If you happen to read my personal blog, you may know that the only models I’ve worked with in the past were Fine Art nude models (here and here – NSFW, of course!) But this year at Baltimore Comic-Con, I had the opportunity to work with a cosplay model outside the convention floor. I’d been wanting to do something like this for a while, but since I’m at the con as press, I can’t just leave to photograph one person. This time, we were able to meet before the show floor opened.
I worked with Hanari Solomon who wanted to get some nice shots of her Pearl costume away from the convention floor. Hanari is an amateur cosplayer who has quite the following. I mean amateur in the original sense of the word: someone who doesn’t do something (cosplay, in this instance) as their paid profession. I don’t mean it in terms of her skills because working with Hanari was every bit as great as working with the models I linked above. She knows how to pose and how she will look from different angles. In this particular photo shoot, she also had lots of ideas once I introduced her to the location and that’s one of the best qualities in a model. Obviously, in a traditional shoot, it’s the photographer’s job to have the overall vision, but working with a great professional model is a back and forth. It ends up being a conversation that ends up in a better place than if they had just been a posable doll.
For this particular shoot, I gave Hanari all the RAW files to play with as she wishes, so she’ll be presenting her interpretation on her Facebook page later this week. For me, this was an opportunity to experiment with various techniques in RawTherapee (my current RAW editor of choice) to come up with different looks for the same subject and background. So, enjoy this gallery and later this week go to Hanari Solomon’s Facebook page to see what she had in her head as we were working together.
