SKATE SHOOT!

February 27, 2023
·
2 mins read
with Lauren Fields

During the quarantine, for her birthday, I gave Lauren a Distant Era voucher good for a photo session and portrait. We delivered it the way we did everything in the pandemic—standing outside in masks, exchanging things at a distance. Even though she couldn’t party with guests, Lauren was celebrating anyway. Pink party fringe hung down from her apartment windows, candy-bright against the gray light of early March.

The quarantine period rolled on, ended, and life everywhere struggled to return to what it remembered as normal. Photography work began again, including The People of Light and Shadow, in which Lauren participated as “The Merrow.” Another year passed. Lauren moved out of the neighborhood, and then at last, at the end of 2022, we made it happen. The result of Lauren’s birthday session is what we affectionately refer to as SKATE SHOOT!

During the pandemic, Lauren spent a lot of time on roller skates. When she was local, I’d sometimes encounter her skating in the park by Lake Michigan. By the time we started planning our session, skating had become an important part of Lauren’s life that she wanted to celebrate in pictures. Thus was SKATE SHOOT! born. 

In the weeks leading up to our October 2022 session, Lauren sent some inspirations for the session via Instagram. These brought to mind a disco aesthetic, using old film, overlays, and bokeh effects. With the mission in mind, we set the date of our session. 

The Skate Shoot

SKATE SHOOT! itself was a great time where we experimented with a variety of looks and lights on different backgrounds. We primarily used white and gray backgrounds, and as we photographed the session, I added overlay previews to show what they might look like. As I recall, we rolled through a number of different lighting setups and background changes, trying a little bit of everything.

Our final shots involved Lauren laying down on the background while Distant Era MVP Elizabeth rolled the wheels of her skates to make them light up. I slowed down the camera’s shutter speed to show the sparkle effects on the skates’ wheels. Then I slowed it down even further and had Lauren move her skates back and forth to create some light trails. As always, Lauren and I had a blast working on a project together. Frequent visitors to The All Worlds Traveller may recall that much of the initial groundwork for Distant Era was conceived during a six-week residency in Lauren’s space at Birch House Immersive back in spring 2019. I am grateful for our many collaborations and our many collaborations yet to come. 

I was really excited about the idea of incorporating my skates into a photo shoot. What I didn’t think about was how much different posing on skates would feel.

Steve was so patient and encouraged me to experiment, which resulted in some really fun discoveries we never would have thought of.  One of the things that makes Steve so fun to work with is how passionate he is about other people’s passions. When talking about a new concept we bounce ideas back and forth and draw inspiration from each other, which makes the process feel truly personal and collaborative.

I love the results, and I love the memories of making them even more!

Lauren Fields

Birthday Sessions

SKATE SHOOT! is one of four birthday sessions I’ve photographed. Birthday sessions are cool because they permit the subject to indulge themselves in the things they love. They are acts of self care and fancy, and unlike so many things, the images we make from them memorialize the subject on that day and at that point in their lives forever. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the digital versions of these birthday portraits don’t age or fade, and the printed artworks we make of them are supposed to last at least three hundred years. With each passing year they become more valuable to us and the stories we tell in our lives.

It was a pleasure and an honor to make SKATE SHOOT! with Lauren!

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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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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.

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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.

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