Distant Era Portraiture at Gen Con 2024 with Chris Gehrich

September 30, 2024
1 min read

Here we present the last of our Gen Con 2024 portrait subjects! Cosplayer Chris Gehrich signed up for a session at the convention, thanks to the recommendation of Mike Burd (featured here!).

Chris created a Final Fantasy paladin cosplay with wings that folded out. The costume had glowing lights in the sword, shield, and wings. As we discussed the session, Chris talked about a dream image for this paladin and showed us some references of a dramatic pose with huge, sweeping wings of light.

Our first objective was to capture something as close to the pose in Chris’s dream image as we could, within the capabilities of our Gen Con setup and portrait offerings. However, once we captured that pose with the wings extended, Chris pulled the wings back in and we got some intimate character portraits.

After some initial shots with a blue gel filling the shadows, we removed the gel and took some portraits without any colored light. Chris did an excellent job with these, showing a more thoughtful, contemplative side to the paladin character.

At the end of our twenty-minute session, I put the blue gel on my big light and flooded the whole scene with blue.

Later that day, after the Gen Con cosplay parade and contest were over, we encountered Mike and Chris in the convention center. That’s when we found out Chris won first place in the video game cosplay category for the paladin! Every year, we’re so thrilled to photograph subjects that place (and win!) in their categories in the contest.

Post Processing

In the weeks following Gen Con, we communicated with the subjects of our mini sessions, asking which portraits were their favorites. To these we made detailed edits. Chris chose one of the candidates for the dream image.

I needed some practice for my current Gods and Heroes of the Aegean series, so I composited a background from paintings, and on Chris’s request added some magical flames to the sword and shield. I still have a lot to learn about compositing around light in Photoshop, and every image I work on is another step in that direction, so I’m grateful to Chris for the opportunity to practice!

And with that, we conclude our Gen Con 2024 mini sessions! Many thanks to Chris for signing up on Mike’s recommendation, and I’m grateful for all our past clients who reached out and brought Distant Era back to Gen Con for 2024. It was wonderful working with everyone and capturing the portraits of their beautiful and detailed cosplays!

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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.

The All Worlds Traveller

Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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About a Distant Era

Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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