Where is this going?
I’m still not entirely sure what this website is going to be when it grows up – it has already taken a turn from what I thought it would be. This was going to be an outlet for my creative photography projects, fun stuff not driven by paid gigs. Along the way, I would, hopefully, rediscover the joy of cosplay photography, something I haven’t done in years.
I love photographing cosplayers. They’re full of energy, passion and creativity. All of the ones I’ve met are really nice people who love posing for photos. But with no upcoming cosplay events on the calendar for the DC area, I wouldn’t have any new work to post for awhile. Since it had been six or seven years since I had been to a comic con, I thought it might be fun to revisit some old images and look for new takes.
I feel like my photography has advanced quite a bit since I last shot cosplay and I’m certain my post-processing skills are better. Why not try to rework some of these photos as composites?
In the photo above, her cosplay is of a character called “Little Sister” from the Bioshock video game. While I’m not familiar with the game, it’s easy to see from the outfit that she needed to be in a dark, creepy setting. I found some gothic wallpaper online and it made a huge difference in establishing the mood. I combined the images in Photoshop then put the composite in Fotor and made a few more adjustments to create even more cohesion between the composite images. I loved it.
However, one thing bothered me: I had used an image of wallpaper that I didn’t own the copyright to.
One way around that would be to just manipulate the images in Fotor like I did above with a photo I took of my friend Chris as The Shadow. Then I thought of something else. Why not just create my own backgrounds with an AI image generator? I didn’t have a lot of experience with generative art but I played around with some prompts describing “a city burning in the nighttime” to use as the background of a photo I had taken of a Batman cosplayer. I used Photoshop to merge the images and then Fotor for some additional stylization.
I thought the results were okay, but the important takeaway was that using AI-generated backgrounds would solve my copyright concerns. What I hadn’t expected was that using Night Cafe to create the background would get me hooked on generative art, which would end up changing the trajectory of this website.
I still plan to shoot some upcoming cosplay events but it will be with the intention of making images that can be composited, or even used as image prompts for new AI adaptations as I did with the Captain America cosplayer below. As you can see from the series, the concept evolved drastically as I picked variations and tweaked the prompts. (To see a more detailed progression, along with the text prompts I used click here)
And really, that’s the beauty of generative art, you might know where you’re starting from, but you have no idea where you’re going to end up.
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