We live in Haymarket, an area surrounded by horse farms. In fact, there may be more horses per square mile than people. So it's not surprising that lots of things around here have a horse-themed motif.

This is the weathervane that's directly over my studio. Being so convenient, it's become one of the themes in my current work.

There are two kinds of themes that I use. In one, I photograph the same subject multiple times, in different lighting, from different angles, in different seasons, at different times of day. That's what I do with the weathervane.

In the other kind of theme, I'll take a single picture, then make lots of variations from just that one source, mutating it into a set of unique images. This is what Picasso did when he worked with etchings, drypoints, and aquatints. He would take a plate and keep exploring variations of the same image until he felt he had reached the end of the line. The only problem was that, since he was working with a physical plate, it could only be at one stage at a time. At each stage, he would make some test prints before working on the plate again. In the end, there was the finished plate, and all of the images that were made along the way. But there was no way to go back to an earlier stage and make more prints of that particular stage.

It's different when you do this on the computer. Disk space is cheap, so there's no reason not to keep all of the intermediate steps when working on an image. Sometimes, I take one of the intermediate images and start down a whole new pathway.

I wonder what Picasso would have said about this.