For this edition of The All Worlds Traveller, I’m proud to share one of my all-time favorite images, featuring Rachel Sleek-Bañuelos and Sierra Bryn as Anne Bonny and Mary Read in a bonus preproduction image for Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s production of yo ho., by SMJ, directed by JD Caudill, which opens July 19, 2026 at the Edge Off Broadway theater in Chicago.
Ancient History
Over the last sixteen years, key moments in my development as a theatre and fine art portrait photographer have occurred with Babes of Blades Theatre Company.
Last Daughter
In 2010, I did my very first theatre photo shoot. This was for Jennifer L. Mickelson’s play The Last Daughter of Oedipus, produced by Babes With Blades. The hands of the Fates inspired me in the direction of The Evil Dead, and for a long time this photo featuring actor Kimberly Logan was my favorite theatre work.
Lady Demands
In 2016, on a shoot to make the images that would serve as the inspiration for Arthur Jolly’s play The Lady Demands Satisfaction, Morgan Manasa, Jennifer Mickelson, Libby Beyreis, Maureen Yasko, Elizabeth MacDougald, and I made Pre-Raphaelite-inspired photographs that prompted Mo Yasko to talk about how much fun it had been. This inspired me to consider what I would need to learn to make high quality Renaissance portraiture, the spark that I would nurture into Distant Era three years later.
Richard III
In 2022, during a Richard III preproduction session, BWB granted me a few minutes to play around, and I created some dramatic lighting for a shot of Aszkara Gilchrist as Richard III and Lauren Paige as Queen Elizabeth, with assistance from Ali Dornheggen. This became another of the defining preproduction images I used to show my theatre preproduction work. In this shot, the lighting was deliberately positioned to emphasize Queen Elizabeth while sculpting Richard III with shadows.
The Duchess
In 2023, we had a few minutes to make some really neat portraits during our preproduction session for The Duchess of Malfi, featuring Carrie Hardin and Clara Byczkowski. It was these quick portraits that inspired me to try the same on a larger scale with Idle Muse Theatre Company’s full cast in 2024 for What The Weird Sisters Saw and many after that.
Free Play
Leading up to our yo ho. session, I thought about how necessity has dictated that we be very mission oriented in our preproduction sessions while at the same time reflecting that our most striking imagery has come from free play and experiment.
That doesn’t surprise me; in my experience, that’s how creativity works. So with this in mind, I asked the team whether we might spare some time at the end for creative play and experiment, prospecting for gold.
The team that was coming together for the yo ho. preproduction session included Morgan Manasa (BWB poster design), Jennifer Mickelson (intimacy), Jennifer Mohr (costumes), and Hayley Rice (BWB artistic director), with Elizabeth MacDougald on hand to assist as well. I’ve collaborated with each of them on countless creative projects over decades, making this environment an ideal place for trying something new.
The Story Behind the Image
Our mission for the session was to create an image that looked like the cover of a romance novel.
Graphic designer Morgan Manasa had created a background featuring a cloudy sky and rainbow, with the show title in big, bright letters, very much in keeping with the mood and theme of the show, which you can read about here. For Morgan’s purposes, we needed to photograph well lit, easily extractable subjects on a gray background. We set up the studio to match the light on the romance novel covers we used as inspiration for the poster.
Rachel Sleek-Bañuelos and Sierra Bryn arrived and got into costume as their characters Anne Bonny and Mary Read. We had a wonderful time working together, which included a few joyful moments when Garrus and Willow decided to make an appearance on set.
Near the end of our time, we’d photographed far more than we needed and decided to wrap up. I asked whether we might take fifteen or twenty minutes to try an experiment, and everyone was on board.
The Mentorship
In 2023, I did a private mentorship with photographer Chris Koeppen of An Ethereal Fire, who was making images as close to what I’d always dreamed of doing as any I had ever seen. My best efforts in this style have thus far appeared in Distant Era’s ongoing Gods and Heroes of the Aegean series (the first of which, Pandora, features Sarah Scanlon; we met way back on that very first 2010 BWB preproduction shoot for Jennifer Mickelson’s play—it all comes full circle). In April 2026, I continued my mentorship with Chris, who has been using more dramatic lighting in his work these past years, paired with new compositing tools and techniques that could potentially speed up my process.
The Experiment
Nearly two months later, client work had kept me too busy to experiment with anything Chris had taught me. With the BWB yo ho. session approaching, thinking of the landmark BWB collaborations of yore, I considered winging an experiment if I had time. I did not have the same tools as my teacher, but I’d been doing dramatic lighting with a fresnel in Distant Era’s Golden Age of the Silver Screen series and thought it might be suitable, though I’d rarely experimented with it in color photographs. To be honest, I hoped to be partly successful and expected that given our tight timeframe I’d end up with something passable, which I’d have to work extensively on to make it suitable. To my great surprise, the opposite was true.
The Light
The light used in this photo was partly funded by photographer and bestie Greg Inda, who contributed to the creation of a future Distant Era project purely in the interest of spreading joy to others. That project is a long way off and required this higher powered light to create, though acquiring such light was the first hurdle we need to cross to make said project. The effect the light had on this project is a cooler, brighter LED modeling light, which allowed us to clearly see how we were photographing our subjects. I am extremely grateful to my dear friend Greg, and I’m dubbing this image part of the upcoming “IndaLight” project.
The Images
The images coming out of camera looked stellar to me. They looked like they came from a painting, the way we had focused and colored our light. In total, I shot about two dozen images. That was all the time we had, but I couldn’t have been happier.
Compositing
After turning over Morgan’s images for the poster design, I started playing around with my favorite from among the twenty-four experiments. I took the image into Photoshop and carefully masked it manually. I probably spent far more time than I needed trying to make the mask and hair selection perfect, and it wasn’t perfect in the end, but once I placed it on a dark background, I couldn’t tell. Good enough. Here’s what it looks like.
The following day, I looked around for two-hundred-year-old artworks I could mash together and place behind the subjects. To start off, I tried “A Stormy Sea” (Marcus Larson, 1857). Once again, to my surprise, it worked perfectly. In fact, it worked too well. As if there was little more work to do.
Learning from Success vs. Failure
I learn very little from success and everything from failure, so I spent the next week trying various things, adding and removing elements. I tried keeping the original vertical orientation, but in the end I chose to simplify and crop the image horizontally. Vertically, the image felt zoomed out, and there was little of visual interest in the lower half of the image, but cropping horizontally, the actors’ beautiful expressions were front and center. It looked and felt like the cover of a romance novel or a movie poster featuring Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
I even found an old painting of a burning ship that fused seamlessly with the rest of the composition. To this, I added lots of other minor textures, which roughed up the image and gave it a sort of canvas quality or perhaps an old paperback. Compared with the Gods and Heroes of the Aegean compositions, this experiment me little time—moments to succeed and a week to learn from failure before swinging back into success again.
The Prints
In exchange for Rachel and Sierra’s time and talent, I had these images printed and matted in Italy for perfect color calibration with my monitor, and I made one for Babes With Blades. These I handed off to Hayley Rice to distribute to the actors during tech week for yo ho.
Summary
It’s important for me to restate that this experiment is not the official image for Babes With Blade’s production of yo ho. and that it may have very little to do with the play, whereas Morgan Manasa’s graphic design for the poster is more aware of, and in keeping with, the production’s theme. What I’ve made is a bonus artwork in the style I aspire to; I’m also a history enthusiast and greatly enjoyed David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates, as well as shows like Black Sails, both of which feature those two historical personalities.
When we arrived at the end of this experiment, I had a portfolio image that exemplifies the direction and quality of work I want to show as Distant Era. It gave me some hope that work like this can be made among such creative collaborators in such a friendly environment. My immense thanks to everyone involved—Rachel Sleek-Bañuelos, Sierra Bryn, Morgan Manasa, Jennifer Mickelson, Jennifer Mohr, Hayley Rice, Elizabeth MacDougald, Greg Inda, and Garrus and Willow.
Most profoundly, thanks to my mentor Chris Koeppen for his exceptional teaching, his notes, and his commitment to craft.
We wish Babes With Blades Theatre Company a happy opening of yo ho. this week and most a successful run!
