Dragon Con 2023 Sunday Gallery by Wonderllama Photo

Holding Dragon Con in Atlanta on Labor Day weekend is a roll of the dice, weather-wise; it’s usually hot and humid, and enjoys the occasional tropical storm. For my return to my favorite con this year, the cosplay gods smiled on the estimated 100,000 attendees and sent us the nicest weather I can remember. So much time is spent indoors — at panels, walking around at night and checking out the amazing cosplay on display, and at the many parties. So being able to spend so much of the weekend outside was a real treat. The meetups this year were epic, filling the stairs on both sides of the Hilton back steps. The patio side was bumping this year; the perfect weather, bigger bar setup and great DJs kept huge crowds of cosplayers outside, socializing and partying.

The Hilton does an excellent job managing the outdoor spaces. The servers at the bar tents were fantastic, working hard to keep hundreds of thirsty people hydrated. The DJs were a ton of fun, keeping the party going with great dance music all day and late into the night. The volunteers running the meetups did an amazing job of wrangling cosplayers and photographers for photoshoots, keeping the spaces accessible and everything running on time.

Getting up early on Sunday morning at Dragon Con is never easy, but I wanted to snag my usual spot on the patio for making pics with as many cosplayers as possible. It was well worth a little lost sleep. Between people heading to and from meetups and enjoying the weather with friends, I got to shoot with a ton of people. It’s also a great spot to connect with old friends and make new ones. I got to see people I only see at Dragon Con, countless friends from New England, and met some wonderful new people this year.

By the time I got home from Atlanta, I was already working on hotel reservations for 2024.

Cosplayers in this gallery include swagmancer, enigmainme23, dapper_prince_, elfgrove, curlsinhoney, crescentice, smile_nova, talloolah_love, ris.harp, all_mighy_cosplay, wild_mewtwo, vega_mccree, brynn.and.tonic, liza_m_ig, drag.on.cosplay, zonyado, hollywoodmarin, thatlazysnail, mexicancowboii, roxieroadz, mags_is_me_tv, listigrav, thorgoldencub, shinylikethesun, sinistra_cosplay, ragingbabyseals, rebellionbarbie, chris_gregoire, cupcakesandcosplay, johndetty, booker_detty, and many more.

We now use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.

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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This was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, many of the characters being cosplayed here wouldn’t exist. Please consider donating to the Entertainment Community Fund here.