Gen Con Cosplay Portraiture with Brook and Chris

Over the past few months, we’ve shared the Distant Era portraits from our 2025 Gen Con cosplay mini sessions. For those just catching up, here are some of the finals we’ve shown:

This week, we conclude the Gen Con 2025 mini portrait sessions with our final two subjects, Brook Burd and Chris Gehrich, who entered the Gen Con cosplay contest as a duo, playing characters from Final Fantasy, and won first place in their category, Best Video Game!

Readers of The All Worlds Traveller may remember Brook’s 2B and Viera White Mage from previous years, and Chris’s Final Fantasy paladin from 2024.

In every entry about Gen Con, it seems like I talk about how fond I am of the subject, but it’s true. I’m blessed to have had the good fortune to work with so many lovely people. I first met Brook in the big, three-hour 2023 Distant Era cosplay posing workshops. Brook attended TWO of these and was one of the kindest, most welcoming, collaborative members, fostering a sense of community among the participants. The following year, when we did our first Distant Era mini sessions, Brook introduced me to Chris, who had some dream images he wanted to accomplish, which we showed off here.

This year, Brook and Chris played Final Fantasy’s Honey B. Lovely and Astrologian respectively. We photographed their sessions back to back.

Honey B. Lovely

Brook is a tall human in real life. In past cosplays, Brook has always appeared taller, often in both directions, wearing giant boots and giant ears, in the case of Brook’s Viera White Mage cosplay. I’ve sometimes struggled to get Brook’s entire cosplay on the background. This year, Brook warned me that it was going to be even more of a challenge, and that was no lie!

Brook’s Honey B. Lovely costume was huge, expanding in all directions: giant polearm, stinger, fully articulated wings, boots. Everything. It was a work of art, the most complex cosplay I’ve ever seen Brook make. Shooting the whole costume on the background with any amount of consistency wasn’t going to happen, so that no longer became a parameter of the session. I still tried to capture the costume in interesting dramatic light and to do several detail shots that showed Brook’s characterization of Honey B. Lovely, and here are a few of those:

Astrologian

If I recall correctly, Chris burned the midnight oil, assembling the mage cosplay in fourteen days. Framing Chris was much easier, as I could fit the whole costume on the background! We did a variety of different takes. I played a lot with the angle of the hat to Chris’s eyes and leaned into the dramatic shadows we made with the restricted light.

Chris provided helpful requests during the editing process for the final portrait. Since the character has an astral theme, we added stars throughout the portrait. I had some star brushes I’d picked up a few years ago, possibly for Quinn Leary’s Urania portrait in The People of Light and Shadow, and these were super helpful in creating the world around the mage. I also used some NASA imagery to add stars and nebulae into some of Chris’s other portraits.

That’s a Wrap on Gen Con Cosplay Sessions 2025

I’m grateful to Brook and Chris for their friendship, kindness, and creative collaborations, this year and in the past. I see them as master craftspeople, designing costumes with ingenious mechanical apparatuses and electronics, or even, in Chris’s case this year, whipping up a detailed, contest-winning entry with intricate embroidery in less than twenty-four hours.

I continue to be amazed at the brilliant work I’ve had the opportunity to photograph this year, across all the subjects from our Distant Era mini sessions.

This year, I put a lot of emphasis on shadow in our portraits. My favorite portraits from Distant Era’s Gen Con sessions have had a certain amount of shadow depth, so this became the standard for 2025’s sessions (as is likely evident all of the images above). In editing, we experimented with more compositing than ever. As we look toward Gen Con 2026, we’ll continue to evolve our Gen Con portrait offerings in service of all these master craftspeople with whom we are so privileged to work.

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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.