We had a LOT of fun with this shoot. Like with the Donut Hole, it was meant to be rough and low-budget. I really exercised my inner bozo to come up with stupid ideas, and then do them.

I’m trying this new image gallery plugin, you can swipe across to scroll the thumbnails, and click any of them to open the usual lightbox viewer overlay.

Dodgy shadows in the shot? Blown out highlights? Poor framing? Breaking a flash because it wasn’t properly screwed to the lightstand? Nah couldn’t be me! Forgetting stuff in the car and having to walk 15min back there to get it? Okay that wasn’t an idea…

Matryoshka might not be the 90s, but we can pretend like it was – I busted out the mighty fisheye lens again, it’s so raaaaddd! Normally you end up with way too much crap in the scene, but it works a treat in a rich environment like this, you basically can’t go wrong.

I’m really pleased with how the blurred shots turned out. The dim environment meant I could drag the shutter out nice and slow (about 1/15th), then popping the flash would freeze just the cosplayers nice and crisply. It didn’t even take many attempts ✌️

What’s in the bag today?

Nikon D800 with 16mm f/2.8 fisheye, Sony A7.3 with 24mm f/2.8G, 1x speedlight (now broken) and white umbrella