The Vigilant Knight

July 31, 2021
2 mins read

A favorite among favorites from 2019’s Portraits from a Distant Era series is the vigilant knight portrayed by Jesse Coder. 

I didn’t know what Jesse was going to bring to the session—I was just grateful to have some subjects to photograph. So it was a surprise and a delight to see him armed and armored in the costume he had put together. Jesse was a wonderful subject to work with. He’s full of ideas and acts through poses, filling each frame with a unique and interesting image. Together we made a series of Strider-like images, depicting his knightly character in a variety of scenes. In the end, we had many options, from fighting stances to scenes of surrender to contemplative moments, but the one that struck me most was this simple pose—eyes closed, head bowed, holding the hilt of the sword in two hands as if swearing a solemn oath. I love what Jesse did in this image and what his acting brought to it. Something is certainly happening in the image, but it’s up to the viewer to decide what that is. For me, it’s a knight swearing an oath at sunset to keep watch through the long, dark night; the image conjures memories of the Renaissance faire, of The Lord of the Rings, of Arthurian legend. I’m interested to hear what others think is happening.

Revising the Image

Perhaps because I love this moment so much, I had a difficult time revising it. I would as soon not touch the original, but like many of the others, the contrast looks a little too extreme to my eyes now, and when I print these for display, I’d like to see a little more detail and a little less pure black in the images. After lightening the shadow areas as much as I could, I noticed a lot of digital noise in the areas that had been darker. To solve this, I brought in some texture but encountered several difficulties with masking—for example, dark hair on a dark background, and adjusting the sharpness of the texture vs. the gradations of sharpness in the portrait, from face to shoulders to background. I brought in shadows to try and replicate what I’d done before, only not so dark and obfuscating. I removed some distracting, bright elements in the background.

After bringing the shadows up and some texture in, I noticed that the darker areas of the image had a greenish cast, likely due to some original editing choice I had made long ago. I wasn’t in love with that, so I set about to smooth the overall hues of the image into a monochromatic (brown) scheme. Yet, this causes the subject and the background to blend, perhaps more than I’d like, but after hours of revision, this is the compromise I’ve come to. For now. 

Revising these older images is no easy task. Initially, I threw the sessions together and edited them as well as I could with the knowledge I had. That was much easier. On revision, there’s an impulse to chase a kind of perfection that is ultimately unattainable.

Above: The original contrasty version vs. a more unified revision.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

  1. Practicing Patience with Personal Projects
  2. A Bright Room Called Day, with Blank Theatre Company
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  4. Alone at Last, with Laughing Stock

The All Worlds Traveller

Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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