Month: May 2012

Posted on

Better Cosplay Photos: Why Hallway Shooting?

Hallway shot from ACen 2012. Photo by OscarC Photography.

Last month I attended Anime Central (ACen), a large anime convention near Chicago. I didn’t have many shoots scheduled, so I spent most of the convention doing hallway cosplay shooting. Even though some cosplay photographers belittle hallway shooting as boring, I had a great time, and I got a lot of positive comments about my shots.

I don’t agree with the belief that hallway shooting is what novice photographers do before they graduate to “real” shoots. Certainly, hallway shooting does have a lot of disadvantages:

  • You can rarely get a clean background, and you pretty much never get a pretty background
  • Your lighting options are limited, usually to just an on-camera flash+diffuser.
  • Because you have maybe 30 seconds (at most!) of the cosplayer’s time, there’s almost no time to pose the cosplayer or to think about the shot.

However, from those disadvantages come practice in several important techniques:

Hallway shot from ACen 2012. Photo by OscarC Photography.
  • Shooting quickly. Cosplay photographers can become a bit lazy in this area, since cosplayers are almost never paid to model by the hour, and are usually very patient. Learning to shoot quickly is important when shooting paid models. It’s also important when shooting children’s birthday parties, wedding receptions, and other events where you, the photographer, need to capture the action without getting in the way.
  • Selecting and processing a large set of photos. Nothing like coming home with 1100 hallway shots to make you hone your photo selection skills, and nothing like having to process the 300 photos from that set to make you hone your speed-processing skills. Both skills are helpful for all photographers, but they become especially useful when you shoot other large events.
  • Experience shooting a wide variety of costumes. Just at ACen, I shot more different cosplays than I did in all my private shoots in the past 3 years.
  • Making new contacts. Shooting a lot of cosplayers helped me meet some new friends, and introduced a large number of people to my photography. Some of those people have already asked for private shoots. If you only shoot private shoots, you can end up in a bubble, isolated from the larger cosplay community.
Hallway shot from ACen 2012. Photo by OscarC Photography.

Because of all the skills you hone when doing hallway shooting, I strongly encourage even experienced cosplay photographers to hallway shoot at least one convention a year.

Here are some tips when doing hallway shooting:

  • Scope out the venue as early as you can, and be prepared. Some venues have low, white ceilings that are very conducive to bouncing a flash off, but most of the time you’re not so lucky. An on-camera flash with a diffuser or mini-softbox is usually required for decent-looking photos.
  • If you’re indoors shooting with a flash, shoot in M (manual) mode, with a setting that picks up some ambient. To do this, figure out what the camera thinks are the “right” settings, and then set them about two stops lower. For example, if your camera is metering 1/200th of a sec @f/2.8 at ISO 1600, you could shoot with those settings at ISO 400, making the background darker but not completely black. If you don’t like that look, play around with the settings until you find a flash/ambient mix you like.
Hallway shot from ACen 2012. Photo by OscarC Photography.
  • Don’t shoot in one spot for a long time. Move around the convention to find a nice variety of cosplays. (Don’t forget to update your camera settings if you move to a location with different lighting!)
  • Don’t carry around a lot of stuff. You will quickly get tired of carrying it, and it’s more things that could get misplaced or stolen while you’re shooting.
  • Have business cards ready to hand out. A common cosplayer complaint is, “A hundred photographers shot my costume, but I can’t find any of the photos!” By making your photos easy to find, the cosplayer will remember you and your photography, so you will have made a contact. There are many sites where you can order good quality business cards at a very reasonable price.
  • Post them as quickly as you can. Interest in hallway photos diminishes quickly after a convention.
  • To post photos quickly, you will need to process them quickly. A quick photo selection pass followed by 30 seconds of Lightroom tweaking is usually plenty.

Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that hallway photos will not look as good as private shoot photos; that’s not the goal here. Instead of spending 60 minutes trying to get near-perfect photos of one cosplayer, you’re going to spend that time trying to get good photos of 30 cosplayers. If you do that well, they still may be some of the best photos those cosplayers will have of their cosplays.

Posted on

Better Cosplay Photos: Before You Shoot

One of the most common myths about cosplay photography (and portrait photography in general) is that doing a shoot is as simple as running out the door with a camera, snapping some photos of a model, and posting the results. With today’s digital cameras, it certainly is possible to shoot that way, but doing so pretty much guarantees mediocre results. So what’s missing?

Bekalou as Youko from 12 Kingdoms. Photo by OscarC Photography.

The most obvious missing piece is post-processing. Almost every shot you take can be improved with a little (1-2 minutes) of post-processing. Pretty much every “WOW!” shot you’ve ever seen has been post-processed to some extent; posting photos straight off the camera is a sure road to average-looking photos.

Another missing piece is photo selection. Choosing what to post is key to making your photos look good. Not only does it hide your mistakes, it prevents your awesome photos from being drowned in a vast sea of mediocre and redundant shots.

However, both photo selection and post-processing occur after a shoot, so I will save them for another time. Just as important as those post-shoot tasks is pre-shoot planning, and that’s the topic for this post.

KittyCatChi as Catwoman. Photo by OscarC photography.

When planning a shoot, the first thing to choose is a location. It should be appropriate to the cosplay, of course, but you should also consider the location’s rules on photography, how crowded the location will be, and so on. (If you’re shooting at a convention, your choices for a location are more limited, but you can still decide where around con to shoot.)

Once you’ve selected the location, you should think from a shoot logistics point of view:

  • How much room will I have to shoot? In a large park, a 200mm lens works great; in a hotel room, a 24-105mm or similar wide lens works much better.
  • What kind of lighting will be available/allowed/possible? Will I need to bring my own? For outdoor shoots, will it be too windy for a soft box? Maybe it will be too windy for even for a reflector? For indoor shoots, can I bounce the flash off the ceiling? Are the normal room lights suitable? Is flash even allowed?
  • What time(s) would work best at that location? Noon on the beach usually isn’t good, unless it’s overcast. Midnight in a bad part of town also isn’t recommended.
  • When is the location too crowded? Does the location have special events that you want to avoid?
  • What’s the parking situation like? How much gear can I get to/from the shooting site?
  • How much background will I want visible in each shot? Do I want to pick up narrow slivers of background, or do I want wide-angle “everything around me” shots? (You can do both, as long as you’re willing to change lenses as needed, or if you are willing and able to juggle two camera bodies.)
  • When does the location close? How much time will I have to shoot there?
  • What style of shots do I want? Sunset photos with the city in the background? High-noon wild-west style? A completely blurred foliage background? etc.
WindoftheStars as Princess Serenity from Sailor Moon. Photo by OscarC Photography.

This info should also help you to pick a shooting time. Most cosplayers aren’t very aware of how time of day affects lighting (for outdoor shoots). You, as the photographer and lighting expert, need to work with them to pick a time that matches the style of shoot that they (and you) want to do. For example, if they request a park shoot at 1pm, you may want to ask if sometime closer to sunset might work better. Don’t forget to allow set up, prep, and warm up time. For example, if you want to do a sunset shoot, don’t meet up 5 minutes before sunset and expect to be able to get the shot.

Once you’ve picked a shooting location and time, determine what gear you will need. For example, if you have multiple lenses, which one(s) will work best for the shots you want? Occasionally swapping lenses isn’t a problem, but if you find yourself swapping your lens every few photos, you probably haven’t planned out your shoot well. Also, what lighting gear will you need? Will you need an assistant?

WrenTheFaceless as Albert Wesker from Resident Evil. Photo by OscarC Photography.

Being prepared for the unexpected is good. Extra batteries, memory cards, etc, are a must. Throwing in an extra lens or a piece of lighting gear “just in case” is good, but if you find yourself bringing lots and lots of stuff “just in case”, that usually means you haven’t thought through your shoot well enough. There’s a fine line between taking advantage of the unexpected and just plain making everything up as you go along.

Ideally, every cosplayer will come to each shoot with a set of character-appropriate poses all ready; in reality, many cosplayers will have no poses ready, or, at best, one or two. Be ready with posing suggestions, and the composition and lighting to go with them. If you wait until the shoot before you start thinking about poses, your best pose ideas will likely occur to you in the car as you’re driving home afterwards. (Don’t ask me how I know!)

Finally, make sure you’re in sync with the cosplayer. Do your ideas for the shoot match what they want? For example, if you show up ready to shoot dark and broody, and they want bright and cheerful, you have a problem. If the cosplayer doesn’t like what you have planned, work with them before the shoot to come up with something mutually agreeable. Also, exchange cell numbers ahead of time, so that you can reach each other if something comes up or if someone has a problem finding the meetup location.

Once you’ve completed the pre-shoot planning, you’re ready to shoot! The planning doesn’t stop when the shooting starts, though, so my next post will discuss at-shoot planning.