Photographing the Poster Image for The S Paradox

July 1, 2024
3 mins read

On the eve of photographing poster images for Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s next production, I realize I never shared the images from the last poster for The S Paradox by Jillian Leff. We photographed the show poster on December 30, 2023. The show ran April 7 – May 18, 2024 at the Factory Theater. Morgan Manasa designed the poster for the production.

The S Paradox, by Jillian Leff

Summary of The S Paradox, from Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s website:

In a distant future, the United States has undergone sweeping reform: guns are banned, healthcare is free and numerous tax and economic bills have helped lessen the division of classes and pulled millions out of poverty. Sloane is a young woman who has been tapped by a watchdog intelligence agency called the CRC, led by the odd, yet charming William Hale. As Sloane triumphantly, and a little drunkenly, leaves a warehouse after signing her contract, she is stopped by a mysterious woman who says she has come back in time to stop Sloane from making the biggest mistake of her life.

Photography

Director and graphic designer Morgan Manasa requested a symmetrical image that showed both versions of our time-traveling protagonist in profile. We photographed that image with the actors facing one another and again with the actors back to back. Ultimately, the back-to-back image won out.

Our lighting setup was pretty simple: two narrow 1 x 4 softboxes on opposite sides of the actors and slightly behind them. The aim was to light both subjects’ profiles such the light outlined their features, stopping at their cheeks on the camera side. This way, we could achieve the symmetry we were going for.

We experimented with variations on our theme. Here’s an example of one of our face-to-face shots (lighting the actors the same way, with the strip boxes at their backs).

Earlier in the session, we tried out other ideas. For example, we began with even lighting before changing the light to add some drama. Then, we did a sequence of running shots and some exaggerated shots at a wide angle. As the photographer, I want to do two things:

  • Capture the image we’re going for.
  • Capture alternatives we may not have thought of.

Experiment and Play

In past shoots, the idea we had at the beginning of the shoot isn’t necessarily the one we like best. Through creative experimentation and play in the moment, we find our way to new and interesting images. Not every experiment works, but by trial and error, we find our way. The top two images in the gallery below came from the same movement and posing sequence, but we lit the first with broad light from above and the second with very limited, dramatic light from either side.

Maureen Yasko and Kayla Marie Klammer.

Cast, Crew, and Production

Babes With Blades generously provided me a comp ticket to The S Paradox. I got to enjoy the show in early May with members of Idle Muse Theatre Company.

I’m always pleased to spot a show poster that I photographed in the wild. I spotted the one below at Metropolis Coffee Company in Edgewater.

Huge congratulations to Babes With Blades on their successful production. I am ever grateful for our fourteen years of collaboration!

Here follows the cast and crew of The S Paradox, as listed on the Babes With Blades website.

Cast

The ensemble cast of 12 artists includes Elisabeth Del Toro (she/her, Dez); Luz Espinoza (she/her, Dez U/S and Older Dez); Cat Evans (any with respect, Ava); Kayla Marie Klammer (she/her, Sloane); Sonja Lynn Mata (she/her, Older Dez); Deanna Palmer (she/her, Nameless, Sloane U/S); Steve Peebles (he/him, William); Jessica Pennachio (she/her, Nameless, S U/S); Thomas Russell (he/they, Nameless, William U/S); Emily Sturges (she/they, Nameless U/S) Tina-Kim Nguyen (she/her, Nameless, Ava U/S); and Maureen Yasko* (she/her, S)

Production Team

The production team includes BWBTC Ensemble Members Line Bower* (they/them, technical director), Jillian Leff* (she/her, playwright) and Morgan Manasa* (she/her, director) as well as Evy Burch (they/her, props designer), Rose Hamill (she/her, production manager), Rose Johnson (they/them, scenic designer); Samantha Kaufman† (she/her, fight choreographer), LJ Luthringer(he/him, sound designer); Payton Shearn (she/they, production assistant), Taylor Stageberg (she/they, stage manager); Rachel M. Sypniewski (she/her, costume designer) and Laura J. Wiley (she/her, lighting designer); and Theo Yaeck (they/them, assistant stage manager).

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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.

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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.

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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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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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