Of course, Madara had previously shot Nadleeh’s Saber Lily at this same location (if you didn’t know/see, you need to brush up on your stalking skills), but I brought along my own interpretation for this shoot. My vision was for something dark and grungy and desaturated to suit the location, but with controlled light on the cosplayers to make them stand out from the background.

While I did achieve some pretty good lighting on the cosplayers, the “controlled” part couldn’t be done due to limitations on where I could place my lights, as well as insufficient power on the part of the battery-operated studio light I used to be able to provide good illumination over the distances involved, and still allow the use of a grid. Thus, there was more splash than I would have ideally liked. I used selective burning to reduce the impact that the splash had on my images.

The more observant will also note quite a bit of abrupt vignetting around the corners of a few of the images. While I have deliberately left them in since they work, they were also generated in camera due to the lens filter I had on.

Key light was a beauty dish powered by a pack and head strobe (which I will be phasing out soon in favour of my AlienBee units – as soon as I get the battery pack for the ABs) for ambient-controlling power, fill was a bare bulb YN-560II (first time using those units for the shoot, and gosh darn their notification beep is LOUD) and a big reflector clamped to whichever light stand is positioned in the right place.

As I mentioned, because of the terrain of the ruins (holes, rugged ground, tall grass, wild Pokemon, etc), there were limited places where I could put my lights. We somehow managed, but for some of the later shots, there were ravines between me and the cosplayers, and the lights were also positioned rather farther away than I would have liked. Towards the end of the shoot, my pack and head strobe also managed to run out of batteries, so I finished off by using my second YN-560II, sans beauty dish.

In terms of my lens choice, it was really my wide zoom that got the most action at decent apertures like f/5.6 (the day would have called for f/8-11 but for my ND filter) – while I could have chosen to bring an 80-200mm to deal with distances, the longest I used was my 50mm lens when the cosplayers were father away. I chose to shoot wide because I did want to get the scale of the place in the photos, for a sense of the size of the ruins.

[related gallery]

Philosophy

I always edit my photos. I shoot raws, and then I use the digital darkroom workflows to edit them. I use Lightroom primarily, then Photoshop for the stuff that Lightroom doesn’t do. My philosophy is that a photograph isn’t complete until it has been developed. Certainly the shooting process is very important, and it’s very important to get as much of the photo “right” straight out of camera as possible. But at the same time, I believe the creative vision of the photographer does not start and end with the shoot itself, but rather extends into the post processing, just as how the old masters used darkroom techniques to complete their works.

With that in consideration, I may or may not start with a particular “look” in mind as the end result. When I am shooting, I tend to shoot and light in order to achieve the foundation for that look. This foundation may be visually similar to the goal, but it’s always shot with post-processing in mind.

The important thing for me when shooting is to have that foundation in mind, set up everything for that, and then focus on the cosplayers, their poses, where they are positioned, expressions, etc.

Service

The main service I provide for cosplayers is a photoshoot and around 20 resulting photos that they may then take and edit further if so desired. That is, I do not go into a shoot expecting a final yield of just 1 or 2 photos. The gallery at pireze.net is not my portfolio as such, but rather was originally created as a place where cosplayers could view and pick up the photos from a shoot. Most of the time, if pushed, yes, I can pick just one photo from a shoot, but I think 20 curated and edited shots provides a reasonable amount of choice for the cosplayers.

The scope of editing reflects what I personally feel suits the cosplay and many cosplayers like the way I edit, but of course, raws are always an available option. I really ask two things when handing over raws:

1) Understand that they were shot with post processing in mind; directly converting them to JPGs will not do them justice.

2) Do not misuse the powers of editing.

Time, effort and skill

I work full time, so I don’t tend to have a heap of time. Given the volume of photos I deliver per shoot, and the current processes I undertake (10 to 30 minutes per photos, depending on how much stuff needs to be edited), I do have to limit the amount of work I put into each photo.

Also, while I have a good grasp of the basic and intermediate methods and I keep learning new things, I am not a retouching professional. I would rather leave things alone than go at it with an amateurish approach, so for certain edits, I will not even attempt them.

So I do try as much as possible to limit the amount of work I have to do in post processing, which is why I will be rearranging things, getting rid of rubbish in the background, etc. It is also why I won’t be very happy if someone rocks up to a shoot and says, “OK, [a certain aspect of what is being shot] is totally inaccurate, but it’s OK we’ll shop it afterwards.” Stuff like the wrong coloured hair, clothing, etc, may seem like easy Photoshop edits, but they add hours to post-processing (if you are aiming for a not-horrible result) and tend to get really frustrating.

Things I do

Cropping, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, colours, noise, sharpening, clarity, white balance, etc: I use everything I possibly can in Lightroom’s Develop module.

Blemish and eye bag removal, skin smoothing: the most common and basic edits in Photoshop.

Dodge and burn: only needed sometimes – I prefer to bring out contours by use of lighting during the shoot, and it’s not my style to use this to make my pictures “hyper-real”.

Background distractions removal: only if they are small and not a total pain to do.

Things I might do

Liquify or warp: only if the photo will be saved by using this technique, and usually never on faces. I said liquify, but I can’t liquify my way out of a paper bag; I use an alternative technique which gives me more control.

Change eye colour: this is a pain to do but doable.

Things I do not do

Liquify or warp faces, change features on people: I do not have insight into what the cosplayers want when it comes to editing their facial/bodily/etc features. This is left to the cosplayer if they wish to do so.

Massive edits like special effects, cutting people out from backgrounds and dumping them against something else, etc: too much of a pain, to be honest. I am not good enough at CGI and manipulation wizardry to undertake these efforts without the result looking crap after I have spent hours on it. Also, I am a photographer, not a CG artist. If I were the latter, I wouldn’t be shooting on location; I’d just set up a green screen and do everything else in the computer.

Madara makes a great Sakura, and she’s putting a lot of effort into her costumes and shoots – we’ve already lined up a number of exciting shoots and concepts which will be executed over the next month or so.

In this post, I’ll outline two shoots we’ve done for the photobook, and of course, the galleries are limited in the numbers of photos uploaded. For the best of the best, you’ll have to get a copy of the photobook.

In addition, there will be a secret section of my pireze.net gallery which will be accessible only via a URL and password found in the photobook. These will provide additional photos from the shoots and maybe some out-takes.

Park shoot

We did a shoot at a small park together with Takuya as Tomoyo. The location itself should be quite well-known to Sydney-siders but it’s the first time I have used it for a cosplay shoot (I did shoot my sister’s engagement photos here though). The day was quite overcast, so nice even light. We gave a bit of pop to the cosplayers via the use of a reflector and small beauty dish.

Stand against the darkness

This night shoot was done with a new (experimental) set up. Warning, technical words ahead.

If you know my dominant style, you will know that I have an intense bias for flashes, particularly cheap speed light type units. I favour them due to their power, portability and to a degree, expendability (I use units which cost around 60 dollars each). I have learned to visualise light without a WYSIWYG approach.

But at the same time, I am also aware of certain trends, such as the deployment of LED constant light panels by particularly Chinese photographers and cosplayers for lighting at night. These light panels, usually utilised for videography, provide a way of visualising light exactly as it will appear on the faces of cosplayers, and can be quite strong.

However, I have resisted this trend for a number of reasons:

1. There is no real choice for modifying the light. It is shone directly on the subject, or nothing. Yes, the LEDs are bright, but they’re not bright enough to take modifiers (which invariably reduce the efficiency of the light source in shaping it to something more flattering).
2. Colour temperature problems. It’s near-impossible to configure the camera’s white balance to make the light look good, and if you get that close to normal, ambient goes weird. Gelling with normal flash-size gels is generally impossible due to the size of the panels, and the cheap plastic colour filters they come with are worthless.

My setup

Even with LED light panels being a distinctly undesirable option for me, I was still interested in the possible use of constant lights for a shoot, if only as a proof of concept. Thus, I got myself a LED torch, a 5000 lumen monster utilising Cree LED chips with a fairly fixed white balance (though still not entirely satisfactory).

The high brightness LED torch allowed me to attach it to a standard light stand via the use of a Super Clamp, and diffuse and modify the light through the use of a CTO gel and a silver umbrella (better efficiency compared to white).

Even with this arrangement, the light loss was severe enough that:

• I had to position the constant light umbrella setup fairly close to Madara for effective lighting, which creates limitations when composing wider shots.
• I was finding the f/1.4 aperture on the 50mm functionally useful (as opposed to merely aesthetically pleasing, though it is that too) and dreading having to use f/2.8 on my zoom.
• I was using the high ISO functionality on my D700. Whoa!

Additional limitations include the white balance, which while less horrendous than panel arrays, and partially corrected with the gel, was still rather greenish. However, this could be corrected in post and did not screw up the ambient light temperatures (which were orange anyway since the area was lit by sodium lights – the orange gel allowed the neutralisation of this).

Advantages included being able to see how the light wrapped around the face in real time (as well as catch-lights in the eyes), and adjusting to the ideal. Also, the weaker light source falls off much quicker, so we didn’t have the problems with spills that one normally gets with using umbrellas. Additionally, the weak light was easier to balance with ambient lighting (which is fairly dim anyway). It was certainly very different to shooting with a “magical moment” of the flash in mind.

I should mention I used a green-gelled barebulb flash (green to balance out the fluorescent-like tint of the LEDs, but not gelled with orange, because I wanted a difference in colour temperature) to provide hair/separation light and a degree of fill. Yes, I am still a flash creature even when I am using continuous.

tl;dr: I used a bright continuous light source diffused with a bounce silver umbrella but it has some limitations, particularly in composition options so I may or may not be using it again.

Anyway, check out the limited galleries below:

[Card Captor Sakura Park shoot]

[Card Captor Sakura Night shoot]

P.S.

The Winery is fairly well-known (though perhaps less so than the Tram Sheds or the Warehouse) and has been used for quite a number of photo shoots. It had many points of interest, but for me personally, the underground spiral stairs were the big draw. Too bad though, sometimes you leave them for long enough and they go away. So here it is, the last hurrah of a once-great location.

We noted how a lot of the old structures were just knocked down, then new walls and bricks were put up in exactly the same configuration. It also looked like they were retaining some of the old building parts to be incorporated into the new. Residential apartments were built on the side, and I believe the main area seen above is being built into an underground carpark, with more residential space above.

The juxtaposition between the old and the new is pretty jarring, but much of the original charm of the Winery is now gone.

We trudged around for a bit, and I took a few more pictures before leaving the site to visit Location #77. We’ll probably never come here again.

Location #77

This extensive complex provides a wealth of different looks, ranging from the classical architectural ruins, to grafitti and haunted house, to the European grassland/forest and deep forest type location.

The last time I came here, the abandoned house was still accessible: it is still there but has since been fenced up securely.

This part is said to be haunted, and well, it looks the part. It’s secured though, and inaccessible without some heavier handed action. Lighting information: handheld torch.

This structure is fairly famous, but I managed to find it after missing it the last time I was here! Next to it is some kind of abandoned greenhouse (sans any of the original walls).

I have been dreaming about being able to step into this building for so long, and now at last I have done so. My only regret was not having a wider lens with which to document this, but it’s nice, overgrown, decaying, with architectural features from almost the colonial era

[Google+ gallery]

Of course, large groups require a few more lights, and at last count, I had 4 lights going, one through an umbrella softbox, another positioned high on a beauty dish, another on a silver umbrella, and yet another behind a large wood-frame scrim. An additional fill light at the bottom was provided by a foam board.

The problem with lighting a studio shoot, especially with multiple photographers, is that of the refresh rates of the flashes. Naturally, some flashes recharge faster than others, especially given the power differentials required for the different parts of the setup. So if we do not wait enough time for all the flashes to be ready, we end up lighting with, for example, the key light missing.

(Note the nano-type light stand clamped on to the boom on the heavy-duty light stand)

Another problem that cropped up was battery life – even with my standard complement of spare batteries (nothing to sniff at, I have three sets of four spare AAs in my bag), it was deemed insufficient for three photographers to use at the same time (three photographers = a third of the normally available battery life) and still have enough to complete the shoot.

Sean and I judged this situation and rested our shutters for the second half of the shoot – it was more important for one photographer (Straw) to get a variety of shots and poses, rather than facsimiles of the same shots from slightly different angles. Simply put, in studio shoots, there are a very limited number of “correct” angles to shoot from. Deviate too much, and the lighting setup stops working optimally.

Given the problems encountered with battery life and refresh rates with this shoot, I have now invested in the relatively cheap Paul C Buff Alienbees (B800) studio flashes which can be plugged in to mains (or alternatively powered portably with a lithium battery pack, which I will buy later). These will be used in future studio shoots where there is access to power, with normal flash guns to provide fill at lower power settings.

Not too many photos uploaded to the gallery for this shoot at the request of the cosplayers. Gotta buy their ROM/book to get the full experience!

[related gallery]

This Inu x Boku SS shoot with Shirley and Bella was done at a house in Strathfield, courtesy of Shirley’s friend, who kindly allowed us to use her abode. It was my first shoot with these cosplayers, who I have seen around cons and also on Facebook and it was an interesting shoot, trying to make full use of the environment we were presented with (since I’ve never actually been to the house). In the end, I decided that the best lighting would be, once again, the natural look, supplementing ambient with my lights bounced off various surfaces, and using umbrella softboxes as needed.

Thanks to Shirley and Bella for a great shoot! Hope to work with you guys again in the future!

[related gallery]

In fact, the Sigma announcement and release of the 19mm and 30mm lenses were greeted with pretty much a “meh” by most Sony enthusiasts, and barely registered as a blip in the camera news world, and for me the 19mm is less a toy and more a necessary evil or tool. In any case, I used it during the weekend for a very challenging shoot (and the caveats with the lens did not help) which I may or may not post about since we got some results but perhaps not many enough to warrant a post. Today, I decided to do a scout of Location #111 on my list, while bringing along only my Sony NEX-5 and the Sigma 19mm as a way to test the real-world capabilities of this lens.

The photos in this post are post-processed to bring out the feel of the location, and are not meant to be a true illustration of the capabilities of the Sigma 19mm. However, I will talk about my experiences with this particular lens, while showing what Location #111 offers.

Physical attributes

The Sigma 19mm has an entirely plastic body with a small front glass element. It’s light, and the focus ring is wide, but not rubberised, and rather too easy to nudge in my opinion (especially given it has full-time manual focus override). It takes 46mm filters.

There is some clunking sound when the lens is shaken or agitated. This is not unusual for a lens but it does seem to be a bit more easy to elicit noise out of it than most lenses – you simply have to tilt it.

7 aperture blades are visible within the lens.

Performance

The first thing I realised when I started using the Sigma 19mm is that it is slow to focus on the NEX-5. I’m not sure if that is because the NEX-5 is two generations back, but it takes a bit of time to get the lens working, so it introduces lag into startup times, switching from image playback to shooting screen, etc. Focus can also be rather slow – the contrast AF that the NEX-5 uses does not help matters but the camera does seem to hunt a bit more than normal. Overall, the performance is rather slow. This is not a problem when shooting landscapes and places normally, but for faster action it is a problem.

Additionally, shooting wide open at f/2.8, this lens is soft. It’s not like you can’t pull back the sharpness in post (and I have done so in the pictures here), but the raw performance isn’t really there. It’s not as bad as the 16mm but for someone who has used higher grade equipment the lack of detail in the raw images is noticeable. At around f/4 the sharpness becomes acceptable.

While Sigma has quite a reputation for their bokeh, of course at 19mm and with 7 aperture blades and f/2.8, the bokeh isn’t much to write home about. If you focus on a close-enough subject at f/2.8 the bokeh is fairly smooth but still pretty distracting.

On Location #111

This is a recuperated industrial site which has been transformed into a park. Much of it is still inaccessible, though there are ways of sneaking around the various defence mechanisms. Good for industrial/ruins, with the key feature being the long tunnel, which is lit by sodium lamps. Of the four possible tunnels, only one is accessible: the other three have not been properly worked on and are sealed with fences.

[Facebook gallery]

In attendance: harmony (cosplayer), Ray (photographer), Straw (photographer, videographer and makeup), Zuzumoo (makeup and lights)

This was in fact three shoots in one – the first being a “normal” shoot with Tomie sitting in a chair, a typical portrait type session, but I also wanted to establish a starting mood with subdued colours and dark-ish lighting, especially feathering the light to darken the background. We used the hotel for this.

The second shot stipulated by harmony was for a candid type photo but with an abnormal head growing out of it – you should look up Tomie if you want to know the reasons for this, but it’s basically a Photoshop job. Unfortunately I’m not that good at Photoshop and my efforts only yielded one barely-useable photo of the kind. I grunged it up with an Old Photo Texture from flickr’s ‘Playingwithbrushes’. Zuzumoo has offered to do some of the post work so when she does that we might see something much better than mine.

The above is one of the plate pictures destined to be used for the second head.

The final shot required heavy make-up augmentation with wax and fake blood to create the scars on Tomie’s face which is normally what happens when people take a knife to you.

Keep in mind we’re at a school. I think drugs, especially those involving syringes, are BAD. BAD STRAW.

The behind-the-scenes photos above were just taken with the lights randomly strew around, actually turns out quite nice, especially when a hipster post-process is used.

We spent a lot of time doing this last part of the shoot, especially as the light was falling with the approach of dusk. We found a creepy stairwell and corridor in the school to use, and in fact we did a shot where Tomie is laying at the bottom of a stairwell with limbs in weird position looking like she had just fallen and was dead. We hear a bang of a door slamming on the top floor of the building then a woman coming down the stairs. The first thing she saw when she turned the corner was harmony there with her gory makeup and blood and disjointed limbs. Needless to say she was spooked.

Technicals

I was making a conscious decision to use my 50mm lens on this shoot – it made sense given the time that Tomie is set in (thinking film eras here). I also sought to limit the depth of field because horror is almost always about what is hidden rather than what is shown. We were using predominantly two light sources – one umbrella softbox, another harder light. Of course, the hard light was used to accentuate shadows, once again to hide things.

Straw was also doing some videography, so we switched to a constant light when night fell – my LED torch. It offers very limited control of the light, but is bright enough for ISO 800. Torchlight also has a very horror-like feel given its limited coverage and rapid fall-off – you could shine it on various parts of the subject to stimulate finding something horrifying in the dark.

In fact some of the video that straw did was enough to induce an…uh…exclamation from Ray – apparently he is a bit susceptible to horror stuff.

[related gallery]

The other specification was for relatively soft lighting for the characters, so I brought my umbrella softbox thing (my second lighting modifier, long thought lost, but found once again in some cupboard).

We went to a garden near the Sydney CBD for this (not Botanic Gardens or Hyde Park) to do this. Both Alan (the other photographer invited to shoot) and I were sick, so it was a lot of fun lugging around all our gear. Still, I think we got some pretty good ones.

I am just uploading a few from the shoot this time round because once again, they’re doing a photobook, so there’s no point in revealing all the shots.

[related gallery]

But at the same time, these low fidelity shots have something going for them. They are fleeting moments of enough beauty or urgency for me to take out my phone. My favourites are those which utilise reflections, where one image may be superimposed on another (I don’t do multi-exposures, so these are all “found” reflections”, or where my sense of lines inspires me to take the shot.

Some photos are mundane, some are beautiful, and some document my life as it happened: get-togethers with friends, being bored, doing shoots and workshops, and going to new places. From the dates of the images captured, the 43 images span a year of my life, from 13 February 2011 to 26 March 2012.

In post-processing, I tried to enhance the sharpness and clarity of these photos. Keeping with the hipster aesthetic, I applied considerable latitude in terms of colour processing, and of course, cropped to square.

[Facebook gallery]