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The brief from Millbank PR was to make Lucent's new product look as interesting as possible in photographs for an advertising campaign. The cable was gigaspeed, capable of transmitting much greater quantities of information more quickly than its competitors. The previous photography Lucent had involved strands of wire laid out in parallel on a wooden table, so anything else would be an improvement. I suggested a close-up shot to show the various coloured cores, and a spiral arrangement to give a sense of depth (and allow us to see the branding on the sheath). The background is made up of the distinctive diffraction patterns produced by CDs, appropriate since CDs store the larger amounts of digital data that the cable is designed to carry. I used medium format equipment rather than digital to maximise the image quality and the cable was lit using a ringflash, ideal for small-scale close ups. Separate flashes and tungsten lamps lit the background discs to produce the range of colours. Nathalie Golden of Millbank PR comments "I was amazed at the difference between what I saw during the shoot and how the cable appeared on film. It's very hard to make a product like cable 'sexy' but this was more than we could have hoped for".