Skip to main content

Tried a New Group

On September 13th, I attended my first MDStreetMeet Event, which was held at Glen Echo Park.  This was a low-light event focused on low-light photography and capturing the neon signs at Glen Echo.

Street Meet is all about street photography with a few models thrown into the mix and is supposed to be about collaboration and meeting other fellow photographers.  It really wasn’t my thing, as I’m introverted and have a hard time integrating myself into groups, especially groups that already seem to have their own internal clicks.  I’m also not a street photographer; I lean more towards portrait and studio photography.  I did take a few images but not enough to say it was worth my time. You can see a few of those below.




 My other observation was some people brought a lot of gear for something that is supposed to be geared towards street photography. My thought of street photography is simple setups; maybe a single light stand at most, not carts full of lights.  The other observation is, the group tends to do “paparazzi” style shooting of models, so the poor model is receiving instructions from several different people at once and it make it difficult to set up a shot.  I prefer to work with model’s one-on-one.  The paparazzi-style shooting might be because only a few models come, and this group is supposed to be focused on street photography, not portrait photography. 

Overall, it really wasn’t my thing and I felt out of place. Not sure if I’ll give it a second chance.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2025

This year felt a little off for me; I think it was because I was in a mental recovery mode.  I finished my graduate program in June and immediately went on a week-long vacation to Palm Springs.  I do not recommend Palm Springs in June; way too hot.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the graduate program mentally and physically exhausted me, which I think showed in some of my creative work.  But being able to work with great people like Natalie Hanrion , Coralinx Cosplay , and Anastasia B kept me motivated.  While I didn’t attend as many Cosplay Photo Shoot events as in the past, the ones I did attend were helpful in keeping the creativity flowing.  I also took some time this year to reflect on a few things and will be making some changes for 2025. In 2024, I shot 6241 frames, which is a 30-percent decrease from last year.  I edited 3187 frames, which is a 40-percent decrease from 2023.  I think this year, I started focusing on being very min...

First Session of 2025 - Queen of Hearts

My first official shoot of 2025 was with Lady Cels on January 4 th , to shoot her Queen of Hearts cosplay based off the NoFlutter Design. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 1 FJ400 Westcott Strobes 60-inch umbrella with sock 1 rectangular soft box 1 bell reflector grids 2 C-stands 1 Platypod Sandbags Backdrop stand Savage Primary Red Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps   Gold ring wedding altar pieces Playing cards Flowers Styrofoam block Scotch tape     The set up The inspiration for this shoot was obviously the Queen of Hearts, but I took my set design cues from the original NoFlutter drawing.  I wanted to create something similar to the swirls used in the background of the image, so I started looking at wrought iron garden fences and ended up on gold we...

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 ...