With this image, we knew we wanted to talk about robotics. And this is a music box, which works like a robot—it’s binary. Those little prongs enable those rubber things to make a sound or not make a sound. There’s this problem of depth of field with macro photography, and there was no way I could get this all in focus. I used helicon, a stitching application—a friend of mine introduced me to it and it’s changed my life.

This is a composite of 5 images. You take a series of pictures at various focal planes and the software stitches them all together and gives out a final image, which has the absolutely correct exposure. The lighting is all-natural. I just put it in front of a window. At the last minute I turned a light on, which is what created the pink cast. I took the music box apart and just photographed the mechanism.