Projecting Patterns with an Optical Spot

May 6, 2024
2 mins read

After Christmas, Distant Era acquired an optical spot—a tool for creating patterns of light and shadow. The optical spot fits on the end of a studio light, and you cover different portions of the light to project shadow patterns. I didn’t necessarily need an optical spot, but it looked like fun, and I wanted to explore the possibilities it offered.

In January, I told Elizabeth that I thought it would be cool if we did a special session for her What the Weird Sisters Saw production. (Here are the production photos, and the archival session from previous posts from The All Worlds Traveller.) I mentioned a gobo pattern I saw that had shadowy tree branches. Elizabeth immediately bought the gobo packs and told me to book a session for the sisters. In March, after one of their Sunday shows, we experimented with the optical spot to see what we could make.

Hot Hot Optical Spot

Prior to our Weird Sisters session, I used the optical spot for the first time in a headshot session with Evan Jackson, the show’s director. The first thing I noticed was that the optical spot can get very hot very quickly. Depending on the camera settings, an optical spot can require a lot of power to make its patterns distinct. To circumvent this problem, I used an LED light with the optical spot, and that seemed to work ok.

Weird Sisters in the Woods

With one experiment under my belt, I was ready to practice with the Weird Sisters. Over the course of the evening, we tried three different setups.

In our first setup, we shot against a brown fabric background that felt appropriate to the mood of the show. You can see how we varied the hardness/softness of the branch shadows. I felt the hard shadows worked best in black-and-white images where contrast is everything. The softer shadows worked well for portraits generally. In either case, positioning of the shadows on the subject is key.

For our second setup, I wanted to combine a gel with the gobo and see what we could make. We tried some cool-colored gels with a leaf gobo. We experimented with hard and soft edges on that one as well, to see what kind of range we had. Once again, the black-and-white images were as appealing as the color images but in different ways.

For our third setup, we went all out, adding even more colored gels. This one probably had less to do with the production, but at that point in the evening, we were just experimenting. Why not throw up a red window and then use blue lights on the subjects? It was a mood. We took a few of these, but it was getting late, and after these experiments, we decided to wrap it up.

Experimentation and Play

Experimentation is key to development in every skill, and this session was a fun way to play around with a fun lighting tool to see how it worked so that I can start to incorporate it into professional sessions. In my sparse free time, I’m continuing to work on another experimental series I hope to show in the not too distant future. Thanks to Elizabeth MacDougald, Mara Kovacevic, Jennifer Mohr, and Jamie Redwood for their willingness to experiment and play with lights!

Subscribe to
The All Worlds Traveller

Distant Era's weekly blog delivers every Monday.

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.

Follow Me

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.

Popular

Previous Story

What the Weird Sisters Saw, Archival Session

Next Story

Headshots with Jennifer L. Mickelson

Latest from Blog

Greetings from the UK

We’re traveling abroad this week in the UK, experiencing immersive theatre, Shakespeare, and life in London and Wales. I’ve included some travel shots of our adventures for this special All Worlds Traveller…
Go toTop