Pleasantly Surprised

I started a 500px account, in late May this year, to just see what the buzz was about and to have a place to showcase what I think is some of my best work. Overall it is nice site, but I’ll stick to my Munchkin Photos account through SmugMug for most of my work.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised today when I uploaded my picture of the Hungarian Parliament Dome, which I called Golden Dome (right).

The photo shot up in ratings to a popularity rating of 90.1 in less than hour. This is double the highest rating I have on some of my other photos. I think it is rather impressive for a low light photo shot without the use of tripod looking straight up. Now the question is will anyone actually buy a print of the photo.

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Cobwebs Everywhere

On October 7 th , I did a studio spooky session with Coralinx Cosplay . The central theme of this shoot was a pretty goth girl who had a fondness for spiders and decorating with cobwebs, making it a perfect Halloween session. Note: Cobwebs are defined as abandoned or old spiderwebs that have collected dust. Many cobwebs are the result of comb-footed spider (i.e., black widows) that make irregularly shaped webs. Spiderwebs are active structures built to catch prey. (Source: Western Exterminator Company) For these sessions, I used: Photography Equipment Other Equipment Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Westcott FJ400 2 Phottix Strobes 2 strip boxes 2 rectangular soft boxes 2 c-stands 3 light stands Backdrop stand Black seamless 2 Westcott silicon gels Tether cable Laptop Laptop holder Sandbags A-clamps Spyder Color checker Fake cobwebs Table ...

Katsucon 2025 Wrap - Up

Katsucon 2025 didn’t seem as crowded as 2024, but I still wasn’t feeling it. Katsucon will always have a special place in my heart, but I think I’m just bored with it, from a creative perspective. While I still love working with cosplayers the location itself no longer excites me and I’m tired of fighting the crowds. If I return to Katsucon 2026 I think I’ll just set up a studio in my room and do studio sessions. I can be a lot more creative with a studio session, and I get to use all my lights. So now let's talk about photography. For Katsucon I was shooting with my Canon R6 with an 24-105 Canon RF lens, and I had a fisheye lens on me as well, but we will discuss that later. I had two speedlights, one on camera which acted as a trigger 90-percent of the time and one on a light stand which my husband would hold during shoots. This year I booked 11 cosplay sessions and shot 869 frames. I shot a range of ISOs from ISO 100 to ISO 800...

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough. I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts. However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer. I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it. Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed. But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy. He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...

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