Dream of Doll Cosplay: Luke, Ducan & Kalix

Finally getting around to posting photos from the Dream Of Doll shoot I did in January this year, over in Melbourne. I didn’t have all my studio equipment on me, but ShinoMatrix let us use his house for a studio setup and was great help with moving stands around. ShinoMatrix’s gear included a two-stand white backdrop and we used my three flashes and triggers with his three flash stands and a handful of white umbrellas. Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot taken at the wide end of K’s awesome 10-20mm lens:

In terms of the final lighting setup, I had two lights at 45 degrees to the model on either side; one main light which was shot through a white umbrella and one fill light that was half the power of the main (the picture looks different because the lights were moved for littlecrane’s shots, her hat was proving problematic). ShinoMatrix normally had his third light for filling the white backdrop with an even spread of light so I kept that in place. However, I wanted another light source to add dimension and so we commandeered a full length mirror from the loungeroom and used it to bounce back some of the other lights and create a rim light.

In terms of lenses and angles, I was standing on top of a kitchen counter several metres away, using either my 50mm or 85mm lenses. I wanted to be as far back as possible and avoid using the wide 24mm, as I knew that this would distort the image and the result would not be as doll-like. It would have been great to have a 200mm lens and be further back, but you have to work within your environmental constraints :)

So without further blather about the photography, here are the photos! Click on the names of the talented cosplayers to get more info about the costumes that they’ve constructed themselves and see their fantabulous deviantART accounts.

K-chan (deviantART) is cosplaying Black Luke from the Dream of Doll collection.

Aly (deviantART) is cosplaying Black Ducan from the Dream of Doll collection.

Blair/Littlecrane (deviantART) is cosplaying Kalix from the Dream of Doll collection.

For reference here are some images of the real ball jointed dolls, taken from the Korean Website Dream of Doll and then montaged (featuring Luke, Ducan and Kalix from left to right):

 

That’s all for now, there may be more photos coming in future from this shoot, it all depends whether any of us have time to do the postwork!