Steampunk is one of my favourite themes to photograph, it embodies all things dramatic that make great art portraits: detailed costumes, beauty, period era, drama, adventure and excitement. I love steampunk.
I chose to light this session in a different way then I have for the first two portraits in this series, The Sheriff, and The Viking, so when it came to the editing the piece weren’t fitting together in the style of the previous two, so I improvised a little and it has come out with a different feel but still has the elements of the other two that hopefully will give it a cohesive look as a series. I can tell that this will happen through out the project because art sometimes just flows out at its own will and you just have to go with it.
I edited this image in a couple different finishing styles, but this high saturation high contrast version is my favourite. I will post the others on my facebook page at a later date so you can compare and choose your own favourite.
Definition curtesy of Wikipedia:
Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction or science fantasy that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. Although its literary origins are sometimes associated with the cyberpunk genre, steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the 19th century’s British Victorian era or American “Wild West”, in a future during which steam power has maintained mainstream usage, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power. However, steampunk and Neo-Victorian are different in that the Neo-Victorian movement does not extrapolate on technology while technology is a key aspect of steampunk.
Steampunk may also incorporate additional elements from the genres of fantasy, horror, historical fiction, alternate history, or other branches of speculative fiction, making it often a hybrid genre. The first known appearance of the term steampunk was in 1987, though it now retroactively refers to many works of fiction created as far back as the 1950s or 1960s.
Steampunk also refers to any of the artistic styles, clothing fashions, or subcultures that have developed from the aesthetics of steampunk fiction, Victorian-era fiction, art nouveau design, and films from the mid-20th century. Various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by individual artisans into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical “steampunk” style, and a number of visual and musical artists have been described as steampunk.
