Virginia City, Montana 2019

This staged picture, in the virtual ghost town of Virginia City, has a compositional balance that I like; the wolf, the wolf’s shadow and the cowboys are all in the right place – which is fortunate given that the wolf was running towards me.
I have never used this old brewery building before in my storytelling because I worried that the facade was too high to fit in an image if there was also to be a cast immediately in front of it. There were two possible solutions – to move the story further away from the building, which would risk disassociation, or to get close to the building and try and capture the wolf with a true wide-angle lens, not easy at all and could risk ending with a lousy series of far lit loose shots. The whole building would be in for sure, but to work with a 28mm lens and a wolf is not to play the percentages.
We had no real choice but to go for the second option and roll the dice. We got lucky, but as someone once said “Luck is the residue of design”. A sharp shot on a 28 mm lens is pin pin sharp.