The first of these pictures date back to 2009. As with everything else in my photography history, I never really searched out the opportunity to do these shoots; they kind of just happened. Fast forward 4 years later and I find that cosplays have become my most often photographed subject and many of the shoots still remain impromptu events.

There are 266 cosplay characters shown here. There are a few shoots which I didn’t include because they were either of people that I didn’t know that well (i.e. just did the shoot as a favour to a friend) or I was not the main photographer. There are also some costumes that I didn’t include because they were re-shoots of the cosplayer wearing the same costume. At the same time, there’s also some photos here which weren’t from a pre-planned shoot which I just didn’t want to leave out.

I wanted to do a bit of a school photo style compilation but with the varying poses and angles often peppering the eclectic style in cosplay, I soon found it a very difficult task to find shots where the person was faced full forward. In the end, I settled for just having them at least staring right at the lens. I also thought about either grouping the shots for each cosplayer so they can see their progression over time or grouping the same characters (I’ve shot quite a few Mikus and Wakos) but I think showing it in chronological order makes more sense.

I just want to thank all of the cosplayers that I have met and have become friends with over the years. You are all awesome!

Click image below and expand to full view.

For a moment I didn’t think this shoot was going to happen but finally we’ve been able to do an Avatar: Legend of Korra shoot with a fantastic team that I’ve always loved working with. Now what made this shoot exciting wasn’t exactly the cosplays themselves; heck besides Mel’s glowing steampunk gauntlet, most of the costumes weren’t super extravagant. No, what made it interesting was the decision to not overly rely on post processing to come up with the effects but to actually do them for real.

I had thought that water effects shouldn’t be too complicated; just throw buckets around, I thought. But when it came time to take photos of it I realised we needed to take into account the volume of the body of water being thrown, how close we can get it to the cosplayer to make it look like they’re controlling it (without soaking them in the process) and the background lighting/surfaces (anything bright just washes out the transparency and the angle of incoming light just had to be right to make sure the water’s rim is lit up well). So yes, there were many takes to get this right resulting in muddy ground afterwards!

But if water was a challenge, fire was downright dangerous. Commonly you’ll find in the internet people lighting up canisters of hairspray; bad idea as they are pressurised and will explode. So after a few more research, we stumbled on the idea of a small birthday candle near the nozzle of a squirt bottle – filled with alcohol. It’s a one shot system instead of the continuous fire with hairspray but it was far safer with less risk of the fire snaking its way into the alcohol which also evaporates quickly. That said during the testing we conducted a couple of months ago, some hair was sacrificed; my fault completely and really emphasized for me, more than anything, the need for safe practices.

Not covered in the current releases are earth and air bending powers. We didn’t really focus on air and any releases on that with the standard poses we took will more likely rely more heavily on post processing effects. We did briefly touch up on earth (our own interpretation of sorts) and the results were actually suprisingly pretty good. Above everything else, the live nature of all these attempts at effects yielded works with more emphasis on action – something I’ve always really wanted to do more of.

Being able to work with a dynamic show with lots of possibilities was excellent. Shooting some of the best cosplayers around was even better. But the icing on the cake was the location we stumbled on. When the group came up to me originally, they described to me the world of Korra as being a bit industrial and maybe a bit crumbling. There were a lot of less than wholesome locations all around Melbourne that could have suited this but there was always the problem of all of them being too far. I had actually rejected going to places where there was security presence but in the process of going to a place which was practically public land, we found this unassuming shed which was ultimately perfect for what we needed.

Most of my shoots have always been fun; I almost always take shoot opportunities when I know I’m going with people I’ll have fun with even if we have to make our own fun in the process. Experimentation and discovery really do add to this element of enjoyment and I’ve loved working with people who felt the same!

Manifest was a couple of weekends ago now and my report for Anime News Network AU has since been published so if you want to read up on our experiences and impressions click here now. The purpose of this blog post though is more to focus on the idea of convention photography and how it has evolved for me.

I think it’s fair to say that convention and cosplay photography constitute a big chunk of the work I do. Rummaging through my collection of convention passes, it dawned on me that I’ve been attending cons for almost a decade! That said, it’s only been in the past 4 years that I can say I’ve been doing cosplay photo shoots. Prior to this, I’ve been taking photos purely for the love of the series.

It was a case of, “Omg, you’re from Naruto and your costume looks cool! Can I please take your photo?” For a good majority of people going to conventions today, this is still the top reason why you’d ask a cosplayer to stop in their tracks and take a few snaps. That’s how it started. After a while human tendency to collect sets start to take over and you think, “wouldn’t it be cool if I can take a picture of Naruto with Sasuke and Sakura?” Pretty soon you just gotta catch ‘em all!

Cosplay meets provided people the opportunity to cosplay outside of conventions. I was probably part of the crowd before they were just cosplay meets and were more general anime fandom gatherings. In these more intimate outings people no longer just kept the photos for their own collection. Initially the line between cosplayer and photographer wasn’t clear. Everyone had a camera and everyone cosplayed in some form or another.

That all changed once the cosplayers dared to be more adventurous with their creations. The costumes became more complex, took longer to make and definitely cost more money. It was inevitable then that they would like their creations to be preserved in perpetuity and photography was the easy solution. Anyone with an SLR became a cosplayer’s best friend.

From my experience, I began to not just take pictures of cosplayers; it became a goal to take good photos of cosplayers. You ramped your efforts up, you tried more gear and you studied up on more techniques that are appropriate for each shoot. Eventually you’ve amassed enough experience and produced results that instead of you asking a random cosplayer in the middle of a convention for their photo, it is the cosplayers that approached you to do a shoot with them. The cosplay photographer is born!

I can’t say that I take pictures of random cosplayers in conventions anymore apart from ones that I deem useful for the articles I write for ANN. But the need in me to keep collecting still remains though these days it’s more to do with pushing the boundaries of my photography. It’s become about trying techniques that I haven’t done yet. It’s about doing shoots with popular cosplayers you’ve never worked with before. If we’re talking about fun here, cosplay photography is immense fun because it is practically a video game. I guess the only question is, when can you say that you’ve won the game.

I’m a person that’s all about salvaging something out of any situation, no matter how wrong it might have turned out. There are always moments when you’ll need to give up but it’s a satisfying experience when you actually create something that in technical terms was a failure to begin with.

The photo below is from a Star Driver shoot (my fourth one, if memory serves me correctly) a few months ago. I had three flashes set up; key light is on the front right corner, fill light on the front left and one flash in the back right pointing parallel to them for rim lighting and illuminate the fog. As (bad) luck would have it of course, the key light kept misfiring all day (and I was down to my last set of batteries). Click here for the original result.

To be honest, though the original photo was technically a mistake, I actually liked it as it was anyway. So I had a choice, upload it as it was or try to see what I can achieve with image editing. After I realised that I can bring out more detail from the shadows and end up with this more dramatic rather than just foreboding shot like the original was, I didn’t look back.

I’m definitely guilty of over-editing photos (which I never end up releasing) but maybe in the end I can’t be blamed for doing so when it can yield results that end up mesmerising me.