“O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Over men’s noses as they lie asleep.”
—Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
This week, we return to The People of Light and Shadow series exploring the characters and creatures of fairytale and folklore, with “The Fairies’ Midwife,” featuring actor/filmmaker/clown Elizabeth McAnulty Quilter.
The Fairies’ Midwife: Elizabeth Quilter
Photo: Sayera Rakhmanova
Elizabeth and I met when she was in a short play I wrote called The Trolls, a sword-and-sorcery comedy about people, monsters, humanity, and finding common ground between “us vs. them.” A short time later, Elizabeth created her own production, The First Fox, a beautiful work of theatrical art piece that featured witches, foxes, rose petals, and more. In the years since, we’ve conversed about Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, Lord of the Rings, art, film, theatre, and meaning.
In the first year of the pandemic, Elizabeth made an awesome Queen Mab film with very cool effects while she was in isolation during lockdown. The film really struck me with its inventiveness, and I watched it several times throughout the summer. When the quarantine lifted in 2021 and I began thinking about making photographs again and reaching out to friends I hadn’t worked with on a project before, Elizabeth was one of the first people who came to mind. I’ve mentioned that this series is a mix of people I’d meant to shoot with pre-pandemic, some veteran subjects, and some friends who do really cool things who I really want to collaborate with. Elizabeth is one of those creative geniuses I hoped to work with to find out what kinds of things we could make.
In the time since, Elizabeth has been working on an extended project of Shakespeare-based short films that she’ll be releasing this year, each one meant to represent a different season of the year, with Mab being the film for spring.
Elizabeth’s Queen Mab film has also gone on to garner several nominations and wins in short film contests. It won Best Female Performer at the Kansas Arthouse Film Festival, as well as Best Experimental Film, March 2022, at the Top Shorts Online Film Fest, and it has been a semifinalist and official selection in a number of other festivals.
For a series on the fey, it would be a missed opportunity not to celebrate Elizabeth’s version of Mab. Please check out her excellent, handmade, award-winning film here:
Photography—Ambient Light and Practical Effects
These series have always been experimental, with a focus on learning and practice, though it can be easy to fall back on old ways. For Elizabeth’s session we tried several new things, taking the series in a different direction.
Though the portrait was shot with the same 85 mm lens as the other photographs in the series, in a stark diversion from the others, this portrait was shot at at night in a dark room at f/2, ISO 400, with a shutter speed of 1/60.
Elizabeth had brought a moon prop that lit up, and it looked so cool that I wanted to try to capture it—however, camera flash and most ambient light will easily overpower the glow of the object. So we measured exposure for the handheld moon and the soft glow it cast on Elizabeth’s face. Then we gently added flash to fill the shadows and the rest of the portrait, but without overpowering the moon, which was the main light source for the portrait—the key light.
It was a tricky balance to find, and while we were shooting it, I thought it may just be an experiment, not the main portrait for the image, though as we reviewed the image I loved the picture of Mab holding the moon as a practical effect. It was unlike anything we’d done in the series before, and I wanted to follow that lead and see where it went.
We tried several different looks as well, including some of the more standard portrait looks for this series as well as another pure experiment in ambient light: I sometimes like to add some haze to soften a portrait, but using flash I don’t often capture the shapes of light beams streaking through the haze. While we were playing with ambient light, I wanted to capture some of those looks in what Elizabeth and I called a very 1980s Kate Bush sequence. In the edits for these, I applied some Fuji Reala, Agfa Ultra, and Kodak Ektacolor Pro 160 film stock profiles to complete the look.
Editing
As usual, the difficult part is figuring out what it’s going to be. We had shot a variety of great images with practical effects and deliberate lighting, but by this time the series has a certain look or character, and much of the editing of this image was about making it consistent with the others. As discussed, in order to use the moon as a light source, it was shot differently from all of the others, with different camera settings—a slower shutter speed, a higher ISO, and a wider aperture with a shallower depth of field. Much of the initial editing concentrated on smoothing out some of the grain and the inaccuracies that were introduced with those settings. The mixer brush was my friend for much of this work. I also wanted the stars to pop more on the robe, so I selected them by color and increased their visibility. While the moon was lighting the subject as intended, I distinguished those zones of illumination a little more by using putting a black mask over the image except for the area around the moon and then tweaking that layer with a Blend If adjustment to ease back the shadows and the darkness while still keeping it distinct.
There is always a compulsion to add more and more, and I did add stars and lights and wings at various points, but I felt like they drew focus from the moon and the subject. I think the moon is really cool, and I love that it’s a practical effect, which you can tell by the way it lights up Elizabeth’s hand. Most of the portraits in this series feature a prop and a background and that’s about it. So I resisted the urge to add more and more.*
I used several film profiles for some of these experiments in what I think of as the 1980s music video section—especially the Fuji Reala profile from Totally Rad. This company replicated a number of old film stocks for Lightroom, and since I started on film I enjoy playing with these from time to time.
The Fairies’ Midwife and a Player’s Life
Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech from Act I, scene IV of Romeo and Juliet is just a bit familiar to me, having heard it (playing Benvolio) or performed it (as Mercutio) a combination of over two hundred times touring Romeo and Juliet with Repercussion Theatre and Utah Shakespearean Festival between 2000 and 2003. As such, it has a special place in my heart. The speech is often trimmed in theatrical productions, with some of the more obscure—or difficult to communicate in contemporary contexts—phrases cut. This one, for instance:
“And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice…”
I think when performing verse the best policy is to speak it as Hamlet implored the players to do, clearly and without too much theatrical adornment; the words will usually do their job if understood and communicated, though with phrases like the one above there’s only so much one can do to specify meaning when the contemporary audience isn’t familiar with Anglican church practices of the sixteenth century. One of the things they do is cut those lines, and so to the point, I remember bits and pieces of the speech, always the beginning, always the end, and scattered middles.
This is surely one of the reasons Elizabeth’s film struck such a chord in me. As a photographer, I was impressed by the amount of work she did to create, shoot, and animate the film; as a performer—and a long-ago performer of the Queen Mab speech—I appreciated how clear she made the speech and how she illustrated it visually without skipping the more obscure lines that stage productions often cut; she made them clear from context. It’s wonderful work, and I’m grateful to Elizabeth for sharing it and for bringing her version of Mab into The People of Light and Shadow.
Next in The People of Light and Shadow series…
Elizabeth MacDougald, who provided INVALUABLE assistance in shooting this portrait and most other portraits in this series enters the series at long last with her own take on Mab. Make ye ready for the Queen of Air and Darkness…
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