Golden Age of the Silver Screen: Emely Cuestas

For this edition of The All Worlds Traveller, we present actor Emely Cuestas in the final part of a headshot and personal brand session we did in April, at the end of which we photographed a Golden Age of the Silver Screen look for Emely.

Here are the original pictures from Emely’s April portrait session.

Extremely versatile, each time Emely changed looks for her headshots, she seemed to transform into a different person. This remained true for the Golden Age of the Silver Screen part of our session, where Emely time traveled back to the ’50s and ’60s with the look she created with makeup artist Jacque Bischoff, who also assisted with the smoke effects we tried in the Silver Screen portion of the shoot.

Behind the scenes on Emely’s *Golden Age of the Silver Screen* session.

Photography Setup

We took a dinner break between the time we photographed the headshot and personal brand portion of the shoot and the Silver Screen portion. Then we dimmed the lights, cued up a swing radio station, and changed lights and modifiers.

Whereas we photographed most of our headshot session with soft light, we shot with exclusively hard light modifiers for our Silver Screen look. These gave us darker, more defined shadows and specular highlights. Sometimes we used barn doors on our main light; other times we used a magnum reflector (which resembles the “scoop” studio lights of the period); later, we used an optical spot to patterns of light around Emely, including a window blinds effect.

Softening the Look

In all but one of the first Silver Screen looks we did in January, I had introduced more softness to the images as I edited them, since today’s tack-sharp digital cameras are very different from the generally softer looks of the period. During Elizabeth Quilter’s Golden Age of the Silver Screen session in February, however, I tried a semi-broken glimmerglass filter my colleague Greg Inda had passed on to me a few years ago.

This particular filter is the strongest of its kind, softening images to a degree that I find undesirable in most situations—except, it seems, this situation, where the softness introduced by the filter closely represented a style I had attempted in postproduction editing for the first portraits in the series. I used this same filter from Elizabeth Quilter’s session in Emely’s. I like it, though it doesn’t stop me from looking for other ways to give these pictures a vintage look.

A Shining Star

Emely did such a wonderful job in both of her sessions that day, and it was a joy working with her. In May, we had the opportunity to see her give a fantastic performance in Theatre Evolve’s MedeaMedeaMedea at Edge Theater in Chicago. Emely is a great talent, a wonderful friend, and a luminous being, and it was such a pleasure making these pictures together.

steven Latest posts

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.