A Foray into Photography with Caroline!

As a cosplayer, character performer, and sewist, I’m very used to being in front of the camera! On the surface level this might seem vain, but what I love most of all (besides committing my creative work to memory) is setting up a shot that captures not just the reality of something I made, but also matches the feeling and the aesthetic. Basically, I’m a photographer utilizing selfies and kind, willing friends and family to push the shutter button.

I wanted to dabble into using this “scene setting” idea as a photographer instances where I’m completely behind the camera, so I asked my Facebook friends who wanted to play dress up and let me practice. This morning, Caroline helped me out!

Caroline is a fellow theatre person and character performer so she’s a natural in front of the camera with all the grace and elegance you can imagine but also a very authentic sense of joy that shines through!

So how did this shoot go? I’d say I’m very happy with my model, her styling and poses, and the framing of my shots! I’m less than happy with my skills in regard to light, and my camera’s capability for image quality. I shoot with a Pentax DSLR that’s about 10 years old - certainly a nice camera, but cell phone cameras have come such a long way in recent years that I rarely reach for it anymore. I would love to learn to shoot in RAW and I suspect that would help with the image quality and adjustability of the images, but today didn’t seem like a day to experiment with that.

To correct lighting and colors, I use a phone app called EPIK. Hardly ideal for proper photography, but it has one great advantage over the onboard tools in GooglePhotos - a “selective area” tool that lets me brighten up faces without washing out other areas of the photo.

Ideally I’d have a nicer camera and Photoshop. But I am very much just dabbling into photography and I’m not yet at the point of investing in proper tools. I want to work on my creativity in generating content, styling, posing, framing, etc. Perhaps in the long run I’ll ally myself with a skilled photographer and be the planning counterpart to determine everything other than the camera’s action itself. Like a film director/costumer/location scout/set dresser who has a creative partner handling the camera and editing.

Or, perhaps I’ll learn and start to invest! I don’t see myself pursuing photography in any vocational way (mostly because wedding photography pays the bills and that sounds like the very last thing I would ever want to do).

For now, I’ll make pretty pictures of my pretty friends!

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A Royal Look for the Gala