A few weeks ago I organised a shoot with some of my cosplay and photography friends. I really like the studio environment, even though cosplay tends to work better on location. A Studio gives us full control over the environment, lighting and more time to chat.
I can’t emphasize enough how lucky and spoilt I’ve been as a photographer to be around such talented, inspiring and creative people. I still have a lot of learning to do, and seeing their work in costumes, makeup and design makes me want to improve my photography more and more.
With the current gear and setup that I have, I’m limited to high-key white background, or low-key black background. For Sefie’s Misato costume, we tried both. The lighting options for the white background are somewhat similar, so for this setup its all about pose, expressions and direction. With my quiet personality I find this more difficult, so working with such experienced models helps so much.
On black, its all about the lighting, and creating the appropriate mood. In this shot, I was just trying to get a bit more separation between the handgun and the pure black background. The lens flare and the highlights are just accidents 😉
I wanted a softer less dramatic look for Annie’s wonderful dress but still on pure black. In the past, I’ve used bare hot-shoe flashes for hair lights but I’ve never been too happy with the spotty specular highlights this creates. I don’t have gridded softboxes for this sort of thing so I just used a brolly and hoped for the best.
Shooting in black is always annoying as its always challenging to keep light from the umbrellas spilling everywhere. I didn’t get a chance to try out my “waffle” as christened by Siera, it was busy on the high-key set. I love the way the black looks though, so I will continue with it till I perfect it.
I’ll talk about the waffle (gridded octabox!) and more high-key work in a future post, and also my attempts with Kodak Portra. I promise I will write that soon! In the meantime you should look at some of the work by Neil, Hayden and Sam. Also Sefie’s and Celina’s blogs!