“There are angels, too, in the midnight city. You might not hear the breath of their wings above the grumbling engines, compliant of car horns, the hysterical shriek of sirens. Wander from the thoroughfares and you may find a denim-clad angel meditating in a quiet garden, the memory of paradise upon the mantle of his wings like the wan light of a distant era.”
After Distant Era’s maiden voyage, our initial outing that gleaned the image of Elizabeth MacDougald as an urban sorceress, we went out the following week with photographer Carlos Serna, who portrayed this angel in street clothes.
Carlos is a fantastic photographer I trained with at Chicago Photography Academy. We modeled for one another in our projects and always had a good time working together. When I asked if he’d like to come along and play, Carlos stepped right up.
Since the purpose of the Urban Fantasy series was to capture city lights and fantasy subjects, Elizabeth and I went downtown early to have dinner and scout some locations.
Food and fellowship became a tradition of the Distant Era shoot. We wanted to make cool images, but we wanted them to have meaning and resound with memories. There was never any obligation to come to dinner but always an invitation, and we always assigned a time for it in the schedule. Our traditional gathering place for the Urban Fantasy shoots was Fadó Irish Pub in downtown Chicago. This place opened the day I moved to the city in 1997, and has been the setting for so many memories from that time on.
In our location scouting, Liz found a quiet little garden area right off one of the main streets. There was a small, stone bench, a fountain, and greenery all around. This was the environment where we placed Carlos as the angel. We lit him with a small softbox, the gentle light streaming in from over his shoulder, brushing the tips of his wings as he looks up. I read his expression as thoughtful, contemplative, even hopeful. We don’t know what the angel is doing here in “the midnight city” (as we began to call the Chicago these characters inhabited) dressed in street clothes, but we imagine his goals are altruistic.
When it came time to edit this image of the angel, the only real obstacle was that the wings we bought from Chicago Costume strapped to the shoulders like a backpack, ruining the illusion. To fix this, I copied a piece of Carlos’s denim jacket without the straps and pasted and blended it over the the place where the straps were, and the problem was solved.
Later in the shoot, we ascended to the rooftops and made magic above the city with the LED lights Carlos had brought along.
This was the last project we got to do with Carlos Serna, as he moved to Florida shortly after the shoot. It was a nice way to make some more memories doing a final project together. As the second Distant Era shoot, I was very pleased with the image of the angel discovered in the quiet city garden.
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