Return to the Gala of Everlasting Change

Last weekend, I photographed portraits at the Gala of Everlasting Change live action role-play event in Yorkville, Illinois. Work on those portraits will begin shortly, and I look forward to sharing them this fall as I complete them. Since I arrived at the event early, I volunteered to take a few quick group shots of the different fey courts outdoors, which I’ll share at the end of this post.

Busy Busy

I arrived at the event after an early morning shoot with photographer Greg Inda for the American Heart Association’s Heart Walk. Greg enlisted me to help him cover the two-day event, which took place in downtown Chicago on Friday, September 22, and in Wheaton, IL, on Saturday, September 23. So, by the time I arrived at the gala in Yorkville, I’d already been shooting informal groups of people all day. The previous week, after photographing and turning over (and seeing!) Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of Jane: Abortion and the Underground, I traveled to Ohio and back in a day to attend (and photograph!) my high school reunion. Meanwhile, I made headway on a few other outstanding freelance projects… There’s a lot going on.

The Gala

One of the best things about the gala is that my only job there is to make beautiful portraits for clients. I’ll have more to say about the gala and the subjects as I work on the individual portraits. For the curious, I wrote about it a bunch last year. Here’s what some of last year’s portraits looked like.

In the photographs below, you see can see the four fairy courts—autumn, spring, summer, and winter, as well as the unaligned fey. I look forward to featuring some of these characters once the portraits start coming out!

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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.