Category: Photography

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Music Photography

Japan Music Festival at the Roller Den, Sydney

Jill

I tagged along to the JMF on a whim, partially as a fan of JRock/JPop – and partially as a photographer looking for somewhere to practice my camera-craft during my off-season.

It was a great show.  Ended up buying Jill’s and kaimokujisho’s albums.  Should have picked up Sparky’s album too, but I was suffering pretty badly from the volume levels and was trying to make it out without spending all of my cash.

Unfortunately for me, I made the amateur’s mistake of not taking earplugs with me – my ears finally stopped ringing 3 days later.

It was a great first outing for my new second-hand 70-200 2.8 VR, which performed admirably in the conditions.  I had also completely forgotten some of the crazy with the D3 and the space remaining counter, so I thought I was running out of space by the end of kaimokujisho’s set – many poor (but potentially salvageable) bursts got deleted, and I thought I had significantly less space during 101A’s set than I actually did, so shot hyper conservatively…  then I discovered about 3 minutes into Jill’s set I had a whole memory card free.  I’ll try to remember about the damned counter next time.

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Photography

Animania Sydney 2011 Photos and Wrap-up

Well, Animania has come and gone.  I’ve posted my photos up to Flickr as usual.  Spent plenty of time chatting with Kris from whatabigcamera.com and a few other of the regular anime convention photography crowd whom I’ve been interacting since I got back into things.

Very low shutter count again this time – I think only 100 for the entire weekend over both cameras, and even that may be higher than reality.  After SMASH! I’m finding I’m a lot more selective over how I take shots, and I’m shooting a lot more with Flash Exposure Bracketing turned off, so I’m losing a few more “would have been good” shots than I used to, but have a lot less to cull overall, and the average quality is a lot higher.

The bulk of Saturday’s photos were taken single strobe – the later ones done with strobe off camera.  Mostly used the 5D, but took a few notables with the 50D + 50mm/1.8 combo mostly so I would have some material to defend my “you can do this with cheap, mainstream gear” claims. 🙂

The majority of Sunday’s photos were taken dual strobe – main off camera, on-camera unit for fill.  Having two 580s is handy that way.  Only took the 5D, but switched between the 70-200 and the 17-40 a fair bit.  Really need to pick up a 24-70 at some point.

Categories
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.