The Munchkin's Notebook

On October 18 th , I did a cosplay studio session with Kei (za_warudio) and Kitsune Kauki (kitsune_kazuki) for their Mizi and Sua from Alien Stage cosplays.   Alien Stage mostly takes place on a stage, so I kept the set very simple to align with stills from the show and the fan art references. For these sessions, I used: Photography Equipment Other Equipment Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Westcott FJ400 2 Phottix Strobes 2 bell reflectors 1 round soft boxes 1 bell reflector with barn doors 2 c-stands 3 light stands Backdrop stand Black seamless 2 gels Tether cable Laptop Laptop holder Sandbags A-clamps Spyder Color checker Silver backdrop Smoke genie Stool Pillow (to kneel on) The setup The stills and reference photos provided were very simple in regard to background, so I went with a black seamless and a silver backdrop.  I chose a silver backd...

On May 1 st I did a cosplay session with the lovely thenext.jeneration and thebreezybiz (Instagram names) at Meadowlark Gardens .  The garden was a great place to shoot their Tangled the series cosplays due to the mix of wooded areas, gazebos, and open lawn that allowed us to capture the essence of the series locations. For this shoot I kept my equipment to a minimum and brought my husband to assist with lighting, since light stands are not allowed.  I had my Cannon 80D, 18-200mm lens, trigger, speedlight, a painter’s pole, and a trash bag. For this session I used ISO 400, because I was mostly shooting in the woods with medium to heavy shade and it was an overcast day which further diffused the light. I used an aperture of F8, since I was group images and wanted to ensure both cosplayers were in focus throughout the image.  My shutter speed varied a lot from 1/40s to 1/1000s with the most prevalent shutter speed being 1/100s. My shutter speed varied due to where we...

Today I spent some time working on my Photoshop skills, by removing annoying backgrounds from photos and creating collages. I used the photos I took at Katsucon for this exercise since, I thought I took some nice portraits but the backgrounds were distracting and full of random people.  I created my own backgrounds for most of these pictures except in a few cases.  You can see some of the final results here:  http://munchkinphotos.smugmug.com/Portraits/Cosplay .  I also worked on creating some collages. I made two for my Munchkin Photos Facebook page cover photos. The most difficult part of the process was identifying which pictures to use and showcase the variety of my work. I also made one of compilation of images depicting the same lady cosplayer showing different expressions. This was a simpler collage since it was all the same person, though the sizing of the images was a bit challenging.  Overall I think the collages came out ok. I now plan on u...