Each February there is a weekend event organised called the Wellington Cosplay Photo Fest.  Photographers and cosplayers from around New Zealand and Australia into the interest in attending the event a couple of months before. The organiser then matched photographers with cosplayers so that each photographer started off with two assignments. Once you have your allocation you arrange shoot times. You are also free to organise other shoots once you have completed your allocation. 

2023 was the fourth year that the event had run and that I had taken apart. The 2022 festival was one of many that ended up being cancelled due to Covid so people will really looking forward to the this year’s event.

As the event coincided with a really busy time for me I only elected to photograph the two cosplayers that I have been assigned. I booked both shoots for the same day. I also decided that I would choose locations fairly close to each other to minimise travelling.

My first shoot was with Ann-Marie who was cosplaying a character from Japanese anime. The Japanese anime seems to be very popular especially with female cosplayers.

For the shoot I wanted something dramatic as a background so we chose the Massey Memorial, which is at the southern tip of the Miramar Peninsula. This is actually the mausoleum of the former Prime Minister of New Zealand William Massey and his wife. It is constructed a white marble and is quite impressive.

We started with some basic shots of Ann-Marie with the city in the background before then moving to a more complicated set up that I had in mind. 

The rear of the memorial has a large curved wall with gaps in it.  I thought this would be great to use in a composite by shooting Ann-Marie separately in each of the gaps and then bringing it together. 

To achieve this the camera was placed on a tripod as this made merging the shots much easier later on. When we were shooting in daylight I wanted to have a pop obliged on Ann-Marie so I had a speed light in a small soft box.  Ann-Marie had brought a friend to the shoot to help her with her costume and so she ended up being my portable light stand. 

The images came out great and It was a simple matter of putting them into Photoshop and then using masking to create the image that I wanted. 

I started the shoot using Aperture Priority with setting between f6 and f6.3. For the composite image I used f10 as I needed a decent depth of field given the curve in the structure. After I shot this, the camera struggled to give me the desired exposure. I switched to manual mode and used flash to highlight Ann-Marie against the background. 

I shot from different angles so that the images did not look all the same. I had also shot sequences of Ann-Marie with the sword and so I created composite with these as well.

By chance while I was processing the images I came across a YouTube Club on how to create cartoons from images. Japanese anime started in comics I thought this was quite appropriate so I produced an image that she really liked.