First Photos

June 13, 2022
1 min read

Today, a humbling walk down memory lane to Christmas 1994, the day I received my dad’s old Canon FTb film camera and, after a quick lesson in loading the film, aperture, exposure, and focus, began to take pictures. These are the things I photographed on my first outing.

A cemetery

Get a camera, photograph a cemetery. It’s almost a cliché. This cemetery lay just up the street from our subdivision. There was no gate, no caretaker, just clusters of very old, worn graves on the corner. They terrified us.

Nature

Icicles and sunsets.

To my credit, those were splendid icicles hanging from my friend’s roof.

As for the sunset, while it’s an amateur photograph, it’s a picture of my parents’ back yard covered in snow. Beyond the barren, Midwestern winter trees is an unknown world. The future. Hope. Excitement.

That was then. Now that picture is the past. We don’t live there anymore. It’s a December sunset on a world that’s long gone.

Friends

I made the rounds that Christmas, visiting friends, trying in vain to capture images in dim rooms with a flash. I did get out to the pizza place in Enon, Ohio, where I worked as a driver that Christmas, as well as Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I photographed my friend with an overpowered burst of flash.

Family

Max the dog chewing on a milk carton. Dad with the dog and a whole lot of shutter drag. And the one artistic expression: two of my sisters attacking with toys. They took direction well, but none of us knew what this was about then, or now.

Beloved Mediocrity

There they are—the surviving images from my first roll of film shot on an slr at Christmas 1994. They’re not good photos, but they are the only memories that remain of that time twenty-eight years ago. Sometimes that’s all that matters.

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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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