If your character would like to have his or her photo taken (solo, with a date, in group, however!), he or she can interact with Ellie here. Ellie will also be wondering through the crowd later, taking candids. If anyone needs her for that in a different thread, PM me.

---

8:30, Entrance Hall/Great Hall

The backdrop and easily rearranged settings had been placed out of the way of the dance floor, the dinner tables, and the towering Christmas trees, in a corner where their presence wouldn’t look clunky but would still see fair foot traffic. Ellie could work with it. She was, after all, a newly minted accomplished professional photographer, having shot the cover story and centerfold of the season, a Witch Weekly issue featuring a very natural Bristol Collins. A centuries’-honored Internationally-boasted tradition of the Yule Ball was a nice to way to celebrate the year (not that she wasn’t planning a brilliant New Year’s Eve!).

As students, their dates, and the dateless queued up for glossy memories of the evening, the young photographer instructed her younger assistant, whose clever wandwork allowed for any number of backdrops, from the hall itself, to a glittery view of the lake and stars, to solid, December-y colors,  and any number of holiday themes. Ellie finished with one couple, the purple smoke fading into the warmth provided by elegant candles and roaring fireplaces, and beckoned forth a younger group of girls and boys. She adjusted her lens to fit all eight or ten of them in comfortably. Aside from the fact that there were a lot of them to fit in, they were small things... Ellie couldn’t recall looking that young at the age of fourteen. It might never not be a weird feeling, to show up to Hogwarts as an adult. (Luckily there were no George Carters around the castle to prove this theory.) “Smile!” More purple smoke went up as she captured the group against a backdrop of the North Pole.

Eleanor sighed, pulled back from the camera. “You,” she said, pointing toward a lanky thirteen-or-fourteen-year-old. She gestured for a private word, waited for the kid to take a few awkward steps away from the witch with whom he had arrived. “Smile like you’re not terrified you’re going to step on the hem your date’s dress,” Ellie told him quietly. Wisdom from an older witch. Hogwarts was getting their money’s worth tonight. “Go on,” she added, more loudly, shooing him back in front of the camera. “She agreed to attend with you, didn’t she?” That was half the battle, apparently.

Much of the night went like this— Ellie telling people to loosen up… or stand still, squeeze into the frame, stop blocking someone else’s face. She fell short of asking a few boys to get their hair out of their eyes. She wasn’t that old. (And hair was very important to teenage boys… and adult men… but Ellie wasn’t going to give away their secrets.)

Whatever they wanted to do, though, they were their memories at the end of the night. She helped the ones who looked like they needed it, who had queued up with their friends and dates for posed photos. Candids were another story.

She made fast friends with some of the Americans, who seemed to take the posing thing to heart— or simply go with the flow. Ellie wondered briefly how elevated her career would become if she managed to capture McGonagall being as candid (or humorously guileful) as the American headmaster and his right-hand croc.

After the Champion’s Dance and a few songs, the queue started to get long again. Another herd of kids was ushered into the frame. Before she could snap the photo, however, the unassuming backdrop began to slip. First an inch, then two. Eleanor pulled up from her lens, staring at it with a mixture of eyebrow-knitted suspicion and a very subtle begging of please-don’t-fall. And then there was a tug as a boisterous boy in Ellie’s frame swayed forward into his friends, bringing down part of the backdrop with his shoe.

Pax, for want of something else to do, had joined the line to get his photograph taken. Of course, since he hadn't summoned the nerve to ask a girl to the ball, and since he'd been too self-conscious to ask any of his friends to go in a group with him, it would be, slightly depressingly, a solo picture. But he was wearing a nice, forest-green set of robes trimmed with cosy white faux-fur, and since his parents had gone to the trouble of sending him the dress robes he figured they'd appreciate a nice photo of him wearing them.

He was the next in line when it became apparent that something was going wrong with the group ahead of him. There was a sudden flurry of movement, and then the wintery backdrop stopped at the first fir tree. Forgetting that moving would lose him his place in a line that had got a lot longer since he joined it, Pax rushed forward. 'Let the professionals handle it' was not especially a thought that entered his head.

'Here, I got it!' he cried as he picked up the section of the backdrop that was caught on one of the older boys' shoes. Unfortunately, though, Pax had that part of the screen, he did not have the adjacent part that, thanks to the extra movement, was now also starting to sway. Pax realised what was probably going to happen before it did, and his face fell. 'Aw, no... Don't fall...'

The screen came down like a wispy sheet of snow, only the enchanted silk seemed anything but wispy when Ellie considered the gaggle of lanky fourth year (or were they third year?) boys and the adorable younger year in green being swallowed up by it. The consideration was short-lived, for within seconds, said children were replaced by a particularly lumpy, slightly iridescent ghost, if ghosts actually looked the bed sheets muggles depicted in Hallow’s Eve stories.  It shivered with bits of star and mountain and Christmas tree, and the other backdrops that it had been charmed to hold, like an old projector had been turned on its side and the film had begun to skip.

“Oh, Merlin.”

On second thought, maybe they weren’t paying her enough.

Her sidekick became thoroughly useless. But before Ellie pulled out her own wand, she snapped a few quick photos-- what were situations like this if not thoroughly picture worthy? Then she wandered forward, wand in hand, ignoring the fact that heels and a formal dress weren’t the most appropriate outfit for saving teenagers and preteens from tangled backdrops. With a spell and a wave, the screen’s corners lifted and the backdrop slowly began to levitate upward, flattening itself out like a taut canopy above the heads of the confused and embarrassed. Ellie’s gaze settled on the little hero. “Are you alright?” She asked, sounding mildly amused. The other kids could fend for themselves, especially the clumsy one who had started this. It probably wasn't the photo the kid was expecting to send to his parents.