PAX East 2026 Thursday Gallery Part 1
The good folks at PAX East brought us back this year as the official Cosplay Photo Studio and we couldn’t have been happier. This year many of the first-time issues from last year were gone, and it was mostly smooth sailing, albeit quite busy. How busy?
We doubled the number of photos taken on both Thursday and Friday from 2025 numbers and increased the numbers on Saturday and Sunday by around 50 percent.
Before all that happened, I showed up Wednesday afternoon to set up the studio gear we once again rented from LensProToGo only to find that one of the four boxes was missing. Of course, it was the box with the most important and expensive gear, the Westcott studio strobe lights. The box wasn’t found until late Thursday morning and didn’t get to our new room until noon — when we were supposed to be open and taking photos. Since I had everything else ready to go, it only took me about 10 minutes to finish setup and start taking the first photos of 2026.
That new room for both the studio and the Cosplay Repair station, once again run by Castro and the wonderful team from GiveWave Studios, was 207 — much closer to the front of the building than last year, and on the same floor as the skybridge from the Westin hotel (important for fat old men with bad knees like me). It was also right next to Room 206, where most of the Cosplay Meetups were scheduled to take place. Some of them, for scheduling reasons, took place in last year’s room, 109, but for most of them our meetup photographer Jibrii of spectra_v3 simply had to walk about six feet from our room to the next.
Because we doubled the number of photos from Thursday 2025 we will have double the number of galleries. And while I will increase the cut-off number I use to split galleries for the rest of the 2026 photos, anticipate weeks’ worth of posts before we get to the Sunday photos. Friday this year we took more photos than Saturday last year, and Saturday we took half again as many as Saturday 2025. Those two days alone will hold just shy of 2,000 photos.
Among the cosplayers in this first of two Thursday galleries are skulryk, damon124567, Carley Winn Cosplay, mangoloo.cos, sqoblin, shannon3673, Kate the Great Cosplays, clockychan, theinternetegg1, craftycontraptions, alhanalemtheyuke, sadieliplady, triforcedelgeezy_cosplay, andromedagato, lizniz119, pikachuinapikachu, wreckeur, nanaakaonasis, faith.fit.blerd, cattableabby, chameleighontv, mrtnz_camo, and many more.
We use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries. To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
If you like our work and want to show your appreciation, feel free to tip us at Ko-fi or become a patron on Patreon.
Also, High-res images for sale is back!
If you are pictured in any of our galleries and want the high-resolution (3200 pixels at its widest by 300dpi) download for yourself, we can make it available via a private Smugmug link, for $10 per image. Just send an email to editor AT nerdcaliber.com. Currently limited to only photos taken by FirstPerson Shooter (aka Rodney Brown).
