This week on The All Worlds Traveller, we present another of the portraits from the 2023 Gala of Everlasting Change live action role-playing game held last October in Yorkville, Illinois. This portrait features the incredible Meredith White as her character Cladhaire of the court of the summer fey.
I’ve made portraits for Meredith twice in the Gala of Everlasting Change and once for the Auxientia steampunk game. Working with Meredith is always the best, and I am beyond grateful for trusting me to make her portraits.
RIGHT: Meredith White as Cladhaire in the Gala of Everlasting Change 2022.
For the 2022 gala, I highlighted shiny pieces of Meredith’s costume and enhanced them. As a fey of the summer court, I wanted to express brilliance, magic, glamor.
Lighting
For 2023’s gala portraits, I used a tighter main light, switching from a large umbrella to a small two-foot softbox for most, though not all, of the portraits, letting the background fall off into shadow. As before, I filled the shadows with my large umbrella.
By and large, I liked this year’s portraits better straight out of camera, so most of my editing process went into the basics of thinking about color and tone, as well as what effects I might add to enhance the character.
Editing
For Cladhaire, I started with the color of her dress. Since it was bright pink, I chose a contrasting shadow color and pushed the shadows from gray to a darker blue-green. This created some nice separation from the background. I then manually retouched skin and features, brushing in highlights and shadows for emphasis and smoothing out any rough patches.
My biggest challenge was to figure out how I wanted to emphasize Cladhaire’s character this year.
Special Effects
In February 2023, I did a mentorship with photographer Chris Koeppen, which forms the basis for the project I’ve been working on in the background. Over the last year, as I’ve been doing client work, I’ve tried to work in parts of that mentorship to get some practice. One thing I hadn’t done yet was create a halo for a character, and it occurred to me that such a halo might be perfect for Cladhaire.
I really love how Chris’s halo emphasizes the character, with that one bright reflective point calling back the sparkling rain from last year’s Cladhaire portrait.
Other effects found their way into the portrait, but I pulled them back, preferring the beautiful simplicity of the character over cramming the frame with too much extra. I always seem to be pulling things back nowadays. Just this week, I dumped several elements from another piece, and I think it was stronger for the editing.
At the end of the process, I placed a texture over Cladhaire, created by photographer Laura Sheridan.
After finishing the first draft of this post, I used some speed editing tools to see whether I could quickly get similar results, piggybacking off my original edits. In Capture One, I used my first edit as a reference photo, and the program adjusted the levels on two other portraits similarly. I took these into Photoshop and used the same halo but tweaked some of the other layers. It worked!
Good Night, Good Night
We also shot some experimental portraits using a very strong, very hazy looking Glimmerglass filter, courtesy of Greg Inda, with whom I photographed an American Heart Association event in the suburbs earlier that day. Here’s one of those. As we were photographing this one, I thought of Cladhaire entering the gala, making her appearance by the light of the moon.
Once again, it was a delight and an honor making Meredith’s portrait. I’ll have a gorgeous printed artwork of Cladhaire for her in the coming weeks, joining the others in her collection of characters!
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