Lane Collins is certainly no stranger to Hey, Hot Shot! So, it seems due time that she be the first to open up this edition's round of contenders.  I've personally been a fan of her work since writing about it way back when she had just finished her B.F.A. and made the bold move to Nelson, New Zealand.  More recently, I noticed that she'd garnered the attention of other bloggers as well.  If you're a regular reader of Lane's blog, you'd know that it's appropriately rife with research on alchemy, tarot cards, and synchronicity.
Collins explains her most recent body of work, Alchemy:

In this work, I examine ideas of spirituality, magic, synchronicity and interconnectedness. The resulting images make use of an esoteric symbology - informed by historical and mystical icons and blended with my own visual vocabulary - to explore the worlds we create in our minds. 

Her images and statement remind me of the magical and mysterious work of Hannah Whitaker.  It's evident that Collins is aware, on some level, consciously or subconsciously, (we could get very Jungian here if we wanted to...), of the work of other contemporary photographers.  But she's not one either to forget the roots and history of the medium.  As much as these photographs are tied to (or connected to, if you will) interconnectedness, the elements of earth, air, wind, and water, and other symbols, they are linked by the quality of light that is particular to her home in New Zealand.  Light, of course is the most fundamental element of photography, and light as it refers to a specific place goes, at least, all the way back to Weston in Mexico.
 
It is her particular attention to light and place that distinguishes her work from others.  While I think they were staged, the objects that she's photographed seem to have just washed up on shore, or fallen from the sky, or in this bird's case, fluttered back into a cage, all gifts from some other nebulous place. 

While I could go on for awhile about this work, just realizing that I'm also reminded of the opening events in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece of magic-realism, Love in the Time of Cholera, where a bird's escape from a cage results in Dr. Juvenal Urbino's tragic death, I better stop, as we are short on time.  We're actually very short on time: this edition of Hey, Hot Shot! closes in less than a month, on Tuesday, November 11th, so get on it, apply before this opportunity flies away too!