Hacos: Alice in Wonderland
By Skywing Knights // November 16, 2023
Hey all!
Little quick update for me with a bit of a Throwback Thursday post! I love taking photos, I really do. But I always seem to have a backlog – there are just too many photos to go through! That said, I have finally been managing to get through some of my old shoots. And so you all are the lucky recipients! (You and the subjects of my shoots lol).
The first shoot I got to go back to recently is one of my favorites that I’ve done with the lovely Tsukasa325. All the way back in 2015, we went to Hacostadium in Japan and got to take photos of her beautiful Alice in Wonderland cosplay. Not to mention, we did so in the most appropriate setting I’ve ever seen. What do you think?!
See the Full Hacostadium Album Here
I loved the resulting photos. Additionally, I really felt a sense of accomplishment with these – both with the initial shots we got as well as with my work in post. In 2015, I was still a ‘baby photographer’ in the hobby realm of photography. I was still shooting in JPG format and was just getting my bearings. That said, I loved the angles and the way the poses I was able to capture of Tsukasa. She was just beautiful and such a great model and cosplayer! The problem for me now that I was working on the photos in 2023 was that I was seeing where I had made mistakes. Sometimes I should have been more careful with the lighting and even the focus of the camera.
However, thanks to the amount of practice I have had since 2015 using photo editing software, I was able to recover a lot of the details, bring shots back into focus, and relight the images so that they really spotlighted Tsukasa’s amazing cosplay skills as they deserved to be. In particular, the Topaz Labs programs proved highly useful for me when working on these photos and I am so glad that I’ve been able to become as proficient as I have with these. I definitely recommend them, especially if you’re working with older or even non-RAW formatted photos.
Long story short, don’t be afraid to go back to your old work. You’re more skilled than you remember and your skills today are likely going to allow you to make your work even better.
Short post today, but I hope to have more throwbacks coming in the future. Till next time, happy cosplaying and photographing!
~Skywing
