In June, my friend Devon invited me to a late August “dark mermaid/siren” photoshoot in southern Wisconsin, created and organized by my friends Courtney and Rachel. I was in the planning stages for the next Distant Era portrait project, but I had hardly shot anything in the pandemic and wanted to get some practice before jumping back into my own work.
Elizabeth came along to assist, and we were shooting with two other fantastic photographers—Allen Castillo, who spoke with us earlier this year in the article “Fantasy with Friends,” and Sara Fierst, owner/photographer at Fierce Boudoir. This was a lot of fun, especially seeing how each photographer applied their own style to the shooting and editing. It’s awesome to witness three different photographers working on the same subjects, each photographer presenting a distinctly cool and different vision with their work.
Choosing a Focus
Oftentimes when you’re setting out to create something without hard parameters, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the possibilities of what could be or might be. In any art project, when I’m unsure which way I want to go, I return to this memory from my days performing long form improvisation: I once asked an improvisor I admired for advice. This improvisor, Pat Shay, told me that before any given show, he thought about one thing he wanted to focus on for that show, one thing he wanted to do well. Prioritizing that one element gives you a direction and something achievable to strive for. I have given the same advice to people learning to run role-playing games for groups of their peers: pick one thing to concentrate on and do that thing well in the session. I find it’s good advice in photography as well.
As we prepared to set out for Wisconsin, I decided I wanted to try to use small flash to illuminate subjects and then bring down the outside environment in editing; I also wanted to burn through all the old smoke bombs that had been sitting in my place for a couple of years. Flash and smoke. Those were my goals for this shoot, so those were the things I worked on.
Shooting from Shore
As the session approached, I learned that pretty much everyone would be getting into the stream. I didn’t have waders or proper footwear, and at the time I was working an insane schedule during the day and then working a second job for three hours each night while spending the weekends editing photos. I didn’t have time to get water gear, and I wasn’t too excited about carrying lighting equipment into the stream, so I used my 70–200mm lens from shore, zoomed all the way in. Problem solved!
Lost in the Woods: An Interlude
When we parked in Wisconsin, we took the wrong path to the stream. We walked through the woods along twisting paths until we no longer knew where we were or where we were headed. It was at that point when we encountered the lone bearded man swinging the giant machete. This is how horror movies start and end, and in fact this is also often their middle. Others were quick to explain that the man was a biker so of course he had the machete to cut away the overgrowth. Sure.
Editing
The colored smoke and the flash made the editing fun to do. After a few experiments, I decided to aim for a more fantastical style, editing like it was a Distant Era project. Thanks to the aforementioned workload, it took a while to get to these. Even so, I was very happy with what we captured. Working within the objectives (SMOKE! FLASH!) that I assigned myself and the parameters of shooting from shore, I felt like the shoot was successful, in spite of the big thunderstorm that rolled in and prevented me from shooting the rest of the subjects that had gathered for the shoot.
Spending an afternoon with friends among the dark sirens was great. An ideal way to break the pandemic funk and start experimenting with images of fantastical people and places again.
Here are a few of the lighter images from the session.
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