Filoli's interior is photographed often and rarely well. The reason is colour. A couture gown inside a 1917 country house, shot in colour, reads as period drama. Shot in black and white, it reads as something else entirely.

A Greek-revival rotunda above a 175-foot reflecting pool, in the hills behind Crystal Springs Reservoir, almost nobody on the Peninsula knows is there. The session was about composition, not coverage — pink chiffon against grey stone, a dress, a column, a long cypress allée.

Most sessions look for a beautiful setting. This one looked for the opposite — crumbling concrete, rusted infrastructure, and graffiti-tagged walls — and used a single deep red dress to make it all work.

The light shifted four times. The wardrobe shifted once. The day started in white Western styling at a 1938 gas station, moved through a railway depot in black, and came back to the gas station after dark — this time under neon.