Delirium's Edge Designs - First Cosplay Shoots 2012

If I had to thank anyone for helping me get into cosplay photography it would be Bronwen Robbins who owns Delirium's Edge Designs. We both entered into the same graduate program at NBCCD last year and her dream was to create a company to design costumes. For me photographing cosplay has always been a dream of my own, so it seemed to work out well for the both of us. These were all done in a studio environment, since that time I've lost access to that area having graduated college, and I now focus on location shoots. That being said the techniques I developed doing this and also straight portrait work translated well into what has become my "style" so to speak. In reality it started before that in my photo artwork, I just found a way to translate into a more simple format.

What is this style you ask? Well the answer lies in one word really, colours. Mainly colours on my lights. I use photographic gels a lot in my work, mainly just to spice things up, but also to help represent the characters a little more. This technique is mainly used solely where the background is concerned, the main light source remains white.

Continuing on about the background, in the studio I didn't run into to many problems with backgrounds, but as I developed location techniques and the fact that I lacked a proper backdrop I found myself editing a lot more. However there were times due to the smaller size of the studio that I needed to do some subtractive editing. I had no idea how helpful that would be at the time.

Here's an example of some of the editing work I put into each of her images. Some took less and some took more, but I love this shot so much.

Most of what I did was in cropping and lighting adjustments but as you can see, light stand needed to be removed and I softened and cleaned up the skin a little. For the longest time I was against skin adjustments, but through doing model work learned how it can really enhance your photo to a professional look. I primarily use Lightroom to do my lighting adjustments, cropping and skin softening and then Photoshop for any removals and fixes as well as additives. That's the system that works best for me, but I've heard of other ways that people like to work and none of them are really wrong, just different ways of doing things.

That's really all I have to say about this, my next post will be a complete archive of both the shoots I did for Bronwen just so you can experience the monumental amount of work based on the above image. Hopefully this has been interesting for you, I welcome any questions or comments.

Also check out Bronwen's site 

http://deliriumsedgedesigns.weebly.com/

-Larry M. Holder