A Distant Era Engagement Session with Natania and Nick

In late October 2024, as we were traveling in the UK with our friends, a query for a potential engagement photo shoot arrived via the Distant Era site:

Hello, My name is Natania and I was directed to your website from Lorelei Atreides via a mutual Facebook group. I’m looking to get some engagement photos done and super interested in incorporating some of your awesome photography/editing style. I have a vision of my fiancé and I in fur coats/extravagant gowns, sitting in a library with a fireplace and leather chairs, almost Game of Thrones style portraits. I would love to work together to make this a reality and would super appreciate any recommendations you have for potentially renting these outfits. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

This was a thrilling prospect—precisely the kind of work Distant Era was created to do. Natania’s query gave me something to look forward to, and we arranged a time to speak after we returned in early November. Distant Era doesn’t shoot tons of engagement sessions, but the engagement sessions we shoot have tended to lead to something fancy.

We photographed Kein and Shelly’s engagement photos in 2018; they commissioned us for one of our first artworks in this style in 2022. Here’s that story!

Natania and Nick were somewhat unique among Distant Era clients in that we had zero prior connections; Lorelei Atreides’s recommendation had come from a Chicago Facebook group where Natania had asked for recommendations, Lore had seen it, and passed her the recommendation. Thus, I’m extremely grateful to Lore for the mention—recommendations are the way these things happen.

In 2008, the fellow on the right has just purchased his first digital camera and is very much willing to begin preparations sixteen years in advance for a Game of Thrones photoshoot.

The Consultation

In early November, fresh back from our trip, Natania, her fiancé Nick, and I made plans for a Zoom consultation, where we got to know one another, and we discussed their vision for engagement portraits. The consultation is important for getting on the same page and understanding the goals of the project, the timeline, execution, and cost. Every consultation is about understanding the dream and planning the way for that dream to come true. The goal was nothing less than to make some beautiful artwork that would be meaningful to Natania and Nick throughout their lives.

As we discussed the budget and goals for the project, we decided to make two artworks from our session, but Natania and Nick would also receive the other images from the session to enjoy.

The Session

We planned our shoot for mid-December, after the Thanksgiving holiday had passed but before the Christmas rush.

In the weeks leading up to our session, we assembled a team of skilled professionals to fulfill Natania and Nick’s dream. For a fantastical dream, we needed a dream team, and that’s where Elizabeth MacDougald, Jennifer Mohr, and Jacque Bischoff came on the scene. Conveniently, all three had just starred in Idle Muse Theatre Company’s phenomenal production of The Tempest and were used to working together.

Jennifer Mohr, a frequent face in Distant Era’s work, served as costume consultant and provided Nick’s outfit.

Elizabeth MacDougald, Distant Era’s MVP, provided Natania’s costume and Nick’s sword.

Jacque Bischoff created the makeup for the session.

Jennifer Mohr, Elizabeth MacDougald, and Jacque Bischoff—not only our creative team for this session but also castmates in Idle Muse Theatre Company’s *The Tempest*—for which Jennifer Mohr also created costumes and Jacque Bischoff designed makeup.

On the day of our session, we unleashed the music of the 1980s over our speakers, and we set about making the images that Natania and Nick had dreamed about. I even remembered to take some BTS images of our session.

TOP: Natania at the makeup table with Jacque. Jen and Liz fit Natania for her dress.
BOTTOM: Jacque touches up Natania’s makeup while Jen adjusts Nick’s costume.

It was an absolute pleasure doing that session with Natania and Nick. The team that came together that day did their best to take care of everyone. I was just so happy to be in the midst of so many skilled professionals collaborating to make a beautiful artwork for Natania and Nick.

After the Session

After the session, I tidied up the photographs and sent them to Natania and Nick for review. Then the Christmas holidays came and went, I caught a cold that laid me out, and the New Year passed. In our initial conversations, Natania and Nick had requested a January turnaround, so after the first week of the New Year, I followed up, Natania and Nick selected their favorites, and I got to work.

I’ll talk about that process next time, but for now, I’ll share one of the two final artworks. Special, yet enormous, thanks to artist Chris Koeppen of An Ethereal Fire, who not only trained me to work in this style in our 2023 mentorship, but who continues to lend an eye and check my work. I am ever grateful for his counsel, his conversation and observations, helping me to improve the work I can offer to wonderful folks like Natania and Nick.

Last, but most important, a million thanks to Natania and Nick for making this session happen. Natania is not only an excellent, thoughtful communicator but a wonderful collaborator as well. A dream client if there ever was one.

I’ll leave off this entry with the throne image for fullscreen viewing. Later, we’ll look at Natania and Nick’s second artwork and some of the choices we made in bringing all the elements together.

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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.

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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.

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.