2019 End of Year Wrap Up

The year of 2019 was a busy year between running the Dayton-Columbus-CincinnatiCosplay Photo Shoot Group (DCC) which celebrated its 1-year anniversary, making headpieces, doing several one-one studio shoots, attending conventions, working on a Masters degree, and getting a new position at work. The first half of the year did not feel busy even though I was set up group shoots for the DCC, did several one-on-one creative sessions, attended a convention, and went on vacation to the Galapagos. It wasn’t until I started my Masters program that I felt like I got busy and had no time. The master’s program basically ate my weekends, due to having to write papers. However, I did finish 9 of the 12 classes in the program in 6 months so I should finish that before June 2020. Due to working on my masters, I did not shoot as much in the second half of the year as I did in the first half of the year. I’m hoping once I’m done with the master’s program, I can focus time back to creative shooting and one-on-one sessions.

This year I shot a total of 7040 frames, of which I edited 4567 images. Of the edited images I used ISO 100 for 2171 images, an aperture of F8 for 987 images, a shutter speed of 1/250s for 894 images and a focal length of 18mm for 2431 images. I had a total of 31 images published across five publication. I had six images published in February issue of Realm Magazine, seven images published in the Issue 47 Volume 2 of Gilded Magazine, fifteen images published in the Issue 31 of Jazzy Magazine with one of those being a featured image, two images in Cosplay Realm magazine, and one in Cosplay Zine. So now that we got the statistics out of the way let’s talk about some events and favorite images for the year.

Cosplay and Conventions

I attended only two conventions this year Katsucon in Washington, DC and Matsuricon in Columbus, Ohio. I did paid shoots at both these conventions. Sadly, I got sick at Matsuricon and had to cancel a session, which I felt horrible about. As usual there were several great cosplayers at Katsucon, but three sessions stick out in my mind Elphaba, Yasha Nydoorin, and Croft and Drake, the cosplayers attention to detail and overall personalities made these fun shoots. Plus, I am happy with the photos, my favorite however is one from Elphaba shoot in which we copied the pose from the theater production poster. I felt Matsuricon was better this year then last year and I got to work with some nice cosplayers. However, I’m still debating whether I will attend Matsuricon in 2020. The shoots that stood out during Matsuricon were Lady Deadpool, Spider Man, and Camie Utsushimi. Several of these shoots I did in the parking garage because of the type of character, and the fact the parking garage had a cool mural. The shot that I liked the best from Matsuricon was of Spider Man, there are not a lot of male cosplayers and this one followed direction well and knew his character.

This year I hosted ten DCC meet ups. We shot in two studios a church that was turned into a brewery, several parks, a train yard, and a farm. All the shoots went well. I always like shooting in studio but the train yard was a bit of a different location, while the farm shoot for Halloween was a great night shoot. The group is slowly growing, but needs a more consistent photographer turn out. It is hard for me to pick a favorite image from meet ups but I seem always come back to the following three images.

Creative Portrait Work

This year I did six one-on-one sessions and one group shoot. I started the year with a shoot using a red dress I had imported from Poland, and then did a 1920’s themed shoot. From there I rolled into a shoot with my favorite purple haired lady, while experimenting with dry ice. I then made a white and silver head piece for a very ethereal shoot that involved very large flowers and garage insulation as a backdrop. From their the flowers and the dry ice made a reappearance for a pink flower shoot. I finished out the year with a group shoot, where all the clothing was white in a very white studio.

Vacation

Vacation this year was eventful. I have always wanted to go the Galapagos Islands, and I went this year. My husband and I opted for a land tour as opposed to the standard cruise. We highly recommend doing the cruise over the land tour, since you waste a lot of your day going to port and traveling out to islands on the land tour as opposed to the cruise where you don’t have the wasted travel time. The Galapagos was nice, we went through ton of sun screen and my husband go some good photos during the whole trip. I on the other hand only got one day’s worth of photos because salt water and DSLR’s don’t mix. Sadly, on the first full day, my underwater housing ended up leaking, killing my camera. (I did get a new one once we got home.) Thankfully, I saw most of the animals before the snorkeling trip, were my camera met its demise. For the rest of the trip I used my husbands’ little point underwater point and shoot, while he used his Canon 5D Mark III.