"I have been thinking about this photo for quite some time. It's inspiration comes from (mainly) a scene from Pink Floyd:The Wall Movie and from 30 some odd years of being an avid Gamer and SteamPunk/Post Apocalyptic fan. For the past 3 or so years, I have wrangled my nephews together to do a "kickass" Halloween picture.
Last year's was relatively cool, you can see it here http://500px.com/photo/16253901 if you're interested, however, my younger nephew was a little disappointed that all you got to see of him was his bloody legs. So, I promised him that this year we would do something really crazy to make up for it.
So, in my head, I pretty much had the basic idea, and set out to get the costume items, and let me tell you, Etsy is a killer resource for not only finding some great things (at reasonable prices), but I find I use it as inspiration as well. Anyway, both the gas mask and gauntlets I got off of Etsy and gaff taped these little LED lights into the the eye slots. The LED lights are actually wedding decorations that you put into drinking glasses, vases etc. We shot this in an alley in downtown OKC around 7pm. I have a 7D, and used an EF-S 17-55 USM, 1/25th, f2.8, ISO 400, natural light, except for the Halogen light over head in the alley. As you can tell, Lightroom and Photoshop came into play heavily for this image, and to be honest, this is only the second or third time I've really seriously messed around with photoshop.
All the post processing credit should go to Glyn Dewis haha, because without his tutorials, the end result would have been completely different. I think I watched pretty much everything he has up on You Tube and bounced back and forth trying and retrying (many times) to get the look I wanted. I'm really happy with the final result, but more importantly my nephew was totally psyched, and that's all that matters."- Tommy J