Went to Melaka again last week along with Razrig and Linkin to shoot Mieko cosplaying Megurine Luka.

It was my second time doing a photoshoot with Mieko also the photographers line up was the same as previous Vampire Knight session. This time with less people the photographers should have more flexibility to direct the shoot and focus on the lighting, posing and framing.

Mieko as always were doing great. She got lots of pose and can response precisely to the photographers. I let Razriq and Linkin to do all the positioning and posing. The location was inside Melaka Mall. It got a lot of glass wall and decently lit shaded area. It was around 11 and the sky was bright outside and probably the reason Amir and Linkin tend to position her into high key position. Backlit is something I don`t prefer because it force me to use lower aperture which will be resulting mediocre sharpness using my lens and less dramatic picture. Another reason I tend to skip bright background is my internal flash looks so ugly when used on people so filling the missing f stops will result artificial look which will look more artificial when I try to fix it with Lightroom.

I put myself to challenge more on creating contrast headshots with biggest aperture on my lens which I can say what my gears is good at. Headshots cannot include much rather than the face and minimal background so lighting, mood and face expression are the major factors to create good photos. Mieko has tried her best and I can say we got a lot Luka version this time but still maintaining her cool and mature characteristic.

I positioned Mieko so she was facing the big glass wall which is my only main light. I wish I got a diffused SB-900 countering the shadows making them softer and more even but I think I have managed to pull some decent ones from this tehnique. If i wanted to go a step further I might ask Mieko to position herself nearer or farther the wall but it would be too troublesome for her also for me so I sorta ignore that thought and continued shooting at the same spot :P

Again I got a lot of problem during post processing. I still haven`t finish reading my portrait handbook yet and tend to get lost when it came to post-processing. I was mixing Auto mode and aperture priority mode and I got various kind of exposure along the shoot resulting the output was not very constant. I might as well just upload the photos straight from RAW instead of having a mix up gallery. But yeah, still a lot more to learn and need to make room for improvement rather than bitching on this blog how amateurish my work is haha…

Anyway thanks if you read this far and here`s some photos for you.
More Mieko cosplay photos on her deviant-art.
Also please visit Razriq`s post and Linkin`s post for more Luka pictures.

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