Steampunk Portraits: Officer Prescott

Last time, I described documenting the first night of the Auxienita live action role-playing experience in snapshots using flash. Now we’ll look at the Auxientia steampunk portraits.

The studio photography sessions at Auxientia were awesome. As I did last last year, I deliver the Auxientia portraits to the subjects who commission them, both as color photographs and as digitally-created daguerreotype-style images. At the end of the process, the subjects receive a full, detailed retouch and a high-end, matted, printed version of their favorite(s).

Our first subject was Deana Vazquez. Deana and I have collaborated on many photography and storytelling experiences in the past. Here are just a few of them: 

Woman of a Thousand Faces

Deana is one of the Auxientia game’s staff. She plays a handful of characters over the course of three days, donning and doffing a multitude of hats and costume pieces and adopting physicalities and voices for all the characters she plays. To help her in this task, Deana travels with a (BIG) stock of costume pieces. These she swaps out continuously through the weekend, one moment an elderly grandmother, the next moment an authoritative police officer. 

This was the second story set in the Auxientia steampunk fantasy setting. Auxientia features airships, wyverns, inventions, politics, diplomacy, and the various factions of a fantastical nineteenth-century city in a time of change. Since the first story, the officer character Deana created has solidified into a familiar personality within the world. Not just a random officer, but Officer Prescott. There are only a few staff members playing all the various characters that populate the city. Deana’s Officer Prescott therefore became the avatar for the police force of Auxientia. She’s the face and personality that represents the officers of the law. Thus, of all the character options Deana could immortalize in portrait form, Prescott was the one she chose. 

It would be a fun challenge to create a portrait of all of Deana’s characters for Auxientia someday. She contains multitudes!

Patron of the Arts

Another thing I appreciate and admire Deana for is the way she values art and artists. In her live action role-play activities, Deana is a patron of the arts and creative visual artists. She commissions sketches, paintings, and photographs of the characters she and her friends play, from multiple artists, which you can see on her Instagram. I’ve read a great deal of talk over the years about paying artists for work; I personally don’t know anyone who does this more than Deana. As a result, she has so many meaningful artworks from her experiences in life and LARP over the past few years. As one of the artists she’s supported, I am grateful to Deana for bringing me in to make art with her.

Last year, I focused more on the daguerreotypes I learned from digital artist Chris Spooner, as they were the in-world versions of the portraits that I felt helped create the mood of Auxientia. Now that I’m more comfortable with the daguerreotype process, I’m spending more time on color and the tonal values of the photographs. I look forward to showing off the rest of the steampunk portraits in the coming weeks!

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