“I love you.”
“I know.”
— Princess Leia and Han Solo, The Empire Strikes Back
The last photo session I did prior to the pandemic was a highly technical Star-Wars-themed shoot for Crescent Moon Nerdlesque. These are some of the final images from the April 2020 session, and this is my first time sharing them.
Crescent Moon
Crescent Moon Nerdlesque is a burlesque dance company that specializes in pop-culture-themed acts featuring characters from television, movies, comics, video games, history, and more.
Two years ago, CMN asked me to do a photo session for them. In that first big session, equipped with a few Speedlite flashes, lighting modifiers, and a large reflector, we created a portfolio of images inspired by Fosse-style dancers, Disney characters, video game characters, and classic science-fiction. That was the beginning of many projects together.
Foxie la Fleur and Minnie Barre
Crescent Moon’s co-producers, Foxie la Fleur and Minnie Barre, became friends working on a show (Game of Thongs) at Gorilla Tango Burlesque. In this show (in which they played the Danaerys/Viserys characters, Minnie got to kill off Foxie’s character by dumping a bucket of gold confetti on Foxie’s head in every performance. After this, they worked together at Kiss Kiss Cabaret where Minnie was a founding member, and they have performed together ever since. This year, Crescent Moon released a calendar featuring several images from our sessions.
The Joy of Print
I’ve grown so accustomed to digital images that it’s strangely satisfying to have a printed photograph hanging on the wall in the form of this calendar, and I find myself paying more attention to the printed image than to anything that scrolls across any of my screens in the course of a day. There could be many reasons for this, i.e., it’s on my fridge, so it’s between me and food; I don’t have to minimize it in order to work; or maybe there’s just something special about a photograph printed on a paper surface rather than backlit by a monitor. The first calendar image features the fabulous Poppy Seed (below) from the last session I shot (April 2020) prior to the pandemic lockdown.
With the pandemic moving into 2021 and theaters remaining closed, when Crescent Moon asked about the possibility of selling a calendar featuring prints of my images, I agreed. All proceeds from the calendars therefore go to the performers themselves. It’s one small thing I can do to help.
Light and Magic
The images above were designed to tie in with Crescent Moon’s “May the Fourth” Star-Wars-themed show in 2020 (which was canceled due to the pandemic). This session is one of the most technically complex I’ve executed, using multiple colored gels and other lighting modifiers, along with some post-processing special effects on five subjects playing six different characters.
Each character and setup required a different colored light or combination of lights, and each required a different position for the colored lights. Characters holding lightsabers needed to be illuminated from the direction of the saber—with careful placement so as not to cast shadows from the saber, which should be illuminating the subject, not casting shadows.
In the Leia image below, a magenta light fires from the right while a yellow-gelled light fires from behind the subject and into the lens; the camera’s aperture was closed down as much as possible (to f/11) to create the star effect from the yellow-gelled Speedlite firing into the lens. These images were shot exclusively with small Speedlite flashes (because I didn’t own studio strobes).
Most of the images used an improvised combination of different color gels, creating either complementary (for example, the blue and orange gels on Minnie Barre’s Han Solo or the magenta/yellow on Poppy Seed’s Leia), monochromatic (the various shades of red on Lottie à la West’s Kylo Ren), or analogous (the purple and red on Ruby Claret’s Rey) color schemes.
Editing these images took some time. The image of Poppy Seed below compares the image straight from camera to the final edit. The intervening steps included adjusting the levels, adding a slight grain texture, removing the light stand, and adding a backdrop of stars.
Before 
After
Star Wars and the Pandemic
When I captured these images, I was waking up from a twenty-year estrangement from Star Wars. I had loved Star Wars more than anything in the first half of my life but had fallen out of love with it since the late 1990s. The bold, dirty-dozen-style Rogue One and samurai-Western-inspired The Mandalorian certainly rekindled my interest, but it was a months-long pandemic binge of the Clone Wars and Rebels series that showed me the excellent storytelling I’d been missing in the Star Wars universe. Followed by the second season of The Mandalorian and the slew of announcements for upcoming Star Wars series, the future of exciting Star Wars stories looks promising.
Working with Crescent Moon Nerdlesque on this final pre-pandemic series was the harbinger of a happy new era of Star Wars. Join their mailing list to be the first to hear about their April 29 digital show and tribute to space-fandom, “STAR CRAZY: An Intergalactic Burlesque Adventure!”
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