I’m surrounded by redheads. Husband, daughter, son, mother, and father-in-law. The list is long, and I have a soft spot. So, when my editor called and asked if I’d ever photographed redheads, I thought, yes, daily. The story was about pain, specifically that redheads are more sensitive to pain and require about 20% more anesthesia than non-redheads.

Like many things I shoot for NGM Departments, often there’s no “go to” image. No event or thing to shoot. I needed to make a single, thought-provoking image that illustrates something abstract and makes the reader linger.

After some test shots on myself and friends at National Geographic, I started bringing redheads to the studio at our D.C. headquarters, to see what