Telling a story with your cosplay photos
When you love your costume or the character you’re cosplaying, you want your photos to really stand out.
There are plenty of ways to do that, from looking up great poses to having a great setting, or even applying awesome photo edits after the fact.
But we feel there is one way to step up your cosplay game even further: tell us a story! There are many formats and techniques you can take advantage of to create a narrative during your photoshoots, and we’re going to lay out our favorite ones below.
WW(MC)D?
“What would my character do?”
It’s easy to remember to stay in character on the con floor, but sometimes, we can fall into the same routine of poses in front of the camera. Smile straight on. Hold up fists for a superhero. Stand back to back with a partner. These photos can still look great, but sometimes you want to add a little pizzazz!
Before you head to your photoshoot, look up covers or promotional images of your character to stay in the right headspace.
If you’re cosplaying an anime character, mimic their signature pose. Almost every anime character has one.
(Right: Kelly of Phoenix Sisters Cosplay – Sailor Mars, Left: Crayle of Phoenix Sisters Cosplay, Sailor Venus) Photos by Thomas G.
If the character you’re cosplaying likes to climb things, well, when in Rome. Find the closest surface you can safely climb and have your photographer take photos from below.
In the example below, Huntress is a nighttime vigilante, so the photographer took photos after dark, and lit her with car headlights.
If your character is a modern teenager, make sure you take a few photos in selfie mode! It works for solo and group shots, as long as your arms are long enough! Below, Crayle and Kelly thought Batgirl and Supergirl would absolutely take selfies together when they hung out.
Some characters even get headaches or have other recurring problems. Throw out a grimace instead of a smile for those.
Or in Jessica Jones’ case, the alcoholism and other maladaptive coping mechanisms also put a bit of a scowl on her face.
It may be your instinct to smile right into the camera, but sometimes, you just have to resist!
Recreate a scene or comic panel.
This is one of our favorite techniques!
Our famous origin story (find it under our “about” section HERE) involved us recreating one of Kelly’s favorite comic book panels: Jean Grey busting in on Scott Summers and Emma Frost while they psychically cheated.
It’s still one of our best-loved photos to this day, by ourselves and our followers/fans.
There are limitless panels and comic covers you can recreate. They don’t have to be perfect, just similar enough that people can recognize them side by side.
Jean Grey isn’t wearing her green Phoenix suit in the panel we recreated, but Kelly didn’t have to make a whole new costume for that. The green suit was still plenty recognizable.
We also recreated a comic cover of Scott Summers and Emma Frost after this by patron request! (You can make patron requests too if you join over at www.patreon.com/phoenixsiscosplay.)
Make your own comic!
It is easier and easier to edit your own photos in fun ways. If you have any kind of background removing tool, you can put your characters over stock images to make your own comics. (We like Canva and Gimp, which have free versions – and they’re not paying us to say that, it’s just what we use.)
That’s what we did for our cowgirl Speedy and Black Canary variants.
We thought of a funny little exchange, just a few lines, posed it accordingly, and put them over some haybale images that we were allowed to use.
And voila!
We love how it turned out.
But if that sounds like too much work, you can just use different poses on a neutral background, and let the poses tell the story!
Ruby from T-Shirt Cosplay joined us for this great Gotham City Sirens story, plus Kelly’s Duela Dent.
A scene doesn’t even have to be complicated to make a cute set of comic panels. When Crayle and her husband did a Punisher and Karen Page photoshoot where the two went on a date, we made an entire comic of Frank helping Karen put a scarf on. It was cute, unique, and didn’t take a ton of planning.
Don’t underestimate the power of a good backdrop.
A lot of times, the setting is a big part of the story we tell with our photos. Our siren photoshoot wouldn’t have been the same without a large body of water as the background, right?
But with indoor backdrops, you can take photos in your own home, with no time limit, and take as many poses as you need to tell your story!
In fact, the backdrop alone helps tell a story sometimes.
For example, our Star Wars characters look fine in front of a starry background. But when we put Leia in front of a spaceship viewing deck, we are alluding to scenes where she has been either escaping a ship or making her escape in a ship!
Using backdrops is also a great way to hide messes in our house, so that you can take indoor photos and make your cosplay content without having to schedule time to clean a whole room.
And you don’t have to worry about the weather.
Here are some of our favorite backdrop photos!
Pssst, like the cheerleader Harley Quinn photo? We have spicy versions HERE…
Collab with other cosplayers – even from a distance!
Teamwork makes the dream work, right? Right.
But sometimes, planning a cosplay meet-up is more than you can manage right now. We get it.
First of all, if you make cosplay reels or TikTok videos, there’s a stitch function to play each other’s videos side by side or one after the other. Take advantage of that when you can. Then you can tell a story with another cosplayer from a distance.
You can also make collages or albums of cosplay friends who are costuming within the same franchise of characters.
Kelly and Crayle cosplayed Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn characters in close months, and we posted the photos together a few times with fun captions like, “Living in different worlds, but still on the same team.”
Use cosplay photo storytelling to keep the cosplay spark alive.
Do you ever end up in an involuntary cosplay slump because you’re trapped in the house (for health or other reasons)? Or because you can’t really afford to travel to take new photos or build new costumes?
We’ve both definitely been there.
Use some of the cosplay storytelling tips above to keep the spark alive.
You can either revisit an old costume and take photos at home to turn into your own comics and tell your own stories with – or you don’t even have to take new photos!
Use your photos from previous photoshoots to collage together or put in albums that tell a story using what you already have.
If you have the photographer’s permission, you can always pull the backgrounds off of those and put them in new settings to tell a different story too.
We have used the same photo with different backgrounds in a lot of our holiday posts, for example.
Both images above have the same base photo, but were edited for different purposes.
This is an especially important way to keep your cosplay posts fresh if you are managing a social media page or other platform that requires you to constantly be pumping out “content.”
We have busy lives, and we can’t be putting on a new costume every day of the week. We’re sure you probably don’t have time for that either!
But every now and then, we sit down and play with some old photos and give them new life or use them to tell a new story.
Don’t delete those work-in-progress photos!
Last but not least, behind the scenes images and WIP photos tell a story of the cosplayer behind the character.
We find that people love this content from us, whether it’s a selfie on the way to the photoshoot in the car, or a photo of all the scraps left behind after cutting fabric for a costume.
So share, share away with your behind-the-scenes and in-progress shots!
Want more from the Phoenix Sisters? “Stalk” us on the internet!
Our socials, website, and much more can be found on our Linktree. www.linktree.com/phoenixsiscosplay
And hey, do you want EXCLUSVE content, including early access to all our photos, and the ONLY access to our SPICY stuff?
You’re going to want to join up on Patreon. Membership starts as low as $1 per month. www.patreon.com/phoenixsiscosplay
For less than a cup of coffee, you can be in our inner circle. And we have other perks too, including birthday shout-outs, fan signs, signed physical prints MAILED TO YOUR HOUSE, and much more!
So join up today!
