Call her demon, devil, daeva—in a puff of brimstone, Yvaine Hadley appears. Keeper of arcane knowledge, voyager between worlds. No hell can keep her, no heaven bar her. The last time she visited, in 1871, the city did not survive her stay.
It was one of the hottest nights of July 2019, with temperatures around 103 degrees, when a small group of us went downtown to capture some images for Distant Era’s first series, Urban Fantasy. This was the third outing for this series, with the most subjects and the most ambitious plans, one of which involved using a smoke bomb for the first time.
Birch House Immersive creator Lauren Fields had an idea for an urban devil character called Yvaine, who made for a great contrast to the angel character played by Carlos Serna earlier in the series. In the fiction, we implied that Yvaine had visited the city in 1871 (the year of the fire that burned down much of the city). I had ordered a set of smoke bombs that I hoped would work to conjure this devil but had thus far only read about how they worked.
One of the main learning objectives of the Urban Fantasy series was to balance ambient urban night lights with an off-camera flash illuminating a subject. For the sequences using the flaming sword and this smoke bomb, we went to the rooftops above the city, where the effects wouldn’t alarm anyone. I set up my flash in a small softbox to the right of the subject and conveyed the instructions about using the smoke bomb to Lauren. I measured the ambient light of the city and set my camera to f/2.8 at ISO 12800 and my shutter speed at 1/60 (lens was 24–70 and the focal length for most of these is 45 mm). Lauren pulled the string to set off the smoke bomb, and then I started shooting as fast as I could while the smoke unfurled around her.
There’s nothing like the enthusiasm you feel when an experiment goes right. The smoke bomb went off without a hitch; the settings captured the city background while the flash illuminated the subject. Lauren used the smoke bomb to make it appear as though the devil was emerging from it. For the ninety seconds the smoke bomb lasted, we got the looks we’d hoped for. A couple distinct looks evolved from these images, as once the haze from the smoke began to hang in the air, it reflected red light on the subject’s face and lent a kind of cinematic quality to the image.
I always have a great time shooting with Lauren. It was her invitation to Birch House Immersive’s artist residency that gave me the time to envision what I wanted Distant Era to look like and to be, and I am grateful for her involvement on the very first, very hot, Distant Era project (as well as the second and third!).
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