Leveling Up

September 5, 2022
1 min read

These two photographs of Birch House Immersive co-creator Lauren Fields were taken four years apart, the left portrait from the first live action role-playing game I photographed and marking the beginning of our friendship and collaboration, the latter from Distant Era’s latest series, The People of Light and Shadow, after several years, many collaborations (including a residency in which the foundation for Distant Era was set down), and a great deal more experience.

I sure learned a lot between those two photographs.

Having finally come to the end of The People of Light and Shadow, I’m taking time now to clean, learn, and build. 

I learned a ton while working on the project, but the project had to adhere to certain parameters I set for it. I learn from every client portrait, performance, or theatre publicity session I shoot, and while I do experiment on each job, the parameters for that experimentation must necessarily be somewhat limited close to the parameters of the job and what the client wants. 

A series is where I go in new directions to expand what’s possible. In a busy schedule of hustle-hustle-hustle-go-go-go, it’s challenging to carve out additional time to expand one’s skillset. Over the years I’m learning to pause, learn, progress, in that order.

How does one decide what to learn, and in which directions to grow? In the past, as an actor and as a writer, these were more complex questions, and the metrics for growth were more difficult to discern. Grow as much as you like as an actor, a terrible production will still make you question your skill; increase your skills as a narrative writer as much as you can, but if your audience doesn’t care for your new series or direction, this may again lead to self doubt.

Photography and graphic arts are a little more concrete and a little less subjective than these. One can learn better lighting or use of gels or better retouching or how to light products or learn video or compositing or AI or 3D or layout and design or new software, and so on. As for me, I’m circling back on some classes from several years ago, investing the time and practice to complete them, this time with a little more experience and understanding.

I’m leaning with an eye toward a couple of future projects I have in mind for Distant Era, which I’ll talk about once I’m sure they’re happening.

I’m off to learn new things!

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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. Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 2): Costumes
  2. Greetings from the UK
  3. Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 1)
  4. Northern Lights on the Lakefront

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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About a Distant Era

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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