Hi everyone! As you may already know, I’ve recently started learning photography and I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s funny because, seeing how the photographers I know work, I thought It was going to be very difficult, but on the contrary, I discovered that taking decent pictures is not as complicated as I initially thought. Handling the camera is something pretty simple and, thanks to the edition software, we are able to make intriguing pictures with limited equipment.
Obviously, I’m not a professional photographer and I’m not even trying to. I just want to be a little more independent when it comes to have cosplay pictures.
In this section, I’m going to guide you trough the things I’ve studied and the things I’m learning to help you try yourself in case you’re afraid or don’t know how to start taking your own pictures. I’m just gonna leave here some short explanations to introduce you to this hobby and show you the tools I usually use.
Before starting, I want to talk about my photography equipment. I own a DSLR Nikon D5100 camera with a 18-55mm (regular) and a 55-200mm lens (zoom lens). I also have a big 5 in 1 reflector. The edition software I use is Lightroom 4.4 and Photoshop CS5. With this humble equipment, I got to take and edit pictures like these:
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| Before and after. |
There’s no need to have heavy equipment to take appealing pictures. Right now we even have a variety of amazing compact cameras that are great to take good pictures. Maybe, the most important difference between compact and DSLR cameras is their sensor, that is bigger in this ones and, consequently, takes better quality pictures (don’t confuse between quality and megapixels). Also, DSLR cameras offer the possibility to take RAW format pictures, that keeps more information than other formats and lets us modificate picture parameters later when we edit our pics. *
The first thing I looked for in google before start learning was “what is a good picture?” I don’t know you, but I always hear “this picture is good” here, “this picture is bad” there, “this is wrong”, “this is right”. Well, I surprisingly discovered that the most used definition for a good picture is: a picture that tells a story, that evokes a feeling, an emotion, an image with meaning that promotes a reaction. Wow! That’s quite deep! The message in photography is more important than I thought. Technical fetures such as exposure, white balance, focus or composition (we’ll see them later) are overriding, but are linked to all of the above and work as fundamental resources when it comes to transmit what we want to.
Cosplay photography has a really special character as it’s a mixture between fashion photography and fantasy photography. In one hand, we want to show our work as costume makers; but, in the other, we want to move our creations to fantasy worlds to evoke the essence of the game, anime, book or whatever we’re cosplayig from. It doesn’t matter if we look for beautiful locations or if we want to make a photomontage. It’s complicated as there is a thin line between both styles. I personally like it when the cosplay picture is 50% fashion and 50% crazy interdimensional fantasy (although this balance is hard to achieve, hehehe).
To take a picture in manual mode, that is the interesting one, the basic thing you must know is how a DSLR camera works (diaphragm, sensor, shutter) and how to manage its valors to take the picture you want. With this, a good focus and white balance, we meet the requirements to take a decent picture.
(I’m sorry, guys, but I learnt watching this photography lessons in spanish by Guillermo Flores. I’m sure if you search on youtube “basic photography” or “photography for beginners” you’ll find lessons in english. You can try and look for the terms I used here such as “exposure”, “manual mode”, “shutter”… and knowledge will come to you.)
Well, guess you have plenty of work to do after reading this post. I’ll keep on showing you tutorials about important things to have in account when taking and editing a cosplay picture and I’ll try to show you some little tricks I’m learning.
Hope this is useful for you! And, if you have any advice you can give me, I’ll gladly hear it. Also, if you have any question or doubt, feel free to ask me in the comments.
As always, you can find me on facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.
Thanks for reading!
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*There are compact cameras that shoot in RAW format, but you have to have in account that their sensor is still smaller than the DSLR camera one.
P.S: I want to thank very specially Jesús Clares, Samuel Hurtado (Cameko Sam) and Teco for their advice and patience. I wouldn’t have known howto start without them.
