The Problem

"The core problem with Teen Titans is that it’s never been about teenagers, but rather what adult writers want teenagers to be. Superboy, Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash – these kids revere their elders and try to emulate them. Fuck that noise. Adults don’t deserve reverence. Plus, teenagers don’t want to read about obedient, law-abiding teens, and adults reliving their youth don’t want to read about obedient, law-abiding teens. They both want sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll (or substitute in hip hop). The Titans shouldn’t be fighting crime, they should be fighting for the right to party, and generally reminding adults how much they suck."

-- The Hooded Utilitarian

Making the Final Battle photo

This was a cosplay photo based on the anime Black Rock Shooter.

For this photo I planned a lot out in advance. I asked the models to send me some example photos of the costumes so I could start thinking about what I wanted to do before the shoot. I realized that there wasn't any location available that would be right, so I planned from the start to do this as a composite photo, and we shot these indoors against a plain white background.

Kori was cosplaying as Dark Master (upper right), and I had her do some shots where she jumped up in the air and turned 180 degrees, then landed facing the opposite direction. With jumping shots, if I don't want it to look like jumping I'll often do something like this, or have the person jump sideways or backwards. Doing that takes away a lot of the characteristic body language of jumping and makes the pose a little harder to figure out.

So this was Kori's shot:





As soon as I saw this, I knew I could base a whole scene around this pose, because it looks like she is levitating, the pointed toes are great, and she has a wonderfully intense facial expression.

The shot of Emily as Black Rock Shooter that I ultimately used was this one:





I love her facial expression here, it is perfect for the character and the scene. She looks like she is completely ready to fight, but wishes she didn't have to.

Prior to the shoot I had done some research to try to find background photos. If I'd had access to a suitable location I would have tried to take a background photo myself, but I couldn't find anything like this. So I searched for Creative Commons photos of a cathedral, and I was especially looking for one that would have the black and white checkerboard pattern that is a visual motif in Black Rock Shooter. I found a great photo taken by Kent Landerholm. The original photo is this:



This is a wonderful HDR photo and it was just what I was looking for.

After the shoot, I started to think about how to lay out the composition. Here is one of my rough sketches for it:



You can see from this sketch that I'm still not sure what to do at this point. I'm trying out various positions. The circles and lines are a way of thinking about how the lighting might look, but I wound up doing something very different. The note "7 or 8" in this sketch was me trying to decide which photo of Emily to use.

I decided to mirror-image Kori and make a diagonal from lower left to upper right instead, because this sketch didn't feel right. But it helped me decide on a composition before I wasted a lot of time in Photoshop.

Once I decided on the layout, I put the elements together into a scene, and added in a "special effects" fractal that I had made in Oxidizer. I wanted the fractal image to be very high resolution, to actually be larger than the scene, so this took something like 2 hours to render on my laptop.

When I first put the elements into one image, that is when I had to make a decision whether to go ahead or bail out, because at this stage of the project it always looks pretty bad, nothing is blended yet, the colors are wrong, so I had to see some potential in it. In this case I thought I was on the right track.

The background photo is very wide-angle, with some spatial distortion because of that. Instead of trying to hide that, I actually increased it slightly by warping the background to make it "spill out" slightly more to the lower left. The Kori and Emily photos are taken from 2 different angles, so when put together they do kind of match the wide angle perspective of the background.

The colors in the original background photo are very yellow, and at first I tried to work with that, but it didn't work. My next approach was to desaturate the background to make it almost black-and-white, but that didn't feel right either. I decided on blue and purple for the main colors.

A lot of the work after that was painting in the new colors and the new lighting. I didn't use any Photoshop "Render Lighting" stuff here, it was all by hand. I also painted in some manga-style "speed lines" and added some "atmospheric heat distortion" to the area around Kori. I originally planned to do that with the ripple filter, but it didn't look right, so I ended up using the Liquify tool instead and putting in the distortion by hand.

When I got that figured out, I still felt it looked too "plastic." I decided to make it look like there was dust in the air, like in a very old building. So I started painting in "dust" layers, and this made it look a lot more like what I wanted.

One of my friends gave me a helpful critique of the rough draft of this piece, and based on his advice I added a bit of "distance blur" and increased the light and effects at the upper right to balance out the light at the lower left.

And that's about it. It was a lot of work, but in the end I got a scene that matched what I had imagined. All of this was inspired by the models Kori and Emily, I put in a lot of time on this because they gave me such great material to work with.

Making a Black Rock Shooter Scene

Here's a short explanation of one of the Black Rock Shooter scenes I did with Kori and Emily. First I used a white background, some lights, and a reflector, and took photos of the models.
The light in the upper left corner is pointed at the background, the other lights are on the models. They did some battle scene poses, including Emily as Black Rock Shooter with the sword, and Kori as Dark Master in a fighting stance:

Then we needed one that could show Dark Master jumping/flying through the air, so Kori did this:

Having her balance on the boards was just a quick way to get the pose to look a little more like jumping/flying and less like just standing on the ground, but the hair doesn't look right for the final scene, and she's looking at the camera instead of to the side, so later I combined the lower part of this photo with the upper part of the previous one.

Then I took a photo of a building for the background. Luckily I found a building that had the type of checkerboard pattern that is often used in Black Rock Shooter.

I put these all together in Photoshop, cleaned up the background, mirror-imaged the other shots and combined the two Dark Master shots into one. Then I re-colored and re-lit everything. For initial background re-lighting I used Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. I used adjustment layers to approximately match the colors and brightnesses. Then most of the final additional coloring, lighting and shadowing was painted in by hand.

Here's the final result:

This was really fun. There's a lot I still need to learn in creating composite scenes like this, but I hope this post may encourage other photographers to try something like this.

Uwajimaya Japan Festival 2011

I went to the Japan Festival at the Beaverton Uwajimaya today. There were people there in cosplay, and I got to meet up with some of my friends who are going to be at Sakura-Con next week.

A-Key Kyo (above) performed, and did a fund-raiser for disaster relief for the Japan Earthquake. I got both of their DVDs.

It had been a while since I last saw A-Key Kyo, but they were just as fun as I remembered.

Jael outside

Gears of Winter

This device has sort of a steampunk look to it.

Frog

Cosplay photo shoot

This weekend I did a cosplay photo shoot with Shay (above left), Maddy (above right), and Sahara (below). Shay and Maddy are cosplaying Alois and Claude from Black Butler and Sahara is Rukia from Bleach.




I've done several photo shoots with these models and I really enjoy working with them.

Esplanade

Walking along the esplanade in downtown Portland I found this vantage point.

Two Leaves as a Hungry Mouse

Second in the series of "leaf transformation" photos. This photo has been post-processed, but the shadow is real. Click the photo to see it larger.

Arc de Triomphe

I'm going to do a series of autumn leaf photos like this, where the leaf or its shadow resembles something else. I spotted this on the way to work. The shadow was naturally like that when I saw it, but for the photo I repositioned the leaf onto a different part of the sidewalk that made a better background.

I took this photo with the Canon S90 as a 3-exposure HDR. I post-processed in Lightroom. But I did nothing to change the shape of the shadow.

Red Rose Challenge

Loveless cosplay

Model: nekovamp13. There's something about her facial expressions that I really like. It's like she knows something you don't. It's a very engaging quality.

Sahara and Shay

On Saturday I went to Esther Short Park in Vancouver, Washington to do photo shoots with people I met at Kumoricon. It was raining hard, but still a lot of fun. Sahara and Shay are fantastic models to work with. They are really fun and they inspire me to work harder and try to do more.

Cross Crusade 2010 at Alpenrose

Cyclocross racing series Cross Crusade had its first race of the series at Alpenrose. They announced that there were 1,506 competitors, a new world record.

See my full Cross Crusade 2010 photo set on Flickr.

Kumoricon 2010 convention report

My convention report on Kumoricon 2010 is up at JLHLS.

Gregor Torrence also got some great photos at the rave. He even has the last 9 photos in 3D, so if you have any red/blue 3D glasses lying around, get them out and look at his Kumoricon 2010 rave photo set.

Sunset over Portland

Mt. Tabor Soapbox Derby

Full photo set

The short version

"Here's a hanky, now go get killed." -- Lisa, summarizing medieval chivalry.

Reclaim the Commons