I attended Anime World Chicago on Saturday August 4th.
This time I was partly collaborating with a friend on content for our new site cvfta.blogspot.com. I was juggling various things, so I didn’t put in as much time into photography as I normally would.
For this convention my equipment was:
- Pentax K-01 with the 10-17mm Fisheye lens for video and a few stills.
- Pentax K-5 with the 24mm f2 lens and flash.
- Sigma EF-530 DG Super flash with a mini soft box diffuser and 1/2 CTO gel.
While I had intended to use a standard lens with the K-01, I switched things up at the last minute and focused on using it for video. The K-5 was all for photos with the flash attached to it the entire time. The flash setup was the first time I had tried using the little soft box I had as well as a color correcting gel. The gel was a “color temperature orange” at 1/2 stop light loss. The main intention here was to try and equalize the flash’s light and the majority of ambient hotel light together (thanks to Ben of fotaku.com for some gel usage suggestions). I think that even with the mixed lighting scenarios, the gel did help me avoid strong orange backgrounds to my photos, which is great. It looks like I’ll be using the gels more in the future. However, I am not too fond of the results with this little soft box, so I will try to use one of my other diffusers with gels in the future.
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Almost a given for every convention it seems, I had some issues with focus accuracy (K-5 and 24mm setup). It looks like I had a reasonable number of photos with front focusing, but the errors were not usually enough to completely junk the photos, especially at web resolutions. I’ll have to look into that combination to see if I can improve my technique or apply a micro focus adjustment. It’s possible I was just a bit too quick at the draw and caused some of the issues myself.
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Along with the focus problem, my flash unit seemed to stop functioning a few times. It seemed to be active, but the flash just wouldn’t fire. Cycling the power on the flash was usually enough to get things functioning again. It’s possible that flash might be on its way out, but I hope not… TTL capable flash with HHS are not cheap.
Here is a copy of my other article in case that blog goes away at some point:
Hey, this is Scott of Photography Banzai. I'm one of the contributors to this new media team known most simply as CVFTA ("Conventure Fireteam Alpha"). I'll be posting articles about various events we attend, but one of our main staples will be conventions. We attended Anime World Chicago on Saturday August 4th to take photos of cosplay as well as some clips for a few different videos. I recently finished processing my photos, enjoy!
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The convention was fun. Size wise, it was probably one of the smallest ones I have been too in a while, but that's a good thing in some respects. It's a bit strange to see the location that Anime Central uses be so much less active. Along with AWC, there were a few other events happening at the Hyatt hotel such as a wedding and some type of business meeting. The negative there is that they were casually limiting access to large sections of the hotel, so some of the better shooting locations like the dome were not available.
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The one event I went to was one of Samurai Dan's panels. His panels are always interesting and fun, so that was a nice diversion from taking photos and walking the small convention footprint. Looking at the schedule, the lineup looked solid, so I'm sure that general attendees had a good time in that respect.
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Only attending a single day is good and bad. It costs significantly less than attending multiple days considering the large cost of having a hotel room. However, being able to take a good relaxing break is difficult, so I often don't manage a full start-to-finish convention day.
The convention started at 9am, but we decided to get there around 11am. We left around 7pm, so only around 6 hours. I'll have to try harder in the future to get more time in on photos when attending for a single day.