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Photography

SMASH 2011 Photos and Wrap-up

SMASH! has come and gone. It was an excellent effort given it was it’s first time at the Sydney Convention Centre.

Unfortunately, I was quite sick this past week and have only just gotten over that – so I cut my kit down heavily (I only brought one camera, 2 lenses and my speedlights), kept my activity down to a pretty low level and literally only took a few (about 40 total) photos.

To contrast, at both this year and last year’s Supanovas, my shot counts were up around 2000 photos for the whole weekend, of which I have to cull pretty heavily to get down to the 100-200 photos that get posted. Also, because I’ve taken so many photos of so many people, I feel compelled to at least publish some of the poorer photos if they’re still ‘viable’ because it features a cosplayer who has gone to great efforts to make their costume, etc, and I simply don’t have a better photo of them.

This time, because it was so short and sweet, the culling and selection was extremely easy, and the quality of the results compared to some of the other events speaks for itself.

The gallery of photos can be found on Flickr.

Technical Details

(Because for once, my workflow stripped the EXIF – I’ll work out why later…)

All photos were taken with an EOS 5D Mk1 with EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS. (I had my EF 17-40mm f/4L in my bag, but didn’t use it at all).

The first 6 (predominantly outdoor) photos had fill-flash from a single on-camera Speedlite 580EX II with Rouge Flexible Flash Bounce Card. After I shot the first few photos, I also connected the Speedlite to a CP-E3 battery pack to improve it’s cycle time

The last 6 (indoor) photos were lit using an off-camera Speedlite 580EX II with Rogue Flexible Flash Bounce Card. Triggering was done via a standard Canon ST-E2 trigger. Flash held by captive flash bunny (thanks Retro!) – the camera weighs about 3kg in this configuration and I can’t balance the 70-200mm for conventional shooting one handed without introducing a LOT of shake to the camera.

All flash metering was Automatic. No Auto Exposure Bracketing or Flash Exposure Bracketing (FEB) was in use.

All post-production was done in Aperture from Camera RAWs. All edits are crop, exposure, dynamic range, and vignetting only. For once, I needed to do almost no cropping.