For now, we’ve come to the last of our Auxientia steampunk fantasy daguerreotype series. In past weeks on The All Worlds Traveller, we’ve looked at daguerreotype-style portraits from the Auxientia steampunk fantasy role-playing game. (For those just joining, Auxientia is a live action role-playing game co-created by Nathan Pease, Hilary Dirks Norton, and Steve Townshend in 2019, with events in 2022 and 2023.) So far, our series has included Officer Prescott (Deana Vazquez), Robert Irons (John Kidd), Maren Tinker (Meredith White), and Vyara Kayda Sudhāra (Simona Katsman). This week, we look at portraits of Lottie à la West as her character Zsa Zsa St. James and the color channels we tweaked to make her daguerreotype portrait come out just right.
Zsa Zsa hails from Auxientia’s Luciole LTD. technology company. Though born into the wealth and privilege of the affluent St. James family, Zsa Zsa and her sister Sabine followed a path of altruism and charity, which led the naturally curious Zsa Zsa to invest her time and money in the Luciole LTD. corporation. Zsa Zsa wanted to make technology accessible and affordable to all Auxientians in order to improve their quality of life. Though she has a weakness for the flattery and attention of high society, behind her stylish and ever-present fan accessory beats a heart of gold.
Photography
Lottie á la West and I have worked on several projects together in the past, and we have years of experience making images together. Our sessions are always active and energetic, full of experimentation and fun. Lottie is an expert at posing for photography and has approximately eight million great ideas for every shoot we do. Working together is relaxed and easy and inspiring. As an interactive character and as a model, she’s a complete pro. Speaking of which, next week I’ll show off a few additional images we did for 2022’s Gala of Everlasting Change event and reveal some of those experiments.
Last year, we made our first Zsa Zsa portrait, in which she carried her famous Luciole bee teacup. This year, we went portrait style with our daguerreotype images.
For the daguerreotype-style portraits thus far, we’ve raised the photograph’s blue color channel while reducing the red and green color channels in Photoshop. This has worked very well in all the other portraits, lending them a nineteenth-century photography aesthetic, but in Zsa Zsa’s portrait colors begin to disappear when we tried this. For instance, the purple and yellow lettering on the fan blended in with the fan itself, and the yellow highlights in Zsa Zsa’s hair disappeared as well. Notice the way the yellow highlights disappear in the first picture, and the background of the Luciole bee pin becomes almost black.
Changing Channels
I wanted to make sure Zsa Zsa had some contrast, so rather than process the image like my past daguerreotype-style images (where the blue channel is stronger than the red and green), I kept the red and green color channels consistent. Instead, I desaturated the image as a typical black-and-white photograph and then added a gradient and photographic plate texturing over it. Notice how the reds, yellows, and oranges are much brighter in the black-and-white portrait below than in the similar one above.
Backgrounds, Color, and Contrast
Auxientia 2023 was my first time owning a fabric background. I hadn’t shot on one since my time at the Chicago Photography Academy in 2018. Suffice it to say that traveling without long tubes of paper, canvas, and background stands was a great convenience, and I think the textures on the background worked well with the daguerreotype textures (by Chris Spooner) on top of the image. Since this background was a grayish color, and Zsa Zsa’s costume contains so much black and white, it was important to boost the brighter colors Zsa Zsa’s clothing to make her stand out from the background.
Once again, it was a pure pleasure to work with Lottie á la West. I am grateful for her patronage, her friendship, and her luminous talent!
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