Skip to main content

Steampunk in the Park

At the end of September, I got the chance to work with the DC Cosplayer and Photographer meet up group again. This meet up was held at Lake Accotink, which is park Fairfax County Park system.   The theme for this meet up was steampunk. For those who don’t know what steam punk is, it is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates technology and aesthetics designs inspired by the 19-th century industrial steam powered machinery.  The clothing is reminiscent of the British Victorian era or the American “Wild West”.

For this shoot, I used a Canon 70D with an 18-200mm lens, a speed-light attached to Young Nu radio triggers mounted on a light stand with an umbrella.  For most of this shoot, I was in bright sunlight, so I used the flash as fill and to separate the subject from the background.  I stuck with an ISO of 100, but varied my aperture and shutter speed depending on the location in the park while mostly using 100% flash power.  I was happy with several of the shots from this shoot, except I would like to re-do the carousel shots. I noticed halfway through my shutter speed was too low, so several of the shots were blurry, thus I did not get as many keepers as I would have liked. I was also not happy with myself for making the rookie mistake.

The other nice thing about this shoot was the freedom in editing.  In most cosplay sessions, you want to keep full color, but with the steampunk shoot, I could do some sepia, black-and-white, and some creative photo technics that would fit the period.  For some of the photos, I tried to recreate a look called pictorialism, which gives the photo a bit of a hand painted look or the look of a painting.

 The first photo I used a strong contrast, with high clarity then transitioned to sepia.  The second photo I desaturated and gave a sepia tint to make it seem a little more gothic.  The last two photos were the ones that I attempted the pictorialism technique. To get the pictorialism look I first upped the clarity, reduced the saturation slightly, then applied grain to the photo, and finally a bit of a vignetting.  I am happy with how all these photos turned out.  You can see the whole set here.
Cosplayer: Sara Cosplays
Aperture: f8, Shutter: 1/250s, Focal length: 18mm
Cosplayer: Kat
Aperture: f9, Shutter: 1/250s, Focal length: 20mm

Cosplayer: Sara Cosplays
Aperture: f8, Shutter: 1/250s, Focal length: 18mm
Cosplayer: Life of Cosplay
Aperture: f13, Shutter: 1/60s, Focal length: 18mm

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2025

This year felt a little off for me; I think it was because I was in a mental recovery mode.  I finished my graduate program in June and immediately went on a week-long vacation to Palm Springs.  I do not recommend Palm Springs in June; way too hot.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the graduate program mentally and physically exhausted me, which I think showed in some of my creative work.  But being able to work with great people like Natalie Hanrion , Coralinx Cosplay , and Anastasia B kept me motivated.  While I didn’t attend as many Cosplay Photo Shoot events as in the past, the ones I did attend were helpful in keeping the creativity flowing.  I also took some time this year to reflect on a few things and will be making some changes for 2025. In 2024, I shot 6241 frames, which is a 30-percent decrease from last year.  I edited 3187 frames, which is a 40-percent decrease from 2023.  I think this year, I started focusing on being very min...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Optical Spot

The weekend of November 16 th , I got a little ambitious and did four sessions to test out the Lindsey Adler Optical Spot .     I originally rented the optical spot from LensRentals , but that session had to be rescheduled; however, I didn’t want the rental to go to waste, thus a TFP weekend. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 2 FJ400 Westcott Strobes 1 Optical Spot 2 strip boxes 1 bell reflector grids 2 C-stands 2 light stands Sandbags Backdrop stand Savage Fashion Grey Seamless Gobos Gels Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps Star filter Red Curtains Posing stool     The set up While I did four shoots in one weekend, the lighting setup was basically the same for all four sessions; what changed was the gels and the gobos.  I started with a fashion grey seam...
Post a Comment
Read more

Whispering Waters

On July 19th, I drove up to Poughkeepsie, NY to attend the Whispers of Waterhouse photo event held by Everlore Events . This was an all-day event, which included a light lunch, vendors, arts, and crafts areas, and three different styled shooting locations.  I was one of the roaming photographers for this event, which means you work with models who are not currently working with a featured photographer (who have schedules), and can wander between all three shooting locations at your convenience.  For this event I used: Canon R6 1 Speed light Trigger Umbrella Gels 24 - 105mm lens Camera Settings: This was an outside shoot that had sets in heavy forested areas, out on a pond, and sunny meadows; thus, I was adjusting the settings to the lighting conditions.  I used ISO 100 and 400.  My goal was to keep my aperture around f/4 to achieve a nice background blur; however, depending on the conditions, I had to stop down to f/9 and f/11 to manage the light...
Post a Comment
Read more