Wanderer Queen

July 19, 2021
1 min read
Child of the Forest, Heir to the Ashes, The Wanderer Queen

Featuring the phenomenal Deana Vazquez, this image from our second series, Portraits from a Distant Era, portrays the subject in a character she role-played and, over the course of many adventures, “leveled up” in her journey from ranger to queen in the tradition of Strider/Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings.

Last week, I described how I’m revising this series to bring back detail in shadow areas that had formerly been completely black, and making other small changes along the way as well. The intent not to re-edit the image but fix bugs that would make for poor prints. Learning about color management and monitor calibration while reviewing prints over the last two years has proved enlightening to say the least.

After bringing up the darkest areas of this image, got rid of the yellow cast in the whites of the eyes and re-cropped the image to bring the subject closer, which brings her more in line with the other subjects in the series.

At the subject’s request, I composited the two versions of her character into a single image. On the left is the character at the end of her journey, confident and queenly, and on the right is her character from her earlier days as a wandering ranger.

It was a pleasure to make these images for Deana.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

The All Worlds Traveller

Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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About a Distant Era

Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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