Background

[Ollie]

So, what is the best way to deal with background problems in cosplay photography. If it's for a shoot, it's easy enough to wait till people pass by, change your angle, move a trashcan, or anything like that. At conventions, it's a bit different.

If you're in a hallway or exhibit hall, there will be tons of people around. Even going outside or to a less trafficked area only helps so much if there are still a lot of things going on in the area or there's no easy area to shoot in. Often, the best you can do is ask somebody to step aside a bit and minimize what is around and behind them. (Or in front of them, as is often the case when people are too busy munching pocky while walking around a convention.)

Right? Or are there good ways to avoid "junk" in con photos?

A few things I do is move towards a wall or deliberatly place some large object in the background so there's at least some control over what I'm doing. Politely asking people to move out of the background also works in many cases.

[Shizzo]

It seems the best way I can handle people in the background is to look around and try to position myself so there are as few people in the background as possible ^_^;

If your camera has got a good zoom lense on it you can get some nice photos while cosplayers are on stage during the Masq. (Plus you get lots of fun pictures of them making goofy faces)

[stefaniecat]

At cons, I tend to specifically have a few spots I've noticed are "good" backgrounds - a wall relativly empty of signs, etc. - and will ask cosplayers if they'd mind my shooting them over there, which is usually just a short few feet away from the general area. They're usually good about this, and I tend to get shots that have minimal 'junk' in the background...

At Anime LA this year, I had two main favorite locations to photograph people inside, one at each end of the main hallway that led to all the event rooms ^^

[TomodachiFriend]

You could use your lenses wide open or at full zoom; but if you don't have an SLR, there are always walls and columns or even plants.

[Christy McGrath]

The best ways are as stated above and those you've mentioned yourself - move people out of the way (they're mostly co-operative!) or choose a neutral background. Also, if your subject is happy to be photographed, they want to look good, so perhaps choose a different location.

Photographically, if you can't do the above, go for a really shallow depth of field - where you can use a large aperture and focus on your subject with the background out-of-focus. Often that works well, giving just blurred colours in the background.

One bit of advice though - in this instance, your focussing must be spot-on, as you have very little margin of error with a camera setting of f1.8 - f4.0 - use a flash too (or a tripod and a very still subject!).

Christy x

[Ami Yuy]

If you are doing a shoot and you have control of the cosplayer and location, the roof, balconies, gardens, pool, parking structures, etc. are all places that you can go to get generally empty backgrounds. Of course this depends on the location that the convention/event is at, but that's something you should check out before the shoot so that you have an idea of what you want to work with.

At Anime Expo I particularly enjoyed using the roof and balcony because there were no people and it was very clean and blank background but still with interesting geometric shapes for their lines.