Romantic portraits created from the back catalogue

With all events cancelled during lockdown, I’ve been confined to bird and bug photography locally…but now that the sunny weather has been replaced by more frequent rain, I’ve spent a while looking through my back catalogue. My people photographs have almost all been taken at events…so the plan was to find some suitably romantic portraits from last year’s Steampunk events and create an environment for them using my landscape photos, also from the back catalogue.

Enter the beautiful Amy, photographed at Lincoln in one of her own stunning Steampunk creations, the silver and net gown in the first image. The background is made from photographs taken in Switzerland. Five photographs made this regal composition.

I had quite a few pictures of Amy with the same dress, so I wanted to use a different outfit for my second image…enter memories from childhood. When it came to toys, we didn’t have so much as children do today, but a favourite of mine was a cardboard figure of a girl for whom I could design and make paper outfits to dress her up! They would always be princess outfits inspired by the Disney films I’d seen…and maybe I never grew out of that! So, in the second image, I have re-dressed Amy in a beautiful creation that I photographed when it was displayed on a mannequin in Lincoln Castle Steampunk Market last summer.

The dress had to be re-shaped, the skirt lengthened and incorporated into Amy’s original skirt, then the colours matched up and some skin created to fill in the blank areas. A rose was then added before Amy was given a different head and the whole figure incorporated into a Saddleworth foreground and background. Ten photographs went into this image if you count all the birds separately. Hopefully both Amy and the maker of this fabulous costume will forgive me for using their images in this way.