Distant Era's Fine Art Costumed Photography and Posing Workshop at Gen Con 2022 (Part 2)

Three weeks ago, we posted a little about the Gen Con 2022 experience in general. Two weeks ago, we covered the first Distant Era Fine Art Costumed Photography and Posing Workshop at Gen Con 2022, and today we present the second, along with the full gallery of portraits taken at the two Gen Con Game Fair 2022 workshops on August 4 and 6.

We captured these portraits between two brief two-hour workshops that began with a tutorial on posing basics and touched on acting fundamentals in order to create a small playbook of character-specific poses for each participant—it was an action packed two hours, and I’m endlessly grateful to Elizabeth MacDougald for all her assistance in running these workshops. The participants did a wonderful job with their fine art posing, covering a breadth of physical and emotional expression. Here is the gallery of the final selections for each subject.

The amazing subjects of the Distant Era Fine Art Posing and Photography Workshops at Gen Con 2022!

Variants

The workshop promised one final image, but as I went through the editing process I couldn’t help sending the participants some experimental edits or variants from their other poses. Here’s a gallery of those.

Variant portraits from the Distant Era Fine Art Posing and Photography Workshops at Gen Con 2022!

We had an assortment of characters from anime (especially My Hero Academia, which I first learned about last year while photographing the daughters of a dear friend) and Critical Role, as well as a very creative interpretation of a song (the portraits with the fans); we had Nintendo characters from the worlds of Mario and Zelda, as well as other characters from games, such as Sekiro from the samurai game Shadows Die Twice and Lisa from Genshin Impact; we had a full on crow; we had elves; we had Skeletor! I wasn’t familiar with every reference but I’ll close this with a couple alternates of the two characters I know best—one from my childhood and one from now.

I couldn’t resist doing an alternate Skeletor with a paint overlay any more than I could resist using Chris Spooner’s wonderful daguerreotype tutorial for Nadja from What We Do in the Shadows (which I have finally caught up on).

That wraps up Gen Con 2022, my nineteenth since that first visit to Gen Con Milwaukee in 1999. I’ve experienced Gen Con as an enthusiast, as a WotC community blogger, as a game writer/designer, as a game teacher/demonstrator, and as a photography instructor. Perhaps I should go to photography conventions instead, but nah—these are my people.