Finally a new figure and also a proper photoshoot session for it. Too bad both did not turn out very good.

I got myself Shueisha`s 1/8 Shirayuki Mizore from Rozario+Vampire from TFM. After a while collecting figures, figmas no more satisfies me and I move on to buying scaled PVC. And I know if you want a scaled, you might want to get Max Factory or Alter for best qualities. Still, I love Rosario+Vampire and Kugimiya Rie (which doesn`t contribute anything to this figure at all haha…) so even though it was some PVC maker I never heard of, I decided to order her.

When I got the box, I can already feel how cheap the quality was. The box quality, the presentation simply looks not very appealing despite the logo “SHUEISHA SOLID COLLECTION” printed there. Seems to be their 11th figure so far so yeah they are still baby in the industry.

They make the figure straight copied from how she looks in anime. No dynamic pose or custom gothic dress whatsoever. Things I like about Mizore is her street punk oriented fashion. Striped knee socks, UK style creeper shoe and even a leash on her tight which I found kinda erotic haha…

On the photography side, I need to bring out lots of thing outside my room to make some space and shoot this (sigh…still very long till next year when I can move out to my own house). Use a dark blue blanket as a backdrop and use one table lamp as key lamp going trough an A4 paper taped to a medium sized box to diffuse it (cheap DIY softbox style) placed on her right hand side 45 degrees on same horizontal height. A4 paper taped to a cardboard on her left hand side as reflector and I got another table lamp not diffused placed very far from her back to fill some hairlight which seems has zero effect on any of the output photos.

I was using my only lens, the nikkor 50mm. I only got a very cheap and lightweight KEEP tripod so I was very worried troughout the photoshoot that it will fall down and crash my D90. The head was also cheap and plastic and it was very hard for me to frame especially to do slight adjustment. I need a decent tripod really, but so do I need Sb900 and the other stuff orz. During my compact Canon powershot days, it`s pretty easy to pin point any part of the figure because the shooting distance was very close but now with 50mm I need to shoot from quite far especially for whole body shot. I tried a few apertures, F5.6, F8, F11 and the smallest F16 but cannot find any aperture that gives me sharp focus throughout the frame even with manual focus. I don`t have a table so using viewfinder means I need to really crouch down and low my head to see into it. So I use Live View, magnifies it and manual focus it only to know that it`s not realy what you`ll get in the end.

There was space restriction, no proper and stable tripod, and a wrong lens for macro (it can be done with 50mm, only that you struggle a lot, need a lot of post process cropping and far less sharpness compared to proper macro lens). And only when entering lightroom after the shoot I realized, I didn`t allow much light inside (the key light was too diffused and I turned off all ambience light) and everything was underexposed. Was trying to create a soft look and gradient which failed, she looks pretty flat anyway.

So here is the initial look. I don`t really like her dress anyway, they should change it to Sex Pistols t-shirt to complete the whole punk look imho…

Ok, now lets start my bitching on Shueisha. See this seam, it will never be closed, ever. The yellow painting on her sleeve was painted very poorly, seems like they hire a complete noob to paint it.

This is the casted off dress. The edge is rough.

After casted off, she looks better. The ice hand kinda cool though. On a side note, typical Kugimiya`s character usually will have flat chest, but this one is the few exceptions. Still, Mizore is amongs the smaller cup size in Rozario+Vampire with the exception of loli Yukari.

If striped knee socks not moe enough, they gave you shimapan XD

Strike witches style. This is not pantsu.

Limit I can go to close up with 50mm. But it`s not all lens fault, the real thing is not that detailed either.

Until now I don`t know what she put inside her mouth. I am pretty sure it`s not lolipop like Hatsukoi`s Yamamoto.

Supposed to be very cool Creeper shoe was ruined by bad painting. I wish this was done by Alter or at least Griffon…

To wrap it all, I did not expect much quality when I ordered from a company such as Shueisha but I didn`t expect it turned out this bad and was kinda dissapointed. Maybe it`s just because after collecting figures for a while the standard has became higher in me (I used to be very happy with gashapon quality haha…) or the industry standard is very high now with companies like Alter, Max Factory, GIFT making insane quality figures.

This is gonna be my first and only Shueisha, no more from them in the future.

For gallery view I got a set in flickr and also tfm gallery.