I just recently spent a weekend in Wisconsin to take photos at an Anime convention.
My standard setup for most of the convention:
K-5 with the DA 14mm f2.8 around the neck.
K-7 with the DA* 55mm f1.4 in a camera bag.
So I would take a few frames with the K-7 (portrait) and then another few with the K-5 (fully body). The setup worked surprisingly well. If you spend any time reading my blog, you will know I prefer prime lenses, hence the two camera bodies. While primes are quite challenging, I feel they best fit my style a good deal of the time.
When I was going to a large sit-down event in the main programming room, I would switch to this setup in the meantime to take portraits:
K-7 with the FA 31mm f1.8 around the neck for people photos.
K-5 with the DA 50-200mm WR in a camera bag for the event.
That setup also worked nicely as the 31mm is a pretty great all-rounder lens. I can’t easily get full body shots, but it was “good enough.”
I had decided to forgo using flash just to see if I could manage image quality wise, and to avoid lugging around a camera with a flash and bracket. While fast glass isn’t a substitute (harsh indoor light sources are killer without fill flash), it worked pretty decently after seeing the final post-processed results.
The K-5 with the DA 50-200mm WR combo was surprisingly strong when dealing with a very large and dark room that had intense directional light covering an elevated stage. At times I was shooting in 12,800 ISO. I see the resulting images are quite serviceable with noise reduction software like Noise Ninja. Slow shutter camera blur was never a problem, although I was struggling with over-exposure…
Here are a few highlight images:
