Mini Portrait Session with Writer-Filmmaker Drew Beyer

A few weeks ago, writer-filmmaker Drew Beyer came to Distant Era to get updated pictures for an event called Make Something from Nothing: DIY Film and the Narrative Power of Roleplay, taking place at Slant of Light Books in Oldtown. This event includes a screening and talkback for Morning Is Broken, a film Drew wrote and co-directed, which won the Best Fantasy film award at Gen Con 2023 and second place at the 2023 Seattle International Film Festival Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival. (I happen to be moderating this event!)

Longtime readers of The All Worlds Traveller might remember Drew as “The Tataille” in Distant Era’s The People of Light and Shadow series. Suffice it to say, most of the time when Drew appears in Distant Era pictures, he’s covered in makeup or Spanish moss.

Drew Beyer as “The Tataille,” left, and as a leshy, right.

The Session

Drew only needed a couple looks, so I did a mini session focused on crafting headshots that I hoped would act as Drew’s calling card as a writer and filmmaker.

For an actor headshot we often aim for a flat, even look minimal shadows. That’s not at all what we wanted to achieve for a filmmaker and author of weird fiction and horror. As a result, we leaned into the shadows when photographing Drew, creating portraits that aimed for some depth, dimension, and an air of mystery.

Our world-class makeup artist, Jacque Bischoff, did a fantastic job getting Drew’s skin camera-ready for the session, and she was an enormous help taming flyaway hairs, angling the reflector, and acting as a second pair of eyes to review the work.

As we progressed through the session, we pushed the shadows more and more, pursuing even moodier and more dramatic looks.

We did make sure to do at least one flat look with a collared shirt and a minimum of shadow.

Finally, as the session was wrapping up, we had some fun making hard light portraits. The picture below is the Drew that I know the best.

I also played with some black-and-white edits for Drew, just for fun, including a a monster movie look.

Black-and-white experiments at the end of our session.

Many Thanks

By the end of the session, we had a few hundred great images, so I turned the session over to Drew to choose the ones he liked best.

Creating this session for Drew was as much an honor as it was a great time. I’m grateful to Drew for trusting me to capture his portrait, and I’m grateful to Jacque for her spectacular makeup and assistance. This mini session produced scads of solid images that should hopefully keep Drew in pictures for years to come!

headshots

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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.