For the fourth time, we return to the epic seven-hour colored gels session we did for filmmaker Drew Matthew Beyer’s film Even’s Elegy back in February. (Drew’s latest film, Morning Is Broken, is currently an official selection at the Museum of Pop Culture’s 18th Annual Science Fiction + Fantasy Film Festival.) An exciting experiment in light and color, these Even’s Elegy gel portraits were a thrill to photograph.
Ultimately for Even’s Elegy Drew needed four finished portraits—two for the film’s wanted posters and two memento photographs carried by the characters in the film. Rather than shooting four looks, however, we photographed seven—two for each character except for the character of Marl, for whom we only made one. Previously we examined Quinn Leary’s portrayal of the character Mercer, both in a teal-magenta look and a red-blue look. Then, we featured actor Caroline Kidwell in her character Naomi’s alternate “purple look.” This time, we present the alternate orange look for actor Jacob Bates’s character, Ethan.
Jacob is a dream to work with, and he’s appeared several times in past Distant Era series, notably as “The King of Winter” in The People of Light and Shadow and as the android hunter in Distant Era’s cyberbunk-and-Blade-Runner-inspired Chicago: November 2019 series. Two amazing makeup artists—Dawna Chung and Dyllan Rodrigues-Miller worked on Jacob for this look.
Photography
This was a relatively simple setup. We photographed Jacob against a white background and placed two small umbrellas behind him, equipped with orange gels. In front of him and to the right, we placed a beauty dish with a teal gel.
I hadn’t used small umbrellas before this session—I’ve tended to go big when acquiring light modifiers, probably because I worked with small, battery-powered flash for so long and wanted to expand my range with larger lights once I began shooting with plug-in strobes in 2020. But light modifiers are tools like any other: their degree of usefulness depends on the application to which they’re employed. In this case, the small umbrellas, when angled toward the background, spread their orange light pretty evenly across its surface while outlining Jacob, who we placed just at the edge of their light. The beauty dish, a lovely hard light modifier, we equipped with a grid, so as to restrict the teal light from hitting the background and disrupting our orange light.
So long as Jacob stayed in that zone between where the orange lights outlined him and the teal light illuminated his face, he had perfect freedom to move and pose. By the seventh hour of our Even’s Elegy photography day, we had hit our stride setting up and shooting with gels, so we felt a fluidity, a motion, an exhilaration, toward the end, and Jacob delivered with every shot, as usual.
The gel techniques, as well as the gels themselves, came from fashion photographer Lindsay Adler’s The Magic of Gels class.
Editing
When it came to editing, there wasn’t much work to do, as we’d accomplished what we wanted in camera. We brightened and clarified, using the sliders in Capture One, but for the majority of these portraits of Jacob, we didn’t need to do too much.
The Halfway Point
Jacob’s orange look marks the halfway point in our Even’s Elegy gel portraits. In the future, we’ll present the images Drew chose for the characters’ wanted posters, as well as one more keepsake photograph that appears in the film.
Many thanks once again to Drew Beyer for bringing Distant Era in to photograph Even’s Elegy, to Dawna Chung and Dyllan Rodrigues-Miller for their makeup, and to Jacob Bates for being such an amazing collaborator.
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