My final shoot at 2021 Wellington Cosplay Photofest was with Bianca who goes by @Happy_Cookie-Snapper. She had a number of possible costumes and we agreed that she would play Toshiro Hitsugaya from the Japanese anime series bleach. Given that anime cosplay allows people to be completely different characters it is not unusual to find them portraying characters of the opposite sex.

During our discussions we settled all the shit in Wellington Civic Square and the entrance to the Michael Fowler Centre as we could make these resemble the environment of Bleach. She she mentioned that to her her friends were also taking part in the car fest and they were playing characters from the same series and as such could we shoot it as a group. I was more than happy to do so.

After the incident of the armed police call out at a previous Photofest I was taking no chances that somebody would report us as the characters were carrying samurai swords. I called the police ahead of time and told them that we were doing a photoshoot. As the event ran over a long weekend I knew that the square would not be as busy as it would normally be on day.

When they arrived it turned out that the other two where Jasmine and Ruan had shot a couple years before at the very first Photofest. We shot around the top of the square and then moved down to the entrance of the centre.

Most of the shoot was done in natural light, however for the ones outside the centre I did position a speedlight behind to columns to ensure that the back two characters stood out.

Once I had selected the final images I used Nik Software to create a heavier contrast before delivering them.

I was very pleased when Bianca told me that they had ended up looking exactly how she had imagined and that they fitted the bleach world well.