Cosplay Photographers Turns One Year Old

When Cosplay Photographers first launched one year ago during Yaoi-Con, it was just a one man show by Richard of Bui Photos with a dream: build a network of cosplay photographers who give back to the cosplay photography community knowledge that they have learned. The idea is that by helping new cosplay photographers develop their skills earlier, the entire community benefits by leaps and bounds. At the time of our launch, we showcased our very first ever Cosplay Photographers Featured Photographer of the Month, the incredibly talented Thomas Kuan aka Hexlord. From that, a monthly tradition was born. It wasn’t too long afterwards that Tim Vo of FiveRings Photography joined up and helped expand the vision and goals of Cosplay Photographers. It quickly became necessary that we find a Social Media Guru to manage and help grow our social media components such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. We tapped the super talented Maid Cafe specialist Venus Chan to fill the role. In February 2012, Vince Milum of Darkain Multimedia and Al Hayashi joined our network as staff photographers and regular content providers. In keeping with our motto, “To Learn, To Teach”, Al wrote the very first ever tutorial. Since then we’ve added four more cosplay photography specific tutorial articles, all of which have been big hits. We also introduced our first ever Cosplay Photographers Spokesmodel, the beautiful Kara aka Electric Lady. We became Crunchyroll Ambassadors to the best Anime and Korean/Japanese drama streaming service on the planet, Crunchyroll. We amped up our network of photographers aka the Cosplay Photographers Ambassadors with the additions of Darrell Ardita of BGZ Studios, Adam Jay of Super Hero Photography by Adamy Jay, Ray Lum of Ray Lum Photography, and the most recent addition of Photographes Sans Frontieres. Our internal staff group has continued to grow; we’ve added more staff photographers (Ger Tysk and The Watters Mark Photography) and writers/editors Airyo Kyu of CLOVER Cosplay, Lawrence Brenner, and Jesse James Anderson, all of whom do amazing work. We helped launch our sister network Cosplay Videographers and we’re constantly proud, amazed, and inspired by their continued work.

So what’s next? We’re going to continue to build out the Cosplay Photographers Network. We’re working on building out the system right now, but in the near future, a cosplayer could browse the system and find cosplay photographers in their area with a link to their portfolio as well as contact information. We’re constantly getting questions from cosplayers asking if we know of a photographer in their area or if there is a photographer we know that will be at a con. We’ll also have an application process for cosplay photographers to apply to be involved and contribute to the network.

Many of you will start seeing us break more into the East Coast, down South, and across the globe. We’re focusing more on cosplay photography tutorials as well as a huge number of new con-coverage articles and albums. We also have some exciting new plans for 2013, so stay tuned!

And most of all, a big thank you to all our fans and supporters! We couldn’t have done this without you! Enjoy some photos of cosplay photographers gatherings with Cosplay Photographers: