While at first glance this photo of a woman in silhouette near a window might look like a visual representation of social distancing in a time of COVID-19 (check out our coverage for photographers here), photographer Emily Cutting of Emily LC Photography in Colorado actually took this a few months ago during a portrait session with a friend.

“We had been planning an entirely different shoot but had some technical difficulties, so last minute I thought about going to The Oxford Hotel here in Denver,” Cutting explains. “It’s a beautiful, historic hotel, and while the main place we wanted to take pictures at—the bar there called The Cruise Room—hadn’t opened yet, we decided to walk around the hotel and see if anything caught our eye.” 

When Cutting spotted this window, she immediately felt a cinematic sense of place. She had set up her friend near the window to capture the soft lighting it was presenting them, but as soon as Cutting backed up, she realized that a silhouette would be stronger here. “It just seemed so timeless and romantic,” she says. “I liked the ones best where she was how she is in this photo: flush against the lefthand corner of the window so that her body almost becomes part of the frame.”

(Shot on a Canon 5D Mark III and 50mm f/1.4 lens at f/3.2 and ISO 3200.)

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