Portrait Session with Actor Gary Henderson

In the midst of photographing Gary Henderson in Golden Age of the Silver Screen in January 2025, we got to talking, and Gary expressed an interest in getting some portraits in some of his favorite clothes with some of his favorite color combinations. We made hundreds of photos together for this session. With such a wealth of options, in this edition of The All Worlds Traveller, we’ll show off a few of each look.

Gary Henderson has appeared several times in the pages of The All Worlds Traveller. His portrait “The Changeling” was the inaugural piece in The People of Light and Shadow. We first worked together in photographs on Distant Era’s third series, Hauntings from a Distant Era. Gary brought me in to capture images for The Black Knight, by Angeli Primlani, in 2021. We’ve worked together on live action role-play events and plays. And most recently Gary absolutely killed it in Distant Era’s most recent series, Golden Age of the Silver Screen. He’s one of my favorite people to work with.

One of the traits I admire most in Gary is his ability to make decisions and commit to them. Within a few weeks after our discussion, we had photographed Gary’s portrait session.

The Session

We played with contrasting colors in our session, particularly Gary’s favorite color combinations of yellow and blue. Then we tried green and purple. We also did some high contrast professional/LinkedIn shots on a white background.

We made portraits of Gary until we felt we had an abundance of options. Then we called it a day, and I got to preparing Gary’s previews for selection.

The colors we chose already contrasted one another. I adjusted levels and smoothed out distracting texture. Our goal is always to make our subject look as they might on their best day—natural, with a bit of polish.

Makeup

Jacque Bischoff did Gary’s makeup for the session. As co-Ariels in Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of The Tempest, Jacque and Gary had performed together as a single character and were so accustomed to working together that our session was as easy as it was fun.

Gary Henderson and Jacque Bischoff as co-Ariels in Idle Muse Theatre Company’s *The Tempest*, 2024.

Gary Henderson and Jacque Bischoff at the makeup table, 2025.

They have both appeared Distant Era work in the past, including our winter 2025 series, Golden Age of the Silver Screen.

Gary Henderson and Jacque Bischoff in Distant Era’s 2025 series *Golden Age of the Silver Screen*.

Teamwork

Gary, Jacque, and I had a great time making these portraits together for Gary. I am extremely grateful to Gary for his patronage of Distant Era, as well as the time and talent he lent to Golden Age of the Silver Screen. The images I’ve had the opportunity to make with Gary are among my favorites that I’ve ever made. Later, when Gary wrote to say that he loved his portraits, it filled my heart to the brim. Many thanks to Gary and Jacque, these co-Ariels, who made winter days brighter by coming together to make Gary’s portraits in 2025.

Check out Gary’s work on his website right here!

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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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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.

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.