The Gala of Everlasting Change was a live action role-playing game event that occurred in Yorkville, Illinois, on September 10–11, 2022. In this event, the fey/faerie courts of autumn, winter, spring, and summer met to engage in politics and tricks and decide who will rule their various courts. The participants play various members of these faerie courts over the course of an afternoon and into the evening, interacting with one another and engaging in meaningful moments of role-play as these characters.
Distant Era photographed portraits for the gala in fifteen-minute mini sessions. Anyone who wished could be photographed and could purchase their portraits after the gala if they wished.
The first two portrait orders came from Drew and Brie. Followers of The All Worlds Traveller may remember Drew from “The Tataille” portrait from The People of Light and Shadow series. In the Gala of Everlasting Change, Drew played a leshy—a Slavic forest spirit—called Harrowhawk, who was in the court of autumn, while Brie’s character, Eirwin Mirafiel, was a fey of the winter court whose family ushers in the seasonal transition from autumn to winter.
In the coming weeks we’ll look at other characters from the gala here on The All Worlds Traveller.
About the Gala
The Gala of Everlasting Change was created by actor/director Nathan Pease (“The Goblin Overlord” in The People of Light and Shadow) as a one-night event. In June of 2021, Nathan asked Distant Era about creating a poster and web image for a gala about the fey. I agreed to photograph it as part of a Distant Era series, and this is how the decision for The People of Light and Shadow came to be. The portrait of actor and cosplayer Karissa Kosman became “The Faun,” the seventh in the series. You can read more about The Gala of Everlasting Change (as well as next year’s event) on their website.
Photography
The event site was about an hour and a half away from Chicago. We started shooting around 3 p.m. and wrapped up around midnight, with a dinner break in between, rotating subjects every fifteen minutes. It was an active evening in which we never left the bunkhouse except for (a delicious) dinner, in which we sat among the winter fey and listened to the politics of their realm.
We set up the studio in a bunkhouse under ceilings too low to set up the kind of large softbox I had initially considered for this look. The room we had available was a bit short, so I backed up into the hallway entrance to capture the portraits with my favorite portrait lens, the Canon EF 85mm f/1.4L. Most of these portraits were shot at f/5.6, ISO 100, 1/200. For lights, we used a pair of handy, cordless Profoto B10X strobes with a large, white, diffused umbrella camera left and a diffused beauty dish providing fill to the subject’s face camera right. I usually do the opposite, with the beauty dish as my main light, but it’s a very specific, hard light, and I didn’t know whether it would work for every character, whereas I knew the quality of light from the large umbrella was versatile and could easily be feathered this way or that for additional light or shadow. With diffusion, the beauty dish filled in the darker shadows just fine. (I tried to pack a V-flat, a big foam board to reflect and soften light, but I couldn’t fit it in the car this trip.) This was a shoot where training and practice paid off, as we were able to tweak, adjust and respond to lighting, posing, and technical issues creatively in the moment, shooting twenty mini-sessions in the course of the evening, but I’ll save those stories for a future post.
I’ve begun to edit and retouch portraits as the orders have come in, and I look forward to sharing more of them in the weeks and months to come!
RIGHT: Eirwin Mirafiel of the winter court.
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