[Wakaba Mutsumi cosplay] Ave Mujica pure white lantern girl

This Shanghai photoshoot booking chose a venue piled with old books and paper to shoot Wakaba Mutsumi under the Ave Mujica theme. The moment you step into this space, the oppression and mystery brought by the layers and layers of the sea of paper fit the imagery we wanted to express very well. To match this atmosphere, I wore a pure white Lolita-style dress this time. The details of this outfit are extremely rich; from the chest to the cuffs and down to the skirt hem, it is filled with various ruffles and lace patches, with a long satin ribbon tied into a bow at the neckline. To echo the character's traits, I put a lot of thought into the makeup and styling: the mint green wig was trimmed into straight bangs with a naturally straight treatment at the ends, paired with light amber colored contacts. The base makeup was deliberately made quite fair, and the eye makeup used low-saturation colors to create a cold and aloof feel.
During the shoot, the biggest difficulty and also the most interesting part lay in the control of light and shadow in the frame. The lantern appearing on the left side of this photo is the core light source of the frame. To simulate the feeling of exploring in the dark carrying a lantern, the photographer needed to help hold this lantern from outside the frame. The warm yellow light emitted by the lantern itself hit the pure white skirt hem and face, forming a very beautiful cool-warm contrast and light-dark boundary. If we relied solely on this one lantern, the face would inevitably have heavy shadows, so we set up a cold fill light with a softbox on the right side, keeping the output power very low, just to outline the contours of the face and lace. Lolita costumes have numerous layers of lace; if the lighting is too harsh or too flat during shooting, these laces will turn into a pale white mass, losing their texture. Therefore, we ultimately decided to adopt a side-backlighting approach primarily, letting the light sweep across from the direction of the lantern to outline the edge lines of the clothing while retaining details in the dark areas.
In terms of on-site shooting direction, I tried to avoid exaggerated movements because Wakaba Mutsumi's personality tends to be reserved. I kept myself in a relatively static state, lifting my chin slightly, with my gaze not needing to be deliberately focused, carrying a bit of a aimless sense of detachment. The light from the lantern is actually quite bright, and looking straight at it makes the eyes a bit dazed, but this physiological reaction happened to present an ethereal gaze state. The scattered papers and books in the background are very messy; to prevent the frame from looking cluttered, we used a wide-aperture lens to blur the background and utilized the white reflection of the paper itself to fill in the dark areas of the frame. Moving around in the piles of paper wearing this complex dress actually requires a lot of care, as the lace edges are easily caught by the edges of the book pages, requiring me to tidy up the skirt hem every time I change poses.
From early preparation to the actual shoot, the team spent a lot of time communicating throughout the process. The smoothness of the costume, the direction of the wig, the angle of the fill light—every small adjustment affected the final presentation of the image. Being able to gradually showcase the character's state amidst the sea of paper and the dim light of the lantern through the lens is, for me, what makes cosplay most attractive. I look forward to trying more styles of scenes and light/shadow expressions next time.