I organized a Steampunk photo shoot earlier this month. What is Steampunk? The Oxford English Dictionary defines Steampunk as “a genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, rather than advanced technology.” Think Victorian era meets Jules Verne.

I spent a couple of months scrounging garage sales and the swap meets for gadgets and gizmos that would fit this genre. I had collected some interesting backgrounds that I had planned to use with my models in post production. Lucky for me, Melissa had a Victorian Christmas party in December and provided me with a wealth of Victorian costumes.

This first image above is Christopher. He is the son of a good photography friend of mine. So you can see the type of work that goes into this image, I’ll show the original pictures.

First is the image of Christopher shot against a plain wall. Lighting is from a front light (not shown) and the two edge lights.

The background is made up of some close up watch parts contributed by my neighbor, the jeweler.  I extracted Christopher from his image and add a grunge routine to bring out detail and add him to the background of the watch images (adding a color overlay).

Here are a few more from this shoot. Thanks again to Richelle, Christopher, Holly, Amber and Lauren for modeling. Thanks Melissa for the costuming.