Albuquerque Comic Con

Albuquerque Comic Con 2016: Photos From the Floor

Albuquerque Comic Con 2016 can be considered they year that I mastered getting the shoots I wanted from the floor. The trick that I always knew would work is to slow down. The mistake I’ve always made was not wait on the focus to catch before hitting in the shutter. The images came out tack sharp with that classic subject isolation I’ve become known for. What made Albuquerque Comic Con 2016 so successful was just the atmosphere. Over the past couple of years I’ve made friends with so many attendee’s artist and vendors that it becomes more of a hangout sessions with people you don’t get to see every day.

Harley and Deadpool get Naughty at Albuquerque Comic Con

When working with new people you never quite know what you’re going to get. Sometimes you get somebody who’s a little shy and reserved and you have to slowly get them out of their shell to get the shots you want and others Jump right into character and start giving different things to work with on a shoot. The later of which was Holly Rebelle and Kit Kombat who jumped right in for our shoot at Albuquerque Comic Con and slap me in the face with their confidence and freeing personality. Normally when I shoot I like to keep things a little slow and reserved but in this case the tempo was so high that shoot was over almost before I knew it.

Girls of Geek Make Albuquerque Comic Con Their Wonderland.

Out in a little corner of the Albuquerque Convention Center way from all the warm and low tungsten lighting lays a stair well with a corridor that hold giant windows letting in all the natural light you could ever want. That’s were I was able to transport the Girls of Geek to get some shots of them as Alice in Wonderland Characters for the last Day of Albuquerque Comic Con. I enjoyed how each one of their outfits made since next to each other but could stand alone on their own as identifiable characters. I love working with the Girls of Geek and working with soft natural light so this set of images in my mind are almost perfect.

Albuquerque Comic Con 2015 in Photos.

Conventions are always long, exhausting and crowded; But that doesn’t change how fun they are to go to and how fun they are to shoot. Here’s to a great year of Albuquerque Comic Con hopes for more to come.

Albuquerque Comic Con 2015 Preview: (ReEdits from 2014)

It’s a new year and what better way is there to kick it off than going to a Comic Convention? If you’re a humongous nerd like myself, there really isn’t any. It’s always fun to go to these conventions and spend time around people with similar interests and just celebrate our enthusiasm for nerd culture. I only got to make it to one day last year but this year I plan on taking the whole weekend in and sharing with you the visual goodness that I capture.

Now last year was one of my first outings for using my d600 and I can tell you, having a full frame camera was a godsend with how little light I was dealing with. It was dark, crowded, and I had to literally had to shoot wide open just to get anything. This year however they have changed locations to the Albuquerque Convention Center which think is great because 1. I’m familiar with the layout of that building from all my outings at ACE (The Albuquerque Comic Expo) 2. Lighting is so much better and 3.Crowding shouldn’t be an issue like it was last year. This year I will pretty much have the same gear and I’m hoping that the photos I get will show a years worth of improvement in my photo skills.

As always I will be focusing on the people who are attending the event and the creative costumes that many of them have come up with. Some of the things I’m expecting to be popular are characters from Guardians of the Galaxy considering how popular that movie became, and probably a ton of Harley Quinn (because that’s just how it is.)

Normally I don’t much care for the celebrity guest that come to these things but there are some notable ones like Sean Patrick Flarney of the Boondock Saints cult classic and Fabian Nicieza who wrote one of my favorite comic book series, Cable and Deadpool. Whether or not I get permission to get photos of the guests is still up in the air, but if that’s a No-No I’m not going to be heart broken about it.

Another really exciting thing about Albuquerque Comic Con is getting to see some awesome people who I don’t get see on a regular basis like the members of the 501st Legion: Dewback Ridge Garrison, some of my cosplay friends who are always bugging me for photo shoots.

Speaking of photo-shoots, I’m probably going to be doing quiet of few of those while I’m there. I’d like to get some new people in on them but if that doesn’t happen it won’t be for lack of effort. Posed shoots are always fun to do at conventions and it’s always great to give cosplayers who have spent so much time and effort a chance to show off their work everywhere and not just at the convention.

So here’s to what hopes to be a spectacular Albuquerque Comic Con and I hope I get plenty of stellar images to share with all of you.

Photographing Albuquerque Comic Con: The Challenges of Low Light and Crowded Spaces

This past weekend was Albuquerque Comic Con (ACC) and as previously mention I went to to cover the event in a photographic fashion. This year the event was being held at Hotel Albuquerque down in Old Town and while it was a great venue it came with some of the hardest conditions to shoot in. 2 factors played into making this assignment challenging .1) The lighting was awful. It was a dimly lit hotel all over the show floor using mainly tungsten light bulbs with some areas letting natural light in through windows. 2) Incredibly tight spaces with a large turnout made crowding and moving about the area difficult. Both situations were manageable however with just a little know how, patience and letting go of some nit picky things.

The main thing I needed to figure out was how I was going to deal with the low lighting. Being that the light was so low I pushed the ISO to 6400 on my D600 and was shooting at a wide open aperture. The workhorse lense I was using all day was my 85mm f1.8g and it pretty much never came off the camera body. Ideally I would have liked to stop down to f2.8 or f3.2 to get some added sharpness and depth of field but I needed all the light I could get so wide open at 6400 was where I had to go.

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As a result I had to sacrifice keeping slight amount of grain out of the images and the risk of missing focus on the subjects in order to get properly exposed images and cut down on motion blur. As an added bonus for shooting at f1.8 I created some excellent Bokeh (out of focus areas) to cause awesome subject isolation. Now a lot of other photographers that were there covering the event were handling the low light differently by using a flash. There is nothing wrong with using a flash but I personally don’t like using an on camera flash that is going to cause some awkward shadows in the background and not to mention being that I wasn’t there shooting in an official capacity I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself while I was on the floor. (Note: I was aloud to shoot this event I just wasn’t there for a publication or affiliated with the con itself.)

So the main thing I did to handle the crowded spaces was to stick with my already tried and true style of shooting candidly/journalistically. As previously mentioned in a past article on convention photography you see that a lot of people will stop the cosplayers in the hall and ask them to pose or take a photo with someone else. At this event especially it caused some problems with blocking traffic and resulted in some missed opportunities to capture moments as opposed to posses. So by shooting in aperture priority and high ISO and keeping tabs on what shutter speeds I was getting I just kept shooting on the go. There were times when I would miss focus or get some annoying backlighting messing up my exposure but for the most part this style served me well. I couldn’t quite nail focus on every shot I took but being that I was shooting candidly and not posed portraits I didn’t lose much sleep over not having the sharpest image possible.

Now it wouldn’t have been a convention if my cosplay friends hadn’t asked me to take some portraits of their cosplays. This is how the final challenge of the con took place, finding a secluded area to shoot that has useable lighting. Long story short I was able to find a place outside with no people around to get some portraits of my friends. Now I could lower my ISO to low and noise free levels and stop down my aperture to f3.5 and f4 to get that added sharpness.

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Overall it was a great event and I got some stellar images out of the whole thing. So far I’ve been getting incredible feedback and it’s always great to shoot cosplay.

Convention Photography Tips.

Well the annual Albuquerque Comic Con (ACC) is right around the corner and chances are if you are attending (assuming you live anywhere near albuquerque and you’re into that kind of thing) you’re going to see a large number of photographers and regular patrons out with their DSLR’s, Smart Phones and point and shoot cameras taking pictures of everyone in a costume. I’ve shot quite a few of these comic book/anime conventions like the Albuquerque Comic Expo (ACE) and smaller ones like Con Jikan, and have seen other peoples photos from said conventions and I have noticed some trends in the photos taken at these events. Some of them good some of them bad and others are in the grey area of photography that is personal preference and style. So here I want to give some tips on how to get some of the best images at these conventions. (Note: These are all personal opinions on what you should do. I am in no way an authority on Con photography nor do I claim to be and the thing about photography is that we all find our personal styles and vision in the craft. I’m just giving you guide in what I like seeing in my personal images when I cover events like this)

Tip #1 Shoot Candidly.

Candid photography at these kinds of events is one of the most underrated styles of photos and people miss out on the opportunity of capturing rare moments that you’ll never get to see in regular day to day life. Where else are you going to capture Members of the Justice League mingling with the Avengers, Joker and Harley Quinn going up an escalator dressed as Batman and Robin or Rick from the Waking Dead eating a cheeseburger in a dining hall? The answer is nowhere else.

If you aren’t looking for candid shots however I’m going to let you in on a little secret: You don’t necessarily have to pull the cosplayers over. In my experience if you go around shooting at a convention if a cosplayer sees you have a camera pointed at them they’ll stop and pose for you. I know, crazy right? It’s quite the change of pace from candid shooting in public where if someone sees a camera pointed at them they get skittish and shy or sometimes even paranoid. It’s actually rather gratifying to know they want to have their photos taken. If you choose to shoot this way I would recommend using a short telephoto like and 85mm lens of even a 70-200 so you don’t have to be getting in their faces. It’s not a nessesaty, just a suggestion.

Tip #2: You don’t have to get the whole costume in frame

This is just a personal pet peeve of mine and I realize that not everyone agrees with me but I get annoyed when I see people get a mediumly wide shots of a cosplayer to get the entire costume frame. It throws off the composition, You’re getting a lot of things going on in the background that are going to be distracting and over all you just don’t get a very good photo. I might be guilty of overusing tight shots I will admit but once again a tighter shot helps keep your composition clean and makes it easier to blow out the background. Now I know many cosplayers will spend weeks and sometimes even months putting their costumes together and they want to show off their work but if they really want to show off they’ll get a photographer to do more professional portraits in them as opposed to just getting images done on the convention floor.

Tip #3 Publish and Share

These days copyright and having images stolen or appropriated is a problem, and sharing them online on places like Flickr or Facebook can be a little risky but in my experience putting the images up and letting people find and tag themselves in their photos has been a huge help in getting my images out there and letting people see my work, and more often than not the response has been incredibly positive. Sure a lot of the times people will only praise the subject in the photo and not the person who took it but if you do quality work people will recognize that and appreciate that and that leads to networking and establishing credibility.

These have just been a couple of tips that you can take to heart if you ever find yourself shooting at a convention. Feel free to try them, or ignore them as you see fit but remember that the important thing is to go and shoot. These Conventions can be fun, exciting and even exhausting but you can get amazing images and meet unique people that you won’t find anywhere else. I look forward to seeing what ACC has in stores for me and am looking forward to getting more images to add to my portfolio. If you are attending I hope to see you there and if you ever get the chance to shoot at a convention I would encourage you to do so. It can be incredibly rewarding.

TCK-Media

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