A Steampunk Fire Breathing Blue Leather Dragon - and Episode 204 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

Wait!

What?

A Steampunk fire breathing blue leather dragon?

Well of course I want to photograph it!

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.

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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