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Entry tags:	con report, cosplay, otakon, photography

Quick Stop in Baltimore


Cosplay Pictures from Otakon 2008
Otakon this year was fun, but far too short. Otakon is always too short, but this year I feel like I hardly did anything. And so many people I saw only very breifly or not at all. Particularly disappointing now since it looks like my next east coast con won't be until Katsucon. (NYAF was looking likely, but seems infeasible due to timing relative to a work deadline.)

Thursday

The adventure started with being picked up in Newark, NJ. In a car that really didn't have space for four cosplayers + luggage. But we managed to sort of fit somehow. Many tolls later we were in Baltimore. And much confusion with one way streets later, we were at our Hotel. Time for location scouting for me, and waiting in line for my roommates. Also at some point picked up a toy that I was renting - Tokina's 12-24mm f/4 rectalinear wideangle lens. I've wanted to play with an ultrawide for awhile (since high school), and sklathill's pictures had sort of renewed that spark.

First stop with the new toy was the Thursday Air Gear gathering. The picture on the right is taken with the ultrawide. So wide I had to clone my foot out of the picture. Things were going well until they started getting wet. My gear is cheap and certainly not weatherproof, so that got cut short in favor of running for cover. In retrospect, I wish I tried to maybe talk one of the cosplayers to go out in the rain and shoot them from under cover. But instead we played a game where each person names a yet unnamed anime starting with the letter after the previous person. Somehow many of mine also ended up being wanna-be yaoi shows like "Weiss Kreuiz" and "Saiyuki". ^^;; Next year, I'm going to have to collect some Toul Tool members for a shot by this clocktower
Then waitied a whole 15 minutes in line for registration after the rain let up. (Or something close. It was pretty short.) Then on to photoshoot with serindrana.



I was hoping she'd have a friend with her that I could use to help hold lights and such. But no. So I had to do some juggling. One of my wonderfully cheap flash triggers was failing. So at one point I ended up triggering one of my flashes myself. With 1/3 sec shutter speed, that was kinda tricky. But I didn't want to let in too much of the orange sodium vapor light to mess with my nice blue & green picture. I think it was worth it. For the rest of the con, I limited myself to two flashes.
I was originally planning to use inside hotel spaces for the pictures, but only did for one. serindrana wanted pictures by the waterfalls. I'm glad I listened to her, because all of those are much better than the one inside shot I have.

Friday

The plan was to start with taking pictures at the Ghost in the Shell gathering. (One of my favorite series, and one I'm really lacking many photos of.) But that didn't happen. Instead, adventures in wig styling, and last minute sword repair. (I was considering re-doing the bade before. Now I have to redo the blade.) And because I'm an idiot who doesn't understand mirrors, I ended up twice trimming the side that was already shorter. So, my Suigintou's front/side hair is a little shorter than I wanted it to be. The wig has bangs now. Unfortunately I don't think anyone I know took my picture, so I don't have anything to see/show how it really looked.

Met Bryce, a friend from college, had lunch with his friends. Lunch took forever just getting the food - fastest seeming option, Subway, was OUT OF BREAD. (Guess they didn't get the memo that nearly 30,000 extra people would be flooding the area that weekend.) Back to the con. Time for Part I of geronkizan's shoot - time to jump around. Then dinner I think and then time for a photoshoot w/ firelilycosplay as Velvet from Odin Sphere.

For this, I think I got a little too focused on the glowing psyphers. That was sort of my point - to work on showcasing the glowy parts - and I think I succeeded in that. But I think it's a little lacking compared to my other photoshoots at Otakon in other regards (sorry). Also, at Otakon I was trying to be more concious of backgrounds, but maybe ended up also focusing too much on that.
Then Part II of geronkizan's shoot - time to hold still - the experimental shots involved many 10-30 second long exposures. (15 ended up being the best I think overall) First round was this glowing butterfly experiment. Glowing butterflies are an important part of anime. Really. I was once keeping a list of appearances of anime series with glowing butterflies, and it was pretty long. It's like the unspoken archetype after giant robots and harems.


To do this, I had Geron hold still while I ran around and manually popped a flash. The flash had a diffuser on it. A gel over the diffuser. And Rosco foil cut to look like a butterfly taped over that. (image above) Also, since I didn't think it was practical for him (or anyone) to hold perfectly still, he is mostly lit with a flash, freezing his initial pose. This actually leads to an interesting look by itself. (example).
Unfortunately, I think it looks like I made a custom brush in GIMP (or Photoshop for the rich people & pirates), and just dabbed it around randomly.
 


I consider it a first step towards a trash the cosplay shoot. Along the lines of Trash the Dress style wedding photos (which I'm jealous that solartempest has done), I'd really like to do a cosplay trashing shoot. So if anyone has something they're looking to retire and don't mind getting wet/stained/muddy/bloody/etc., I'm interested. (Though I should probably get a little better at photography first.)
Midnight D.Gray-crack, then off to sleep.

Saturday

Cross Marian day. (Not the Marian Cross, and certainly not Zunade (if you don't get it, There's a story you can listen to. (warning: contains content NSFW and arguably not suitable for anyone)) And general day for Generals of D.Gray-man. Who were my roommates, and all of us were about an hour late to the gathering. There was general insanity, Caramel Dansen, stripping (C9 got the coat this time) and so on. Followed by lunch, were we had the misfortune of find out what Linali would look like with a mullet. (be afraid)
 

On to War of Genesis with envirion and dear_mo. My attempts to stick to fitting backgrounds fell apart here - can't really simulate a desert on Baltimore. (Or is there nearby park with a sand pit I should know about?) But I did get to play with more special effects. I had dear_mo hold a flash aimed at the camera. I used what Shiroin calls my "bling filter" along with some camera movement for the top left shot. The character is a mage of sorts as I understand, so that's my take on casting. I climbed on on a fence of sorts to get that shot. Made some person from the church we were shooting at nervous, and we got kicked out. Trying to come up with idea for the two cosplayers together, we came up with a death scene for Marzana. (not accurate to the game since the two characters never meet) This time I really wasn't happy with the flash for the casting effect. So I decided to just have her pretend and do it in post. So real flare & fake flare.

After WoG, Bryce found me for a Macross Frontier shoot. Dozens of paper airplane tosses later, we were ready to wrap up, and animalboything was bugging me to join the roomies and some other D.Gray-man cosplayers for food and drinks.

Yeah... apparently animalboything's tolerance is even lower than I thought. And I'm sure improper con eating didn't help any. (And as such, alcohol was having more of an effect on me than what I thought it would based on what I had.) That lead to various amusement chronicled by lazyartistgirl in her post. I have video too, but I'm too lazy to do anything with it. I do have a Bak x Cloud 9 picture to share.

After, some mild recovery, we went to the midnight D.Gray-man gathering. Tossed around nuts or something. Took some not so great pictures. (Proper camera gear was in the hotel room, so I could travel light for dinner.) Was very sleepy. Ducked out early.

 
Sunday

I was sort of a panelist on the D.Gray-man fan panel. That is to say, I spent a bunch of time in the hotel room fussing with Cross's Goatee, showed up to the panel 45 minutes late. And fooled around in character a bit. Then afterwards Cross got pinned down by Cloud 9 and buttsecksed by Lau, Linali, and Krory. (WTF is with surprise buttsecks anyway? It's like the new glomp.) Yeah...

There was maybe going to be a Phoenix Wright shoot w/ piratess__ (&co?) but that didn't happen. (Katsu?) Possibly for the best, since that was the only day I really did much random convention center wandering. Too many plans this con. Too little time.

Sunday also included various issues, late evening drama, and a very out of the way trip through seedier parts of Baltimore only to end up eating dinner about three blocks from our hotel.


Whew. That was a lot. Guess no one actually read it all. If you see a cool picture, the stuff about the picture is probably nearby.