PAX East 2026 Friday Gallery Part 5
By the end of the day Friday, it was clear that we had taken more photos than Friday of 2025. When I got back to my hotel room and offloaded the photos onto my laptop to start processing them, it became clear how much more.
We doubled the number of Friday photos from the previous year (OK, just a smidge under double). What’s more, we beat the number of photos I took on Saturday of 2025 — and that was a record for any single day at any convention I’ve ever been to. In fact, it was more photos than I shot previously at most three-day conventions. So, to break that number on just Friday of PAX East 2026 — well, I started really worrying about what Saturday would bring.
Last year I was absolutely wiped out by the end of that Saturday, so I couldn’t have handled this year’s Friday without the help of my second photographer, David. Not only did he do almost all the shooting between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., he came back to the room to help out multiple times up until we closed the doors at 7 p.m.
One of the many upgrades from last year was that this year the room we were in could actually be completely locked up with only key card access. Last year that was supposed to be the case, but after two days of that failing, requiring the Enforcers to haul all of our rental gear to the show office where it could be locked away, we discovered that the key card lock mechanism was broken. It was a great relief this year for us and for Castro and his Cosplay Repair team from GiveWave Studios to not have to worry about our stuff. The final photos in this gallery is of the Friday version of that repair team.
Cosplayers in this last of five Friday galleries include ryosuke91kc, matchamind, scottitom, heroxallf4th3r, seemeglitch, casualinacorset, thepinkrathian, seraphclad, lshadows69, theunnamed.egg, thekamberries, jscosplays_, iheartarby, lance.mrph, smalldoozy, trynasaurus.cosplay, gravitytestr, d_a_b_d_a_d_d_y, suudsu2200, monarchs_devil, aralylangomas, chameleighontv, rollo_linwood, nomvirus, wolfzillasaur, cha_dyl, razzy_.jazzy, shadeseer19, captain_ayame, papergauntlet, cosplay_fool, colorreciipe, safern93, itsmetoni_cosplays, iadontknow, GiveWave Studios, eguzman314, glitch_vbk, 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.
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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).
