Lolita with Snow

Tenth Moon Cosplay won a two-hour photo shoot with me, through a contest I ran on my Facebook page, back in January, and we did the shoot in March.  The two outfits she chose for the shoot were Lolita fashion dresses.  The first dress had prints of constellations on it, which inspired me to buy the moon backdrop used in the photos.  The other outfit was perfect for snow shots with its little fur edged cape.  However, I could no longer be guaranteed natural snow, so I made snow.  I used a product called “SnoWonder InstantSnow”.   One cup of the raw power when mixed with one gallon of water makes two gallons of snow.  The fake snow feels cold and acts like heavy snow, meaning it tends to clump.  However, it works wonderfully to coat a floor and toss in the air.  The only bad part is it is hard to clean up when it is wet because it tends to stick to everything, but once it dries it is easy to clean up with a broom.

For this session, I used a Canon 70D with an 18-200mm lens.  Two 450 RT III flashes mounted on light stands trigger by a radio trigger, an umbrella and a square soft box with a grid.  The soft box was located to my right, which provided the main light, and the umbrella was placed to the left, which provided fill.  I used both a printed background and a standard white background during the shoot.  For the shoot All images were taken at ISO 100, with 62% of the images taken at a focal length of 18mm, 51% taken at an aperture of f5, and 50% taken with a shutter speed of 1/160s.   When editing the images, I kept them relatively natural except for a few where I attempted to show moonlight, lighting the model. 

My two favorites images from the shoot are the snow-tossing image an the contemplation image.  I like the snow image because it looks like the snow is staring to form a heart shape. The other one I like to call moon contemplation. During the editing process for that photo, i add a blue overlay to make it feel like it was taken during late evening blue hour, right before the world goes to black. 

Aperture: f4, Shutter: 1/160s, Focal Length: 24mm

Aperture: f5, Shutter:1/160s, Focal Length 20mm