Patrick Sun
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Jun 30, 1999
- Messages
- 39,674
Every Labor Day weekend in Atlanta is Dragon*Con, where 35,000+ people descend upon downtown and have a good ol' time. For a photographer, the best thing about this event is the insane number of people who not only dress up in all sorts of costumes and outfits of their favorite character(s) from many pop culture venues, but they want people to take their photos, so they are totally willing subjects. As a photographer, you could say this is a "target-rich" shooting environment.
Well, the 4-5 days weekend went by really quick. The vibe was kinda weird at this year's Dragon*Con, but I still had a good time, mainly seeking out photo-shoot opportunities to get a lot of practice shooting with my dSLR under some very trying lighting conditions. Besides trying to get some "decent" shots from the various panels of the actors/celebs (totally hit-or-miss these days for me since I rarely wait in the long lines anymore, so I'm stuck with faraway seats, or sometimes getting lucky up front if there's a single seat available half-way through the panel), I think I went to 9 different photo-shoot gatherings.
As it turns out, social networking has made it really easy for people who enjoy creating super-hero costumes and wearing them around conventions to hook up and get really organized for photo-shoots. There's even a "superhero costuming forum" (goes by SCF) where people sign up and tell the organizers what characters they will show up as, so people know if there are too many of a certain character, etc. So depending on the time of day, the lighting outdoors can be brutally bright mixed with shadows or you end up chasing daylight until you need to bust out the external flash units.
Some of the gatherings had over 150 costumed attendees, and we got to take photos of them as they all piled on a large wide set of steps from the backside of the Hilton hotel. I'd never done this type of photography (of such a large group of people), so it got really challenging to get the exposure somewhere in the ballpark so that I'd have something to work with as I knew I'd be tweaking the photos shooting under such different/difficult conditions. And then some places were afflicted with shadows and bright light (total nightmare to try and get decent shots). And then we got to shoot faux-battle scenes where people were sprawled all over a wide space (basically the photographer went up on the large set of steps and shot downward toward open spaces used for the battle scenes.
And then there's the matter of just snapping photos of people walking around the hotels in their outfits, and that's also a challenging proposition, I mainly just went into auto-flash mode and hoped for the best. I'm probably going to have to brighten up those photos because I under-exposed them while shooting with flash so I wouldn't have blown-out useless shots.
It's going to take me a while to get the photos sorted and also fixed/cropped for presentation. And although I probably snapped hundreds of shots at some of the panels just to get a few decent shots, I totally abused my poor little Canon XSi for over 9,000 actuations this weekend. My right index finger got a workout too.
Learned a bunch, and learned more about how much I don't know. Went through with manual bracketing for a lot of the group shots so I could pick the best exposed shot, never did go with AEB, just because I wasn't sure I wanted triplicate of so many shot opportunities, but in retrospect, I probably should have made the effort just for the practice.
Well, the 4-5 days weekend went by really quick. The vibe was kinda weird at this year's Dragon*Con, but I still had a good time, mainly seeking out photo-shoot opportunities to get a lot of practice shooting with my dSLR under some very trying lighting conditions. Besides trying to get some "decent" shots from the various panels of the actors/celebs (totally hit-or-miss these days for me since I rarely wait in the long lines anymore, so I'm stuck with faraway seats, or sometimes getting lucky up front if there's a single seat available half-way through the panel), I think I went to 9 different photo-shoot gatherings.
As it turns out, social networking has made it really easy for people who enjoy creating super-hero costumes and wearing them around conventions to hook up and get really organized for photo-shoots. There's even a "superhero costuming forum" (goes by SCF) where people sign up and tell the organizers what characters they will show up as, so people know if there are too many of a certain character, etc. So depending on the time of day, the lighting outdoors can be brutally bright mixed with shadows or you end up chasing daylight until you need to bust out the external flash units.
Some of the gatherings had over 150 costumed attendees, and we got to take photos of them as they all piled on a large wide set of steps from the backside of the Hilton hotel. I'd never done this type of photography (of such a large group of people), so it got really challenging to get the exposure somewhere in the ballpark so that I'd have something to work with as I knew I'd be tweaking the photos shooting under such different/difficult conditions. And then some places were afflicted with shadows and bright light (total nightmare to try and get decent shots). And then we got to shoot faux-battle scenes where people were sprawled all over a wide space (basically the photographer went up on the large set of steps and shot downward toward open spaces used for the battle scenes.
And then there's the matter of just snapping photos of people walking around the hotels in their outfits, and that's also a challenging proposition, I mainly just went into auto-flash mode and hoped for the best. I'm probably going to have to brighten up those photos because I under-exposed them while shooting with flash so I wouldn't have blown-out useless shots.
It's going to take me a while to get the photos sorted and also fixed/cropped for presentation. And although I probably snapped hundreds of shots at some of the panels just to get a few decent shots, I totally abused my poor little Canon XSi for over 9,000 actuations this weekend. My right index finger got a workout too.
Learned a bunch, and learned more about how much I don't know. Went through with manual bracketing for a lot of the group shots so I could pick the best exposed shot, never did go with AEB, just because I wasn't sure I wanted triplicate of so many shot opportunities, but in retrospect, I probably should have made the effort just for the practice.
