2016_1029_OhioRenFest

A few months ago my good friend Jessica contacted me and discussed the idea of me coming to the Ohio Renaissance Festival with her group to get pictures of their D&D characters (which they made costumes of) with the castles and people and overall feel of the festival.  I had done this last year with Brittani Ginoza as her female Captain Hook and it turned out awesome! That time I went solo, but this time I was able to bring my wife along. I had only been to one Renaissance festival the previous year, and she had never been so we were both pretty excited about the opportunity.  

We made it to the grounds without incident and got to look around a bit while the rest of our party got there and grouped up. I will say the bathrooms this year were greatly improved over last year (the wife was impressed!). Silly side not (BUT IMPORTANT!).  We purchased a flower wreathe for her at one of the vendors, got the group together and started to wander around, keeping an eye out for cool spots to shoot later on in the day when the sun wasn't directly overhead (HORRIBLE lighting to shoot in).  We looked at quite a few of the shops, bought some food (dear lord the turkey legs are everything I thought they'd be!) and found a cool spot to start snapping pics that was in the shade and out of the way.  

I have gotten used to the curious stares over the last three years of doing this as I get my lightstand and single softbox set up, and this was no different.  Even though there was a show going on ahead of them many people turned to see what was going on.  Once I had my calibrations locked in we were able to blast through the first couple sets of pictures fairly quickly and keep walking till we got to the castle (which was FANTASTIC!). It made a perfect backdrop for many of our shots.  Again, we drew the attention of some onlookers and I saw more than one person sneaking pictures of our group with their cell phones, and who can blame them?  They looked amazing!! As we were wrapping up at the castle, our Rogue noticed an archer had been watching us do our shoot and ran to give him one of my cards.  He came back and I grabbed a couple of super quick shots of him in front of the castle, which was pretty awesome.  

After that we had one of the vendors come out of his booth and asked to see one of the pics I had just taken.  I showed him and he offered to let us use his chainmail for some shots if we wanted to because he liked my lighting setup and how the shots were turning out, which was incredibly flattering.  We were on our way to one of the events, though and didn't get to make it back to take him up on his offer, which kind of sucks because he had some great work!

We wrapped up the shoot, grabbed some more food, checked out some shops (ate a ton of pumpkin cookies that our Rogue was thoughtful enough to bring) and parted ways. It was an absolutely fantastic day for all of us, the wifeoo had SUCH a good time (and even bought some great elf ears!).  We also got to talk to the awesome Karneval Masque Atelier and got a couple of cool shots of the wife wearing some of their great products. I would love to do some product photography with her work, it has so much detail and texture that my lighting and style just really works well on.  Below is a gallery of some sample images from the shoot on my Facebook, so check it out! Thanks for reading my rambles, keep being awesome and peace guys.  Till next time *bows*