Gen Con 2023 was the busiest Gen Con ever for me and for Distant Era, as we returned to the fair with our fine art costumed photography and posing workshop for the second year in a row.
Leveling Up the Workshops
Last year, we premiered this workshop at Gen Con.
A number of small adjustments improved the workshop experience this year. For me personally, getting a shirt that identified me as the photographer and workshop leader helped. Also, this year we lucked out in that our workshops were taking place in the same hotel where we were staying. Instead of hauling a cart of equipment across downtown Indianapolis, we just pulled it down the hall. Amazing.
Last year, the workshop ran two hours, and we were really hustling by the end. This year, I extended the workshop to three hours. All summer, I had wrung my hands over that decision, thinking it might be too long. And yet, in practice, three hours allowed us to take more time; it allowed the participants more time to get to know, and to support, one another; it gave us more time to experiment and change the light for different looks.
The 2023 Workshop
In the three-hour workshop sessions, the participants learned posing fundamentals and then demonstrated them in a playbook of poses that we created over the course of the workshop. As we photographed the subjects, the images appeared on the monitor (tethered to the camera via a cable) so that both the on-camera subjects and the other participants of the workshop could see what’s working and what to adjust.
I’m always anxious before the first workshop. The cure for that anxiety is meeting the participants. Everyone is so kind and interesting, and they’ve put such thought, time, and work into their costumes. This year, I was delighted with the way the participants supported one another, helped adjust costumes, offered helpful suggestions, and cheered each other on, just as I was delighted with how wonderfully they implemented the posing techniques of the workshop.
We had a couple photographers take the workshop as well, who wanted to learn a little more about how to direct models and participate in a session with multiple subjects to see how to implement a variety of poses. I really enjoyed switching gears to explain how I was adjusting lights and making technical choices.
Elizabeth, the Distant Era MVP
I couldn’t have executed these workshops without the help of Elizabeth, Distant Era’s MVP. Along with handling all the administrative tasks and helping me set up and take down the room every day, she helped coach subjects and summarized the information for latecomers to the workshop while I was busy shooting.
Finally, it was a pleasure to spontaneously run into a few of the participants from last year’s workshop, who told me they’re still keeping the guidelines in mind when they think about posing.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting images from the workshop here and on Instagram as I refine them.
Friends, Films, and Fun
While the Distant Era workshops took most of my physical, mental, and emotional focus at Gen Con, they were only a part of the picture of our 2023 experience.
Glitter Guild
On Thursday night, I learned to run sound, and then ran sound, for the Glitter Guild burlesque show, since they were down one sound person. This isn’t a totally random occurrence, as over the years I’ve gamed with some of them, photographed them, and a couple of them I’ve known for a couple of decades. As I ran sound, my fellow photographer Greg Inda did his expert work capturing the show. I look forward to seeing those images.
Films
Much of Gen Con 2023 was spent celebrating friends’ achievements with them. Twenty-four years ago, my friend and fellow server Mike Kuciak introduced me to Gen Con when it was in Milwaukee. Mike had written articles for Dragon Magazine and opened my mind and my world to the idea that people like me could go to Gen Con and sell articles and get published. Mike moved to Los Angeles to make films after our second Gen Con together, in 2001. He returned in triumph this year with Death Metal, a hard rock horror film in the spirit of Evil Dead, which he wrote, directed, and produced, and which we watched late at night on Saturday as one of Gen Con’s official film selections for 2023.
Drew Beyer’s film Morning Is Broken won the Best Fantasy award at the Gen Con Film Festival. Readers of The All Worlds Traveller may remember Drew as “The Tataille” from The People of Light and Shadow series, or the leshy Harrowhawk from the Gala of Everlasting Change, or the cyberpunk portraits from his upcoming film, Even’s Elegy.
Producer and star of the film Chloe Baldwin came to Gen Con to see the film. Chloe co-starred with Elizabeth in Babes With Blades’s production of The Invisible Scarlet O’Neil a few years ago, so it was a joyous reunion for all of us.
Games
I played all the games I brought, including Sentinels of the Multiverse, Escape the Dark Castle, and Iki, and we picked up Blazon, a game about medieval heraldry, since we weren’t able to get it at the Origins game fair earlier this summer.
The Busiest Gen Con Concludes the Busiest Season
At Gen Con 2023, we were always active, moving from activity to activity, never slowing down, going to bed late and getting up early. Gen Con was the last big trip of a summer that began with the Auxientia LARP and Ireland in the same weekend and included travel to Ohio and Michigan and a more or less constant flow of activity.
In the weeks and months to come, I look forward to some more focused time staying put for a while, presenting the portraits from the Gen Con workshops, and (finally) working on project from early summer that I’m very excited to get to, at long last.
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