“She doesn’t like the city in the summer. The air feels like molasses, thick and pressing. Her ears are muffled, shrouded with the cotton balls of humidity. Her eyes and nose burn with the smoke from the burned meet on the grills and the chlorine from the rooftop pools.
Her air is clear: it burns and cleanses in its crispness. Her sounds are the feather fall of snow, the slice of silver skates through ice, the carols of the wind from the North. Her smells are hot chocolate, and pine, and fireplaces, and her eyes seek the sharp red of the holly berries, and the diamonds of the stars above her in the ever-lengthening night…
North Side. South Side. They have no idea what true dichotomy is. Let them squabble over which side of the river is better…
She waits, and watches, and smiles, knowing that the seasons will turn again, and in what will seem like far too few moons, summer will fade, and the whole city, North and South, will be her domain again, and bow to her…”
—Elizabeth MacDougald
The fourth and final week shooting Distant Era’s first series resembled the first: it was only Elizabeth and I, and we were downtown capturing a last batch of images for the series featuring her contemporary Queen Mab look. This final night was more of an afterthought, a postscript to the series. I captured Mab next to a gothic spire downtown and shifted the colors in the photo toward the cool color of Mab’s hair. After a few images, we were ready to wrap the series with the idea of potentially renewing it at a later point in time.
I learned a lot from the Urban Fantasy series through trial and error. I learned how to meter for the background in a dark city environment and how to meter the subject against that background to make sure both subject and background are represented. In essence, a photographer can have as little grain or noise in the nighttime urban environment as they using a low ISO and slow shutter speed; the flash will freeze the subject. I learned to use the TTL (through-the-lens) flash metering button on the camera to show my flash exactly what to expose, which also gave the flash an indicator of how much battery power to use to cover the distance between the subject and the flash. I learned (the hard way) how helpful a tripod is to accomplish any of this, having achieved the effect in week one and then compromised some images the following weeks trying to make do without. Sometimes one really must learn by doing it wrong a few times to see the difference.
This being Distant Era’s very first project ever, I (re)learned that the best way to make a thing is to do it. Ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas. From “We should get together sometime” to “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” But to take action and make an idea become real is what brings others to believe in the idea as well. I didn’t know what I was doing when I set out to do Urban Fantasy. I had some ideas and a theme and some things I wanted to try. I reached out to some friends, chose dates and times, and stuck to them whether or not anyone showed up. And some people did show up. And some people bailed at the last minute. It was important to focus on the task and commit to doing it even if I was the only one. I always shot this series wearing my own urban fantasy costume (a kind of street magician in a tall hat) in case no one showed up at all. The commitment to the idea was what made it happen.
There are things I’d do differently with this series if I did it again (besides using the tripod all the time). If I had the time, I’d scout more locations that were isolated from people but still showed the city lights. I would bring more light to fill in shadows where I could. I would shoot only one or two subjects at a time and make a more deliberate plan—while keeping in mind that an experiment needs to retain a sense of play. Urban Fantasy is very much a first series, a test series. But I have no regrets about how we spent Friday nights on that hot, humid month, dining out, sharing stories, and then wandering the city streets in search of beautiful background lights and story ideas with friends. Looking back on these images, I can’t think of anything I’d have liked to do more.
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