“Well thief! I smell you and I feel your air. I hear your breath.”
—the dragon Smaug, J. R. R. Tolkein, The Hobbit
Smaug is the final image to be presented on The All Worlds Traveller from designer Erin Gallagher’s October 2020 photo session, which also included her costumes for Morla the Ancient One, Thor, and Loki.
Erin conceptualized Smaug as an ‘80s corporate exec, drawing parallels between the dragon’s hoard of gold and the ‘80s Wall Street mantra, “Greed is good.”
Smoke and shadows were the key compositional components of the Smaug images, so we created the first Smaug shots using a directional light, which grazed Smaug’s form while leaving the rest in shadow. The idea was to bring out one of Smaug’s bright eyes, staring through the darkness. We captured a few of these images before the prosthetic teeth ceased to cooperate. Then we went outside to release a smoke bomb and hide Smaug in its cloud.
The smoke bomb images would ideally follow a similar concept to the studio shots, with smoke obscuring most of Smaug’s form, revealing only the dragon’s eye. Among the smoke bomb images, we were fortunate to capture some that met those specifications. We shot the red smoke bomb against a green metal background, and the clash of those colors made for some nice contrast in the final image.
Smaug has always been near and dear to Erin’s heart, ever since her father gave her The Hobbit as a child. On behalf of Distant Era, it has been an honor to chronicle Erin’s costume experiments on this shoot and the previous ones. In a year where photography work paused, this exceptional day reconnected all of us with our art and purpose. After a selection period and editing and careful color grading, I sent the images to the printer, and they arrived as prints of exceptional quality, which I presented to Erin on the first session of our post-COVID lives. Erin in turn presented the Smaug images to her father as a present, honoring the gift of wizards, hobbits, dwarves, and dragons that he had given her long ago.
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