A Work In Progress – Portraits of A Maid Cafe

I’ve been meaning to post about this project for a while. It’s a quick series of portraits that I did last December and April of students from both Bronx Community College and Lehman College, respectively, dressing up for their anime-themed maid café (a cafe event in which people cosplay as maids, butlers, and Japanese anime characters). I stumbled upon doing these portraits while working on another project that I’ll announce at a later date, but mainly, my goals with this was to practice shooting quick and lightweight portraits with just my Olympus E-PL2, one lens, one flash, one umbrella, and one monopod to hold and control the direction of the light. I decided not to use a light stand because I wanted to be as flexible as possible in a crowed area. Here are just a few of the results.

My thanks goes out to the cosplay staff of both BBC’s Anime Club and Lehman College’s Bushido Anime Club who were both interested and willing to stand in front of my camera.