DCC Meet Ups

Recently the Dayton-Columbus-Cincinnati Cosplay Photoshoot Group had two meets relatively close together.  The first was a Halloween theme shoot at PiattsCastle in New Liberty, OH on October 21^st and the second was an open themed shoot at the Oaks Quarry Park in Fairborn, OH on November 11^th.  I’m going to talk about both shoots. For both shoots, I was using a Cannon 70D with two 430EX III-RT speedlight and one lightstand. For all the meet-ups I keep my equipment simple and portable. It makes moving around the location a lot easier.

The castle shoot was an early morning shoot, using the outside of Mac-o-Chee Castle. The day started out overcast and cold, but by the end of the shoot the sun came out and we had brilliant blue skies.  I had two images from the shoot, that I liked how the final edits turned out.   The first is of Bocchan as Bowsette. Bowsette is the female version of Bowser from Mario Brothers.  The second is the image is of Armand from “Interview with a Vampire” as done by Coriander.     To light these shots, the flash was positioned behind the model on a lower step and zoom to only light their upper body.  During the editing process I enhanced the lighting on the models face and slightly darkened the surroundings.  I then added a fade layer to the image with a slight vignette to finish off the image.   I think the fade to the image makes the model stand out more.

The second shoot held at the Quarry was held during the late morning early afternoon.  I usually don’t get to shoot a lot of pairs during the meet ups, however this meet up had thee cosplay pairs.  Note, pairs are not couples, they are just characters that normally interact with one another and are in the same universe.  I have two pictures from the shoot that I like.  The first is of Bocchan as Loki and Gleume Cosplay as Thor, both from the Marvel Universe.  They had a suggestion of doing family type picture that you would get at portrait place to give to your mom. I went a long with it, and think I captured the standard mall family photo.  I did not have to do a lot of editing to the image.  It was shot with a simple speedlight in front of the models to combat the backlight from the sun.  The second group images is of Cosplaykatx and Animoo_trash as characters from Attack on Titan. For their image I went for strong stance and had them embody the solider they represent in the series. The flash was positioned in front of me, and set to be wide.  I did post process the image slightly to brighten up face of the model standing on top of the rock, and add a slight vignette.  I like the overall look of the image and the emotion it portrays.

You can see all the final images from both meet-ups here: Halloween and Quarry.