Quick take: You don't need a big camera and a bag of lenses for great photos. I shot a cosplay portrait session with my Sony RX100 VII point-and-shoot using the same cheap light modifiers I use with my main camera: a window, a reflector, a small LED, a ping pong ball diffuser, and a Godox speedlight triggered off camera in optical slave mode. The results came out really well.
Why a Point-and-Shoot?
I'm the camera guy in my friend group, and people get overwhelmed fast when I start talking about interchangeable-lens systems. I was also getting tired of carrying my X-T3 and two or three lenses everywhere. Point-and-shoot cameras from the last four or five years are really good, way beyond the 5-megapixel Cyber-shot you had as a kid. And since almost all of us post our photos online instead of printing them, do you really need a $5,000 setup?
For reference, my X-T3 with the 50-140mm and 16-55mm covers about the same focal range as the RX100 VII in my pocket. The big camera gives you better image quality, and those lenses stay at F2.8 all the way through, while the RX100 VII starts at F2.8 and loses it quickly as you zoom. But one fits in a pocket and the other doesn't.
Which Point-and-Shoot to Buy
The RX100 VII is an amazing video camera, and I mainly own it for the mic jack I need for work. As a photo camera it's honestly mediocre. If you're buying a point-and-shoot for photos, I'd recommend the older RX100 VA, or even the older Canon G7X Mark II, which you can find used for a lot less.
The Light Modifiers
A window: The most basic modifier. Put your back to the window so soft light falls on your subject.
A constant LED light: It can blind your model a bit, but it helps a lot when you don't have a flash setup.
A 5-in-1 reflector: Not enough photographers use these, and they're about $20. You get gold, silver and white reflective sides, a black side for negative fill (deepening the shadows), and a diffuser.
A ping pong ball: I found this one in an 11-year-old forum post. Cut a slit in a ping pong ball and fit it over the pop-up flash, and you get a low-budget version of a speedlight diffuser. If your flash doesn't flip up, cut the ball in half and mount it over the flash. Video folks can make something similar from diffusion paper.
A speedlight in optical slave mode: This is the one I was most excited about. Godox speedlights have S1 and S2 modes that put the light in optical slave mode, so the camera's built-in flash triggers it, and suddenly you have off-camera flash on a point-and-shoot. The speedlight's sensor has to see the pop-up flash, so positioning gets a little tricky, but it opens up photos you otherwise couldn't get with a compact camera.
How They Did
I started with the ping pong ball, because it's the easiest and cheapest. Make the slit a little bigger than I did. The pop-up flash isn't powerful, so even through a translucent ball you'll want to raise flash compensation by at least one stop. I really liked what it did.
Next was off-camera flash. At conventions with no-stands rules, I hold the speedlight up on a grip; otherwise it goes on a portable light stand with a small softbox. Expect a slight delay when it fires. The whole setup costs around $125 if you don't already own it, and most photographers already do. It was my favorite setup of the day by far.
Working Within the Limits
A nice side effect of shooting a point-and-shoot is that you learn to work around its limitations, and that gives you a different kind of photo. Not every photo needs a super blurry background to be good. A lot of people, me included, fall into that trap, and it gets boring after a while.
The sample photos came out great, good enough that I'm thinking about bringing just this camera to Katsucon. Huge thanks to Alyssa (Alyssa Yoo Cosplay on Instagram) for modeling.
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