High Contrast Cat

Cosplay Bonanza: Memory Versus Reality

The beauty of photoshoppery is the ability to make a digitally captured moment look exactly how you remember it, make the colors and mood just as vivid as it actually seemed. Digital devices lack the ability to truly capture what the human eye does let alone capture the awe of the moment. Here is a more in depth view of one of the shots pictured from last weeks post as I remember it versus how the moment actually captured.
[mouse over to see original capture]



Hardest part about shooting at a convention is that there are tons of people that get in the way and the back drop is a convention center... which is about the dullest backdrop possible. A plethora of wall mounted visual distractions and photo bombers. Two big background distractions that I was oblivious to when I snapped this shot was the mildly disgruntled man sitting up against the wall and the gray wall panel.

Of these Mass Effect cosplayers, the girl in blue on the right was the most impressive. The costume is well done, tons of amazing detail. When I looked at the original in detail after getting home from the convention, I noticed some things (aside from the background distractions) that detracted from my memory of the moment. The girl after a long day at the con had some of her makeup beginning to wear off, the headpiece was starting to come a bit undone, and her bra was sticking out a bit. This is the reality of the moment, but wasn't true to my memory and initial impression of the moment. A true naturalist would have left it as it was and could even argue that by "fixing it" I destroyed the original integrity of the moment... Ultimately, I can live with this since I was able to recapture the moment as I remembered it.

Cosplay Bonanza!

Any convention with cosplayers is an opportunity for guerilla photography. Tons of people running around in carefully crafted costumes that are anxious to show them off. If you are holding a camera all you need to do is make eye contact and they stop and pose. With GenCon 2012 right around the corner, I've been looking back on some of the shots I got last year..

One big issue I've had in the past was with there being multiple visual points of distraction that wound up in each shot. Still being quite the photography noob at this point (2011), my focus was just getting a good shot and not considering techniques I could have used to put more focus on my subject. So, I cleaned up in post. Even with all of the best intentions, a shot can still turn out less than ideal due to people getting in the way. Next post, I'll go into some detail on how I corrected some of these distractions and what my approach was. For now, enjoy a smattering of my favorite shots from GenCon 2011:

Sunrise, Sunset..

Sunrise, early morning, evening, sunset.. best times to shoot. Some more shots from the great north:

More U.P. Adventures: Horse Race Rapids

Down a remote dirt road in the U.P. is a winding nature trail that follows along Horse Race Rapids. Maybe when the rapids were discovered someone was exploring the woods and thought that they heard horses racing and followed the sound to these rapids. I prefer to imagine that at some point horses were actually raced down these rapids. Horse racing on a level enclosed track is just as dull as NASCAR. Racing horses down rapids with tons of slippery rocks seems far more thrilling... and while the riders throw sticks of dynamite at one another. 

I digress.

Shooting in nature is still where I'm learning that most about using my Cannon s95 in full manual mode. It's easy since my subject matter doesn't move or position itself in a way that I don't like. That being said, it's still not simple necessarily.. interesting shots are everywhere, but you have to find them first. In a heavily wooded area, there isn't always an obvious target, you have to dig a little bit more. 

While shooting outside with decent light, I'm preferring keeping the aperture as closed as possible to increase the depth of field as much as I can. Especially since these shots wind up being more about the scenery and of the landscape. I've also been playing with trying to keep the ISO setting as low as possible to reduce noise and keep the shot crisp, which works perfectly since my subject matter again isn't really moving. In some of the shots with the moving water, the motion is a little more obvious due to the lower ISO setting while the rocks and trees are crisp and well defined. All images had contrast and vibrance boosted in post.