Skies and a Handful of Friends is a special collection of black and white photographs McEwen has made in the last eight years of people he has enjoyed photographing for a long time. And he says that when those people aren't around, the sky always is. McEwen usually uses a large-format 8x10 view camera for his work (shown in two of the pictures in this book), but these were made with a medium-format Rolleiflex. He says the Rolleiflex is more of a snapshot camera, allowing him to be "a little more portable and spontaneous."