We wanted to create the sense of a girl lost in thought sitting at a piano. Not sad, but contemplative. One of the main challenges we had was that a white SUV was parked right outside the window, completely ruining the mood of the shot. I was pretty frustrated as I had a clear idea of how I wanted the scene to look, and shockingly enough, it didn't involve an old rusted SUV in the background.

The solution I came up with was to blow out the window light so much that the SUV was completely invisible. To compensate for that, the entire scene was lit with very strong flash pushed through a massive softbox prevent the scene from falling into darkness but also avoid giving it a "flash" look to it.

I was worried the blown-out window would be too much, but I feel it ended up giving the entire scene an ethereal vibe. The fact that half of the window was shaded by the next-door building makes it seem like the scene is actually "night" and the bright light is some sort of mystical glow, and not just sunlight so we leaned into that idea and love the result.