When you spend some time specializing in a certain field of photography people start to come to you specifically for certain types of images. In this case Joy approached me about doing a photoshoot involving her new Spider Gwen suit.

When it comes to shooting any costume based set the first thing I always think of is “what location does this costume work in”. In the case of an urban super hero I wanted to keep it as urban as possible. Downtown Albuquerque provided plenty for the aesthetic that I was looking for. We shot at and around the civic plaza and found plenty of things to work with and even found a few hidden gems in the process.

The best part of shooting with Joy was how much of a trooper she was. I asked her to climb up to different ledges and railings while balance herself without any compliant and it added so much more to the shots.

The big thing I’m trying to be better at as a photographer is collaboration. Receiving input and ideas from different sources and putting it into use. In this case my part time assistant and full time girlfriend Emilie was much more involved in location scouting and posing and I gave her free reign to give suggestions to try out. This system works especially well because even if an idea doesn’t work you can easily say hey we tried and move on. But all of Emilie’s ideas worked perfectly so there was no need to worry.

During post processing the main challenge I faced was balancing out exposure and color. The white portions of the suit caused some major highlights and when getting them balanced out brought in a blue coloring which could be changed in white balance. Post is always a game of feeling out the image and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t.

The images came out extremely well and we got some very unique looks throughout the shoot. It’s always great to get to work with new talent . Joy lives up to her name by being a fun new model to shoot with and I look forward to more work in the future.