PhotographyBanzai.com

One of the great things about conventions is the potential for meeting new people and networking. While I had known of Stephen ( "Secretasianman" ) through the Anime Central forum, I had never met him. This year we met at the photographer’s gathering we had organized through the forum. On that Friday we also spent some time doing “hallway cosplay” photography along with yet another photographer Jacob .  One of the great things about photography is that it reflects the multitude of choices we make before pressing the shutter button. Everything from equipment choices to framing angles and camera settings create a unique and special image that can only be our own. After seeing Stephen’s photos from our time doing photography together, I thought it would be fun to go through some of the images that were of the same cosplayers.  Stephen with a classy suit and my camera on the other side. He was using a Nikon D700 with a Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 lens. He was also using a small flash ...

I’m finished going through the entire ACEN photo set. Even though I took considerably less than 2011, it still took around a week due to having some contract work.  My favorites and other honorable mentions I didn’t post before:  With the big drop in quantity, I think I’ll have to try my best to stay at a hotel closer to the convention next year. The cost would go up around 3 times though. 

This is it for my Anime Central 2012 photos. I finished going through the Sunday photos last night, but passed out half way through them being uploaded to my Zenfolio gallery. Now that I’m back in the game, here are the results.  A few highlights: Sunday was getting pretty sparse around noon, so I didn’t stay too long. Most of the activity was in the dealers room. It’s always pretty challenging to take photos in there, but I seem drawn to it. I think maybe because the backdrop really puts out the convention atmosphere.

I finished going through what is usually the largest day photography wise. It looks like I took things pretty easy this year; only resulting in around 300 general convention photos for the day. Enjoy! Here are a few highlight photos:  Equipment wise, I again used the 31mm f1.8 lens for the majority of my wandering around photos. I also switched off to the 85mm f1.4 for gathering photos frequently because that lens works well in those situations where it is hard to get close to the people posing. The Masquerade event was a big bust for various reasons. They force the seating, resulting in a pretty useless situation photo wise with people blocking the way and being far back.  The Masquerade also was severely cut due to everything running behind as well as a fire alarm at the Hyatt hotel. Next year I’ll consider applying for a press badge to avoid some of the hassles that come with being restricted as a normal attendee (If you happen to know the process, please contact me ...

I finished going through the photos for Friday. They turned out pretty decent. Here are a few photos from Friday: Equipment wise I used the K-5, 31mm f1.8 lens, and Sigma flash most of the time. With settings I used aperture priority often with a fixed ISO and a negative exposure bias. That’s usually my go-to setup for quick reliable photography. It allows me to focus on more than just settings by not having to control shutter speed or flash power directly. The K-5 and 31mm held up pretty well with focus, but at such large apertures it is always going to be an issue.

I don’t often do private photoshoots. I generally like just walking around and randomly asking for photos of cosplayers. However, I don’t mind and will usually take them on if someone contacts me. ACEN wasn’t a definite plan until very soon before the convention started, so I only really had two people contact me within the time that I knew I was going. Revy from Black Lagoon The reason I don’t do private shoots very often? I don’t like carrying around a ton of equipment. It’s usually expected that a private shoot should be more involved and result in images that are something more than the average convention picture. That means more elaborate gear than I normally use. This time I kind of took the middle road and brought just enough to get more variation to the private shoot photos compared to the hallway cosplay photos I normally take. The negative was that I carried around more than I needed 90% of the time.  Female Fujimoto From Ponyo Equipment for hallway photos this year:...

Besides private photoshoots, I just finished going through the pictures I took on Friday for the Sixh.OPERA event. This was an event where the Japanese designer named “Sixh” had a fashion show that was also mixed with his own live band music. It’s an interesting combination. Here are a few photos from the show: Equipment wise I was using the Pentax K-5 and FA* 85mm f1.4 lens. EXIF is visible in the gallery link above, but basically I was shooting around f2 with an ISO of 800. I tweaked the photos a bit in Adobe Camera RAW for color and contrast. No noise reduction was performed. 

I recently went to ACEN 2012. This is my 6th ACEN I’ve attended (first in 2003, skipped 2008-09). If you are unfamiliar with these events, they are Japanese Anime/culture events. They also include other topics like sci-fi media, comics, video games, Internet spawned forms of media, and costuming. I took quite a few photos, but it will take me a while to go through them (potentially a few weeks as I’ve been doing some contract work lately). Check back here for updates. Thanks!  Here are a few photos from Friday: One of my photoshoots. She was cosplaying Revy from Black Lagoon. A nice Japanese girl from the Angelic Pretty company. It was fun trying to throw a few poorly thought out phrases in Japanese to her. She tried to get me to go to their fashion show. I went and it turned out they didn’t allow photography. There was a second fashion show after the Angelic Pretty one which I assumed also meant no photography, so I didn’t go. It turns out I was wrong when a fellow photog...