This one-day creative shoot was a spin-off of a much larger project we'd just finished with the same creative team. We were all still really feeling the fun and flow and decided to spend a day just shooting the stories we really wanted to tell. We had that incredible focus that a marathon shoot gives, but without any client constraints.

We're children of the mid-century and in our opinion, its vision of the Modern is something that's still unfolding and very relevant creatively. When you talk about art history, aesthetics frequently evolve over decades and overlap centuries. Advertising and consumerism are obsessed with novelty and immediacy, but culture is rooted in what's come before - reiterating, re-inventing, re-imagining. What we find beautiful about "the past" can actually be a meaningful connection to what's happening right now.

Cards and games started showing up in still life photography a few years ago as a natural way to create a human story around what were essentially product shots. But when Covid hit and we all had time to kill at home, the trend went ballistic. There's also a recent trend of capturing people sitting on the floor, of shooting feet as well as hands, of reaching into the comfortable, low-key glamour of the mid-century rec room. It presents an idealized version of indoor life.

You have this idea as a photographer that you'll get to a place where it will feel easy, that there will be time to explore, that you can casually get together with your best people on a Saturday and do something fun. This is a very elusive and hard-to-get-to place, and we were there for a day, playing in the studio like kids with money. We captured nearly twice what we can normally do in a day, because we were all in the zone, locked into the same idea and aesthetic.