[Leica] More Anime Convention Photos

[richard-lists at imagecraft.com (Richard F. Man)]

http://www.dragonsgate.net/photopost/showgallery.php?cat=3020
This is the Masquerade and the Friday set. I have ~100 photos from Saturday 
to be processed and uploaded later.

Let me stress again that for most "cosplayers," they love to see their 
photos. So they don't mind even really glaring photo errors (e.g. trees 
growing out of their ears, or lens distortion make them appear to have a 
giant nose, or they suddenly acquiring green tints w/o green makeup etc.), 
as long as they are in the shots. In other words, there are redundant 
photos or some that are definitely decidedly not too good. Having said 
that, I really like how some of them came out, especially on the Friday 
set. I was playing with different composition technique of cutting off 
portion of the body to add drama, but my wife just told me that whenever I 
do that, it's almost always the right side that I chopped off. Oh well. 
live and learn.

In the Masquerade set with the Studio flash, I didn't have time to fully 
explore different lighting techniques or try the single lighting technique 
that Mark Rabiner suggested. For the group shots, it definitely will not 
work well anyway. Anycase, I did move the lights from my usual boring two 
lights at 45 degrees setup and moved the lights further back with the right 
light being stronger and the left one more like 30 degree and closer but 
less powerful to try to eliminate some back shadows. In some shots, I think 
it works reasonably well, but in some others, it fails spectacularly with a 
big ugly shadow right in the middle. Again, since the cosplayers want to 
see themselves, I left even those up. I would have not put them up 
otherwise. Generally, I am happier with these studio light shots than the 
ones I took a year ago (it was the first time I used the lights in this 
sort of situation). Last year I got some burnt out with the white costumes, 
and this year looks like at least I got that mostly under control.

Camera: M7, 35/1.4 ASPH, 50/2, and a small number with 90/2AA. I bought the 
Tri-Elmar to travel around Japan but I found that it is just as easy to 
swap lens or move around. I do martial arts and I notice that after a shoot 
of 2-3 hours my legs would be killing me because I would quickly switch to 
difference stances to get different angles and distances from the subject :-)

As usual, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

// richard (This email is for mailing lists. To reach me directly, please 
use richard at imagecraft.com)