Winter Wish Cosplay Galleries

was talking to a friend earlier tonight.

he was talking about consistency in a general sense.

let’s take batman and bruce wayne and throw in some ridiculous arguments here.

bruce wayne has his own facebook page. and whatnot. and of course batman has his.

their content is vastly different. bruce wayne is smiling all the time and posting his stuff and it’s completely public. batman is complete private, nothing is likeable, and everything is written in CAPS and dead serious.

bruce wayne never deletes anything, and is courteous and always adding people and being proactive. batman only adds when he wants to, posts when he wants to, and deletes stuff on impulse when he feels like because he’s batman and he doesn’t answer to anyone.

bruce wayne’s photo albums are consistent – they are always with other people and press shots or whatnot. batman’s hobby photography page is all convoluted with random photoshop filters. both are photography businesses. so when bruce wayne posts something people know what they’re going to get. batman they have literally no idea.

now let’s say people know bruce wayne and batman’s facebook accounts and they get told by one or the other “hey. I grouped you into this. so you only get this content.” but at some point they feel they don’t even know bruce/batman because they’re unable to see the batman profile and only hear stories or see the public bruce wayne profile and wonder why it’s so different. the content is vastly so different that they see this other side of the person which is a complete shocker either ways. bruce wayne doesn’t have to play PC all the time and batman doesn’t have to be private all the time because neither are real. granted they are still different in terms of their profiles but inherently should be somewhat similar.

so now when bruce wayne or batman asks for anything, people don’t even know what to do – because they’re being sent two completely different messages – because they don’t know who is real. now they begin to form opinions on what information they’re missing.

because bruce wayne doesn’t want to be batman, but to a degree he is batman. if you ask bruce wayne who is real, well they both are that’s not clear cut but not conveyed well. something he clearly needs to figure out.

and when bruce/batman starts losing friends/reputation/connections, it’s partially his own fault. because he’s making people go through mazes unintentionally. because it doesn’t have to be that way all the time. because batman is an extension of bruce wayne – not an alterego.

bruce wayne and batman should be consistent going forward as that was always the original plan and somewhere along the way the filtering went wrong due to too much “talking to ourselve”. and it will be going forward.

I had a great time at AOD 2012!

I mainly shot with primes and ambient light. tried to get natural bokeh and “sunkissed” shots.

http://winterwish.net/gallery3/index.php/2012

Enjoy! =)

I’ve been semi-inspired to post this for a while now. I know some of you have been satisfied and some have not (perfectly okay!). you fail in life sometimes and that’s how you learn. just apologize and move on. but I wanted to share how I do things so maybe everyone will have a better idea of how I shoot and such.

*I know there are a lot of cosplay photographers, but this is rather how I do things. so please don’t generalize.

Step 1: advertising/setting up
this typically happens 1.5 months before the con and continues til 2-3 days before. Basically I take a combination of public requests and also cosplayers I want to work with. There’s a lot of back and forth communication, social networking activity, and such. Things about location and time and special requests. Sometimes people re-schedule and you have to shuffle people around or let them go. I don’t make it a personal habit of re-scheduling a shoot unless I have a personal emergency or need to squeeze in lunchtime – I am there to shoot at a con 95% of the time.

Step 2: packing
this happens the week day before the shoot. checking all the equipment. and checking which backback/suitcase setups I want to go with. doesn’t seem like it would take long, but I would say it’s about 2 hours for me. It’s a somewhat stressful thing as the equipment is 4 digits worth + if you know what I mean.

Step 3:transportation
I usually drive there, and depending on the con, stay or park valet so 2 hours before I shoot I pack. then I have to do an quick equipment check before I leave the car.

Step 4: shoot shoot shoot!
so I try to get there earlier by an hour so I can scout around. After that I start shooting by calling/texting them and letting them know I have arrived. Sometimes people show up. sometimes people don’t. if they don’t I walk around and shoot someone else after 15 minutes by staying around in the general area if they call. I usually take a 30 minute lunch (or less) and am shooting 95% of the time. I spend 5% talking to con friends and some hall shots. this is usuall 6-10 hours a day depending on how many days I am going.
and if you think we don’t suffer physically we do. our backpacks are heavily. our cameras make our wrists scream. setting up over and over makes us tired. and all those shots where we’re bending over to get the perfect shots works your abs to no end. just how I imagine you’re sweating to death in your giant mascot plushie or dying in that miniskirt and 6 inch heels with full makeup and fake eyelashes. we all suffer =)

Step 5: editing – lightroom
I accumulate 50 shots per shoot on average. I usually average 400 shots a day (varies if there are action shots, then there’s a LOT more). after that I put the shots through a first round of culling (trimming out similar angles/over or under exposed/bad poses expresions). The second round is basically I have 2 good shots, but which one is BETTER? I delete the other one. After that I apply a round of global general edits to all photos, followed by specific style edits (b/w, desaturation, etc). this has been known to take up 8 hours or so. About 15-30% of the shots survive this process.

step 6: photoshop magic
this is where I go and remove dark circles, large pores, background people, or any kind of major flaws for a select few pictures. there’s also a few special shots I want to revisit to enhance with creative edits averaging 5-10 min per picture this takes up to 2-3 hours.

for the special shoots I send out the edits for approval to the shoots which it was a 50/50 collaboration for approval. upon approval and re-edits if needed I post those at a later date. there’s a little bit of back and forth here but that’s natural.

step 7: posting/social networking
so I now produce full and web size JPGs. I upload the mass of them to my website. then select ones go on facebook/deviant. links are then posted on my facebook/twitter/website. this is about an hour of work

step 8: backing it up
I power up my 5 hard drives. yes 5 externals. and put the JPG and RAWs on them. I file away my model releases. may take up to another hour.

step 9: double checking
at this point I check on my sites everything is working because I am a perfectionist.

At this point I am exhausted and go to sleep or play a videogame to relax because odds I drove to a con, shot for 6 hours, came back and spent 5-6 hours finishing it. and I probably haven’t had dinner yet.

so yep that is what goes into my process. A lot of effort and love into my photos =)

Hi everyone,

thanks everyone so much for bearing with me and hopefully being educated on SOPA! as a web developer my passion is for web (aside from cosplay photography) and I felt I had to do something.

Hope to see everyone at AOD!

As the title denotates, there’s a few changes.

As for cons, fanime is planned every year for sat and sun(depending on situation). AOD and other local cons are a possiblity depending on time. AOD this year is a go.
I’d love to go to the other cons but they are all in LA and I have better use for 3-4 vacation days (like actual places… cough china cough)

to be honest, cons aren’t as fun as they used to be – maybe it’s because I’m getting “older” or the people I used to work and collaborate we don’t do much work together anymore. but in any case, I’m having a lot of fun working with the new cosplayers I’ve met last year!

that being said, I just feel life should follow a natural progressing, and cons are pretty winding down for me unless there’s incentive like a good friend coming along.

I’m still really invested in private photoshoots as that’s what winter wish photography is all about.

thanks for reading.