Happy Holidays, Everyone!

With 2011 coming to a close, I bring you one last photographer profile for the year. I’m always scourging the internet for new and fascinating cosplay, and I stumbled upon Florencia & Jonathon via Deviant Art a few months ago. These two Spanish photographers have produced a series of stellar Marvel cosplay photographs, which I’m happy to share with you all.

Me: Introduce yourselves!

Florencia: Hi, my name is Florencia and I, as well as my incredible colleague and friend Jonathan, are guilty of making this [Marvel cosplay] project. We're two photographers from Madrid (Spain), fond of cosplay and [the] comic world since several years ago.

Me: How did you become interested in photography? And how did you start shooting costumers and cosplay?

Florencia: Well, the truth is that we've always been interested in photography, but I started at 12 when I was given a camera. (Before that, I've always been afraid of breaking them). Jonathan started studying professional photography two years ago and I just started last year. Before that, neither I nor Johnny has ever had any class[es] or idea of photography. To be honest, all we've achieved till now is due to having spent hours and hours of our free time working together, adding to it of course a considerable amount of enthusiasm.

Even though we both like all kinds of photography, we have a special affection for Cosplay photography. We both are also fans of Cosplay and believe that this kind of photography has great creative possibilities. Each character is a whole and unique world and it drives you to investigate and discover new things, having your imagination fly to bring it to reality.

With this project, we've intended to go beyond the cosplay photography and do something closer, unique, and even possibly great. This is the first time we’ve risked so much with Photoshop.

Me: Are you a Marvel fan? If so, how did you fall into the universe?

Florencia: Do you really need to ask? Yes, of course we're two huge fans. Even though we [returned to] comic reading about 4 years ago, since we were little, we watched cartoons on TV and read old comics from our parents. I believe I still have my X-Men pajamas!

We love all things related to this Universe. Jonathan prefers the Avengers and X-Men, while I've extended our collection with the Thunderbolts. We do believe that it’s a fantastic world and both love to see how it grows day after day. Id never imagine that Storm could become an Avenger!!!

Me: For your photo manipulation, how do you come up with your ideas? Walk us through the process.

Florencia: We’ve dedicated a lot of time to [editing]. It’s very important part of photography to us, and more when talking about Cosplay. We're constantly looking for new alternatives, investigating and testing new effects [for] future photographs. We avoid tutorials, so our work could be more personal and sometimes things appear just by chance (like other things in real life!). The first photograph we did of Emma Frost's diamond effect came out from Jonathan’s suggestion of trying the effect. One day I went ahead and after perfecting it more than 5 or 6 times, it came out quite good.

As per this project, we had the guidelines to follow, we knew we had to bring to reality the powers of the characters, so we spent many hours testing how to do it [as] best as possible, until we found the result we liked best. After that we spent hours editing each photograph; we created textures, used other photographs, draw[ings], created effects, played with lights, focus or contrasts. A long and hard job, but we love it, mostly for the final result.

It's funny to see how some of your friends, or even yourself, could become Iceman or Ms. Marvel.

Me: What would be your dream costume to photograph?

Florencia: We must admit that we have a problem with birds. We would mostly love to have photographs of Hawkeye and Mockingbird. Apart from being our favorite characters, we ourselves will be the models! We've been working on the cosplays for months, and we finally released them a few days ago. I would also love to have the photographs of X-Factor, and Jonathan would very much care for a good group of Young Avengers.

On another side, we also look forward to start[ing] our second Marvel project. We expect to start soon with it and hope you will also like it.

With love from Spain ♥

Thanks to Florencia & Jonathon for sharing their series with us and look forward to more from them! Swing over to their DeviantArts here: WhiteLemon and JonathonDuran

I’ll be back next week with one last 2011 post!

~Judy

[Edited By Moderator]