I’ve had a few people ask me over the past few years why I shoot my costumes on a white backdrop.
Well, let me back up for a second and kinda go off topic; I’ve had people ask why I photoshop the background out of my costume pictures before. I don’t, they’re shot on a white backdrop as can be seen here!
Now back on topic, why I shoot my costumes on the white backdrop. I decided it would be fun to have as many of my costumes on the same background as possible – I guess I could have gone black, or grey, but I liked the simplicity of the white, and it focuses all the attention on the costume.
It’s also way easier to shoot a bunch of costumes at once, than trying to go out and find a location. I do love location shoots and I wish I could do more of them, but… I’m not going to lie, I’m lazy. (Fun fact: so far we’ve shot 44 costumes on the white backdrop with another 6 planned for this weekend, hopefully.)
I’m hoping to one day have all of my still-existing costumes shot like this, and the whole, encompassing reason for it is that I want to make a book.
I’ve been working on this book for years – literally years – and had some variation of it in works all the time. The thing is, it’s going to be expensive – because I have so many damn costumes and want to show off a ton of pictures and I want it in a big hardback landscape format… blah, blah, blah. So besides not having good pics of all my costumes yet, I’m also just waiting for a break to drop the money on it. (PS – this is not something I’m making to sell, btw, it’s just a personal project so I can have a nice portfolio of my work)
Some of my older costumes I just don’t have good pictures of. Something like – my Sakura bat thief costume from way back in 2001. I have like, two photos of it. And those photos are from a crappy disposable camera, scanned in on a crappy scanner, and then sized down to like 300 pixels high. That’s all I got. That doesn’t work for print.
So that’s why you see me taking pictures of older costumes sometimes (and also, I do it before I sell them, it’s part of what helps me let them go…). It’s like, why are you taking pictures of that ancient Nanami costume from 10 years ago, and not the Belle costume you just finished? It’s because before that, I had ONE photo I liked of Nanami, taken in the middle of the con floor with Ash just hanging out on the floor behind me.
So shooting everything on the white backdrop serves a few purposes… but most of all it’s just uniformity. I mean, look how pretty.
Man I can’t wait to get some more done. It’s like building a whole ‘nother collection.