Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
“Fire and Ice,” by Robert Frost
At last we come to the end of The People of Light and Shadow, conceived, cast, and organized in June–July 2021 and shot and edited from September 2021 to August 2022, a full year’s work. Previous series have taken little more than a month to complete, but previous series have been only half as large, have been shot in a day (Portraits from a Distant Era, The Contract, the cyberpunk Chicago: November 2019) or a month (Hauntings from a Distant Era, Urban Fantasy). Watching the stream of others’ photographs that populate Instagram, it feels strange to have taken so long working on each piece in this series, but each one was its own learning experience with its own set of challenges. Each one represents the best I was able to do at the time. Each one was an individual hangout with a friend, time to catch up and hang out after a long period of quarantine.
The King of Winter: Jacob Bates
When I organized the series, I’ve said that I wanted to make it a mix of people I’d wanted to work with and “the old pros,” people I’d worked with previously, who I could rely on if everyone else bailed. Actor and model Jacob Bates is one of those old pros. We’ve shot together many times over the years, and it’s always a blast. Once, I even directed him in a short play. (He was fantastic.)
From all these past experiences, I’ve learned that Jacob is extremely hardworking, extremely dedicated, extremely talented, and extremely kind. He cares about the work he does, and he’s always asking questions, experimenting, and striving to make the work the best it can be. Whether acting or modeling, his work is focused and detailed, and he does it all with a lighthearted sense of humor and generosity of spirit that makes him a joy to be around and to work with. Finally, and most important, Jacob is a good friend. Jacob was one of the subjects of the last full series Distant Era did prior to the pandemic (the cyberpunk series Chicago: November 2019), and I put him on the list to do The People of Light and Shadow before I had even asked him. It is only fitting that he closes out the series.
Photography
“The King of Winter” adhered to our standard settings for The People of Light and Shadow—that is, a focal length of 85 mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/200 sec.
We used the hand-painted blue canvas backdrop that Elizabeth and I painted in the summer of 2020, which made for a nice complement to the costume created by Erin Gallagher (see below).
Our main light was a big rectangular softbox, which cast a beautiful, gentle light on our King of Winter. Jacob is an expert at posing, so I let the camera click away as he moved from pose to pose for our first seventy photographs. The final selection is from that initial group. After that, we changed things up and began to experiment.
Wardrobe
Jacob’s costume was created by Erin Gallagher, the series costume consultant on The People of Light and Shadow. Erin previously contributed to “The Hunted Princess,” “The Morrigan,” and “The Harlequin.” Erin has been featured several times on The All Worlds Traveller, as we’ve worked on many projects together. Jacob’s initial idea was a lonely winter dryad. He sent a picture (familiar to me) from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual as an inspiration for the costume. Erin built from this inspiration and created her own design, a sheer, translucent garment embellished with frost patterns. The costume looked awesome on Jacob, and it transformed him not so much into a lonely dryad as a stately lord of the winter fey, with notes of Jack Frost and David Bowie.
RIGHT: Erin Gallagher, Jacob Bates, and Dawna Chung preparing the look for “The King of Winter.”
Makeup
Jacob’s makeup was immaculately applied by Dawna Chung, who also applied his makeup for the cyberpunk Chicago: November 2019 series. Dawna had a precise plan for the makeup and was meticulous in getting it just right, from the smooth paleness of the winter king’s face to the jewels that glittered upon his skin to the icy streaks upon his cheeks.
Experiments
Gels had worked so well with “The Devil,” casting a fiery glow on our last subject that I wanted to try blue gels in this frosty image. The gels worked wonderfully, though they are not featured in final portrait for “The King of Winter,” as I preferred this pose from the part of the session before we started using the gels.
One of the most fun and interesting things we did when shooting this portrait was to place a bare light far to the left of Jacob and then block the source with flats so that only a thin line of light illuminated his face. Then we filled the room with haze. This was all new territory for the series, and we were all impressed with it. It wasn’t the right look to end the series on, but I’ll be returning to those photographs to edit them more specifically in time.
After shooting around five hundred images, we stopped our experimentation and wrapped the session and the series. Enormous thanks to Elizabeth MacDougald for her assistance, to Erin Gallagher for creating a garment fit for a king, to Dawna Chung for her careful and beautiful makeup, and to the magnificent Jacob Bates, for his outstanding professionalism and enduring friendship and good humor.
Editing
We shot over five hundred photographs for this last session. We didn’t need anywhere near that many, but we were having fun, hanging out, and experimenting. Thanks to a dizzying schedule I didn’t get to selecting the final image for one whole month.
While I love the experiments we did toward the end of the session, I hoped to end the series in a way that was internally consistent with what had come before. I landed on the image featured on this entry, an image that shows Jacob in a pose that mirrors Gary Henderson’s “The Changeling,” the first portrait in the series. I loved the way these two portraits bookended the series. “The Changeling” wears a crown of autumn leaves; layers of snow and ice detail “The King of Winter” portrait; the series begins with autumn and ends with winter; the seasons cycle throughout the rest of the series. Thus this portrait seemed like the right choice to close out the series, mirroring the first image while internally consistent with the others.
I had hoped not to go crazy with effects in this one and wanted to keep the editing simple, as “The Changeling” and “The Hunted Princess” had been at the beginning of the series. “The Devil” had been the grand finale of effects (and took weeks). As I edited “The King of Winter,” I pulled back on the effects I’d learned to use over the last year to keep the portrait as simple as I could.
Regardless what I may have intended when editing “The King of Winter,” I still spent several days on it, and it was still a challenge. There were times I decided I had finished with it, and I saved all the versions and called it a day. The following morning, I looked at it again with fresh eyes and saw all the problems.
This is a lesson I have (re)learned in this process: the value of taking breaks and coming back with fresh eyes. I’ve learned this lesson over and over again in a number of disciplines, from acting to writing to game design, but the pressure of deadlines and too many tasks lures us into thinking that we must succeed by sheer force of will. We want to “work hard,” which to some of us equates to filling our hours with maximum effort, perhaps with some television before bed. Friends, fun, rest, vacation—these can come when we’ve finished our chores… at some indeterminate point in the future.
I created twenty versions of “The King of Winter” before I found one I was happy with. The next morning I did a major revision, toning down the brightness of the background and removing the cracked ice I then found too busy and distracting. Ten versions later, I’d settled on the featured image (which I then made minor adjustments to again the next day).
None of the portraits in The People of Light and Shadow are perfect. I’m not even sure what perfect is. Outside of mathematics and geometry, I don’t think it exists. Or rather, it exists only subjectively, in the eye of the beholder. Each of these portraits are the best I knew how to do at the time. Most of the time when I finished a portrait, there was a detail I would have fixed. As time went by, in most cases I forgot what those details might have been. When I began the series, I wondered if I could ever return to the quality of work I was doing in 2019 in Portraits from a Distant Era or the cyberpunk Chicago: November 2019 series where Jacob last appeared. From where I’m standing, The People of Light and Shadow has eclipsed my previous work, and in the future, I will no doubt wonder if I will ever reach the level of work in The People of Light and Shadow. It was challenging and took a long time. I’m glad I we did it.
The King of Winter, Story Inspirations
The personification of winter, Jack Frost etches his intricate artistry on windows and ponds. I remember learning about him as a child the first time I asked my mother about the patterns on the windows in snowy Oscoda, Michigan, where the white winter woods stood still and silent around the frozen lake. When I lived at the house of the storyteller and Faerie ambassador Joshua Safford, there was a crack in the front window that caused the most beautiful display of frost every winter. Whenever Jack Frost deigns to graffiti the winter world with his touch, I can’t help but stop and stare, frozen in place, and observe.
This Concludes The People of Light and Shadow series…
This marks the end of The People of Light and Shadow series, which was set at twenty portraits. As with D&D campaigns, I now make endpoints to these things. If I don’t do that, they are never finished; when a work is never finished, it leads to feelings of, well I’m sure I don’t have to explain. We all know how it feels to live at loose ends.
So what’s next? I’ll follow up with more posts about the series and the process and the people. I may talk about techniques, about gear, about modeling and costumes. I have ideas for other series, but I need to learn how to make them. There are techniques I need to learn and practice for photography in general. I need to build Distant Era’s business and do more commissions. These series take a great deal of time. I’d like to take a break and take a breath. I owe some people work. I’d like to have some fun. I’d like a little spare time to paint, read, and write. For the most part, things will move on as normal. Some portraits outside this series will appear now and then, which match their style.
Commissions
If you enjoy the work in The People of Light and Shadow and would like to have your own portraits made in this (or another) style, please get in touch, either via the contact page on distantera.com or email me directly.
Thanks
Thanks to all who have supported this series through your likes and loves and especially your comments and conversations. To those who read The All Worlds Traveller, I respect and commend you for following along with these synopses. It is a miserable thing to make art in darkness and silence and a life affirming thing to make it around conversations with the people I know and admire and with the new people I meet along the way. If not for your conversations with each new piece, the work would not have been as good and I wouldn’t have been as excited to do it. I owe you all an enormous debt of gratitude.
To the People of Light and Shadow themselves, the subjects and creators of these fantastical beings, as well as the costumers, makeup artists, and helpers, they live in my heart forever as the first companions of the post-quarantine years; I cherish the memories of each individual session, each conversation and shared moment. Thank you until the end of time.
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