From the gray, empty stockyards to the desolate lakefront littered with the beached remains of yachts, through the muttering, rainy sprawl of New Chinatown and the dilapidated Marina towers, he runs the grid from top to bottom, every block. No matter what it takes, he will find out the rogue androids and retire them.
In November 2019, we shot this cyberpunk-and-Blade-Runner-inspired series in one afternoon in downtown Chicago. This portrait featured the exceptional Jacob Bates, with makeup by Dawna Chung. Detailed and diligent in all his work, Jacob put together his own look for this portrait. He chose a patterned shirt and high-collared coat reminiscent of Harrison Ford’s Deckard in Blade Runner. The Western revolver came on loan from a recent role-playing game session.
Photography with Colored Gels
Colored gels were a main component of this session. We used two battery-powered flashes to create this portrait, each with a colored gel attached to the front. These were Magnet Mod gels, which fix magnetically to the fronts of the small flashes.
Our magnificent model and android hunter, Jacob Bates, is standing in front of a glass wall with a map of Chicago etched upon it (a lucky find, considering our theme). The flash with the magenta gel is behind the glass. Another flash, this one with a blue gel attached (and a Magnet Mod grid, I think), is firing at Jacob from the front.
I dug into the archives of this shoot to grab an unedited photo from the sequence. This has zero editing applied to it and is straight out of camera. I think I took the grid off for this one, as the blue light is a bit more scattered than in the other shots from this sequence.
We chose cyan and magenta gels for two reasons. First, they’re complementary colors, so they create pleasing contrast. Second, they’re what I think of as cyberpunk science-fiction colors. I seem to remember them being used to effect in some city sequences from Blade Runner 2049.
The trick with battery-powered flashes is figuring out what the light will look like. Mine didn’t have any continuous light feature, so every shot was an experiment, every shot a guess. Learning to shoot with flash this way made for a great deal of trial and error. Nevertheless, I got better at understanding light by getting it wrong a million times. For example, here’s a test shot where I wondered whether having a larger light source (an umbrella attached to the magenta-gelled flash) would fill the whole background; unfortunately, all it did was show the umbrella as a big, pink blob behind the glass.
New Frontiers
The cyberpunk Chicago, November 2019 series pushed the creative boundaries of what I knew how to do back then. From compositing to shooting with colored gels, this brief series opened up new possibilities as we experimented with new techniques. Due to the coming pandemic, it would be the last personal series Distant Era would photograph until The People of Light and Shadow in 2021–22.
Follow Me