There were incredible colours in the sky yesterday evening.
I was out for a walk and couldn't resist using my phone to capture the
reflection in a car window.
However, when I'd finished playing about, I looked up to see the car owner
staring out of her kitchen window at me, so I gave her a slightly embarrassed
grin.
She came out of the house to see what I was up to and to be reassured that I
hadn't been trying to break into her car.
I showed her the photo on my phone and we then had a lovely chat for about 20
minutes on skies, sunsets and why Castle Douglas is such a wonderful place to live.
Sometimes I have no idea what kind of conversation I'm going to have when Andrea, the editor of Dumfries and Galloway Life magazine, phones me up.
Louisa and Ben run
The Courtyard
in Annan, SW Scotland – a place for fabrics, yarns and general haberdashery,
as well as shoe repairs and key-cutting.
Louisa is a quilter, and there isn't much she can't create or mend with a
needle and thread, while Ben is a leather worker who has taken his skills way
beyond the cobbling he trained in.
They are into Viking re-enactment, and more recently have got into Steampunk
in quite a big way.
Steampunk, for those not in the know, is a retro-futurism, sci-fi/fantasy
genre.
Or to put it another way – think of science fiction from the point of view of
Edwardian Britain. How would adventurers using futuristic technology look –
from airship pirates to time-travellers? So instead of modern computers
and sleek white surfaces, the aesthetic would be levers, pulleys, cogs and wheels,
with lots of brass, leather, and polished wood.
In fact, just think of the HG Wells book, "The Time Machine" or Jules Verne's
"20,000 Leagues Under The Sea", and it will start to give you an idea of where
the genre has its roots.
Ben was telling me that when they were down in Whitby at a Steampunk Weekend
event, he'd noticed a growth in Steampunk "familiars", or creatures that might
sit on a person's shoulder. He said he'd seen a woman in a wheelchair with
quite a sophisticated animatronic creature that could turn its head and open
and shut it's eyes and mouth, which she operated with a small controller
hidden in her lap.
I can't remember where the idea of a dragon had come up, but Ben decided to
see if he could create one in leather. He managed to find a pattern online,
which he then adapted to suit his needs and style.
And if that wasn't enough, he managed to create it in such a way that it had a
small smoke machine coming out of its mouth with yellow LED lights switching
on at the same time.
Most of the time it sat in the shop window and they would switch it on when
people were peering in, however it has now sold. Ben knows he should probably
start work on another, but considering the last one took him a month to build
and there are many other projects calling on his limited time, it might be a
while before a new one appears in the window.
Exploring ideas of where we might do a photo shoot, it turned out that The
Courtyard was practically next door to
Solway Spirits,
a gin distillery, which had some nice brass stills that would make suitable
backdrop.
So on one of they days they were not distilling, they let us use the
space.
Some items couldn't be moved and it took me a while to get angle and the
lighting I wanted without unwanted elements appearing in the photo that
couldn't be easily Photoshopped out afterwards.
Eventually I managed to get it to work with a 3 light setup – large softbox as
a key light to the right; an off-camera flash with yellow gel behind the still
to the left; and another off-camera flash with a blue gel, over my left
shoulder to create a subtle fill for some of the shadows.
A burst of my own wee smoke machine, and the atmosphere was complete.
Of course, I had to get a wee selfie with the dragon on my own shoulder, along with Ben, Louisa and their daughter. Immie.
Issue 201 of Dumfries and Galloway Life had a feature on Ben and Louisa that used some of these images.
If you're interested, I discuss this photo shoot in Episode 204 of my podcast, "Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres"
And if you decide to click through and watch it directly on YouTube (rather
than here on the blog), then you can watch the Live Chat Replay and see the
comments people are writing in real time as the podcast progresses.
---
1:56 - Welcome, what's coming up, greetings and comments
4:11 - What is Steampunk?
8:54 - The story behind the Steampunk shoot
14:11 - The photos from the shoot
19:59 - Different crop ratios for different purposes
22:32 - The editing process and decisions behind the different stages
47:52 - Smug Points Leaderboard update
50:21 - Introduction to the Feedback/Critique section
51:04 - Viji - Elephant and mahout
1:03:02 - What's coming up this month
1:06:41 - End
