The Munchkin's Notebook

I have always liked Lolita fashion because it is cute and whimsical. For those that do not know, Lolita fashion is a subculture originating in Japan based on Victorian and Edwardian clothing. The Lolita look is one of modesty with a silhouette featuring knee length skirt or dress with either a "cupcake" or "A-line" shape assisted by petticoats, it can also include items such as blouses, knee high socks, or stockings, and headdresses, which are usually elaborate bows.  Within the Lolita culture there are several types of subcultures ranging from classic, sweet, and gothic; however, the photoshoots do not appear to have the same range of looks.  A typical Lolita shoot usually has a garden, tea party, or fairytale theme.  I wanted to do something different, so I did Lolita in a playground, to capture the fun and sweet side of the Lolita culture. I was happy to work on this shoot with the lovely cosplayer Nerdenheim Jen , who is a lovely and fun person to work wi...

I had a brilliant idea to use dinoflagellates (bioluminescent plankton) for water droplet photography. The dinoflagellates glow when stimulated (i.e. shaken, dropped, impact each other), so I figured they could be used for a unique water drop photo.   However, there was a problem, while I could see the glow of the dinoflagellates; the camera senor even when cranked up to ISO 6400 could not detect the glow at a useful shutter speed to freeze the water drop.   Usually when I do water drop photography, I am somewhere between ISO 100 – 400 with an aperture of F4 - F8 and shutter speed of 1/250 or faster. When using the dinoflagellates I was at ISO 1000 – 3200, with an aperture of F2.8 and a shutter speed of 5 seconds or slower just capture the light the dinoflagellates produced.  Thus, I could not freeze any drops, and the resulting pictures look more like blurry atomic partial traces or abstract art.  Below are a few of the better images after they were edit...

Two weeks ago, I participated in the DC Cosplay Photo Shoots Group meet up at Pierce Mill Park in DC.  The theme for this cosplay meet up was horror; however, the meet up was in the middle of the day on a bright sunshiny day.  Even though the sky was not conducive to getting those dark, creepy shots; however, the cosplayers were great and I made the location work for me to get the shots. For this shoot, I was using a Cannon 70D with an 18-200 mm lens, and a 430EX II speedlight mounted on a painters poll triggered with a Young Nu radio trigger.  (Thank you to my husband who acted as my voice activated light stand) I did not use an umbrella, because I wanted hard, harsh light to get that creepy horror look.  Because it was such a bright day,  was using ISO 100,  and stopped down my aperture to F10, used varied my shutter speed based on the amount of light, and had my flash in high-speed sync mode.  I did vary my flash power, but was mostly ran it a...