One of my favorite traditions from the last three summers has been the celebration of Deana Vazquez’s birthday. Deana participates in cosplay, role-play, and LARP, and she’s good at playing a dozen different characters in the course of a day, each with their own costume!
For her birthday, Deana assembles groups of friends to participate in a photo shoot. For the first one, in 2022, we went to the woods to do a magical, fey-themed session (and mini portrait session). We photographed the second (2023) Pirates and Mermaids session on a beach in Evanston. This third one celebrated characters Deana and friends had created that were associated with the moon in various ways.
Over the Moon
For 2024, Deana chose to do her birthday session in studio. She invited friends with whom had created moon-themed characters for role-playing games over the years.
We divided our session between individual portraits, group shots of the characters, and experimental lighting with a glowing moon prop.
We began our session with soft, neutral lighting that became more shadowy and experimental as the session commenced. After an initial round of pictures with a large, rectangular softbox and textured background, we moved to a large umbrella and neutral background for potential composites. Then we got weird, experimenting with focused light, gels, and using the moon prop as our main source. In the end, we made hundreds of moon-themed character pictures for Deana to celebrate another turn around the sun.
Playing Around in Photoshop
After the session, I played around with some edits for Deana to create her character portrait. I haven’t quite embraced Adobe’s generative capabilities outside of small edits for fill and expanding backgrounds, for which they’re very useful. I tried tasking Photoshop with replacing the Fenrir mask piece by piece—first the teeth, the the nose and muzzle, then the eyes, etc. Eventually, I did have something that looked more like a wolf. At one point, I replaced all the skin on John’s arm with fur, but this was going a bit too fur, er, far. Anyway, I leave it here as an example of my experience trying Adobe’s generative fill in summer 2024. In five years, this will probably be easier.
Finally, it came time to make Deana’s ultimate portrait for the session. We began with a scenic image in a classical landscape, using an old painting as the background. As Deana and I discussed further, she decided she’d like to be in the sky like the moon, up among the stars. This resulted in the second take on this portrait, in which we used an image from NASA as her background. Gratitude to artist Chris Koeppen for lending his eyes and advice while I was working on Deana’s portrait.
I think it’s a really cool gift for Deana to give herself and the friends who join her in the celebration. First, there’s the experience itself, getting together in costume and playing around while making creative photos. Then, there are the tangible memories made from the experience. Everybody gets something to keep and to remember the celebration.
I’m ever grateful for Deana’s patronage and friendship. It is always the greatest pleasure to photograph her celebrations of her life.
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