PhotographyBanzai.com

I had checked the forecast a day or two before and noticed a moderate chance of showers. My decision was to use only the K-5 and DA* 55mm f1.4 lens. We ended up having some light showers once or twice while at the garden, so that decision worked out. I just kept using the camera as normal without any issues while the rain was coming down. The nice thing about meetups like this is that I can just focus on the basics, but I’m also inclined to do a more experimental style of framing my subjects. This leads to images that might receive some critical comments on first view, but when examining them further, they might see the intent involved. For example: Multiple times I noticed scenes where the foreground let in just a bit of something interesting. A visual hint of interest lies in the middle of the frame that you put a little extra time into trying to distinguish. On first glance, it might have an amateurish feel, but I don’t believe that is the case when my true intent realized. As...

I was recently given the task to digitize transparent slides from the 1960s. The color transparency slides posed an interesting problem. Conventional scanning was difficult because the slides are small and are designed to be back-lit by a projector. There are dedicated devices available that can scan film negatives, but they are expensive and difficult to find. The standard scanner that I had wasn’t sufficient for the task because it couldn’t resolve enough detail in such a small area (it was 1200 dots per inch maximum).  I made a view on this process and uploaded it to Youtube : You can find many of the items used here: Kit.co product collection I created a DIY digitizer with: LED lamp to act as a backlight. The color of light from this lamp is close to daylight. I don’t know what color of light these slides are designed for, but this was my best bet. Cardboard and tape for the slide holding structure and various simple tools to form that. Two camera flash diffusers to even out th...

What is Chicago Comic Con? It is a large multi-day Comic/Science Fiction/pop-culture convention held at the Donald E. Stephens convention center in Rosemont, Illinois. It consists of an extremely large dealers room, a vast number of artists showing and selling their work, a large number of famous people, various scheduled events, and a lot more. This year I felt that they stepped things up to another level with a nice flow to the convention layout. I found that navigating the main convention was much easier than in 2011 because they moved some of the large booths like the Delorean car, Batmobile, and Ghost Busters vehicle to a nice bright location in the convention center’s entrance hall. A wise decision that made the convention even more exciting to explore because it used more floor space. You can learn more about Wizard World Chicago Comic Con here: Why I attended this convention? I was there to cover what I call hallway cosplay, which are costumers that attend the convention as cha...

Usually I write a summary at the bottom of my articles that are primarily meant to update viewers about new photographs. This time I’m separating the technical into its own article so that I can go into a bit more detail. On Friday I had attended a small photo session at Cantigny Garden in the morning and afternoon. Once that was finished, I had around 1.5 hours to spend at Chicago Comic Con. I made the most of it and ended up with around 100 photos of cosplayers and costumers. Friday at the convention: Pentax K-5 camera Pentax FA* 24mm f2 lens Sigma flash, diffuser, green flash gel placed in the diffuser. Time was limited, so I used one camera and lens with a focus on covering what cosplay I ran into. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of activity so late in the day. There were plenty of people cosplaying, even more so than I remember seeing on the Sunday of Comic Con 2011. My intention with the flash gel was to equalize the color of the flash light to ambient. The gel ...

Before Comic Con, I attended a small meetup at Cantigny Gardens in Wheaton Illinois. It is a large park with a lot of green space, flowering gardens, buildings, a tank park (yes, military tanks), and other various structures.  The equipment used: Pentax K-01 with the Pentax FA* 85mm f1.4 lens Pentax K-5 with the Pentax FA* 24mm f2 lens and Sigma flash. The LCD screen is a lot more vibrant on the K-01, so I had thought I was having issues with the K-5. In retrospect, both sets of photos turned out nice, although I did have a higher percentage of junked photos from the K-5 setup. Mostly from focus errors and not getting settings correct. Properly mixing flash and ambient was somewhat of a pain because lighting conditions were changing from minute to minute. Overall, I’m happy with the results.

I finished processing and uploading my photos from Saturday at Wizard World Chicago Comic Con 2012. I have the images uploaded to this Facebook gallery (you can tag yourself after liking the FB page). A few highlight photos: 

I finished processing the photos from Friday. I ended up with a bit over 100 photos. Not bad considering I only attended the convention for around 1.5 hours on Friday. I have the images uploaded to this Facebook gallery (you can tag yourself after liking the FB page). A few highlight photos: 

I was able to attend Chicago Comic Con at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center for around 1.5 hours on Friday night (6:30-8pm). I plan on going there today as well, so I don’t have enough time to process photos for submission to my gallery. Expect the photos to be uploaded in a few days. I was really impressed by the level of activity so late in the day. The convention hall was full and there were quite a few cosplayers/costumers walking around.  I know someone from the D20 Girls booth, so I talked to them for a few minutes. A few of the things they do are modeling, convention volunteering, booth staffing, game demoing, being panelists, and event coordinators. The convention was full of classic costumes with individual flare applied. Here is a classic Batman costumer and someone from the Green lantern universe. These gentlemen were very tall and fit their individual super hero persona well. Mortal Kombat video game cosplayers. They were very friendly and enthusiastic abo...

I edited and uploaded the video that Mixed Visuals and I collaborated on for Anime World Chicago 2012. This video consists of 13 interviews with mostly cosplayers, but there are a few extras in there. The video will be cross posted on both Youtube channels and I plan on writing unique articles for each site (this site for the technical, and the other for a convention focus). You can see a more general article on the video at cvfta.blogspot.com located here . EDIT: I eventually put a bunch of cosplay and convention videos into one and moved it to my cosplay/crafting website:  With 13 interviews of varying length, the video ended up pretty long at over 18 minutes. The CVFTA Youtube channel is new, so it had a 15 minute cap on it, but Google has an option to verify the account with a cellphone to allow for longer length content. Sound: I brought along the Zoom H1 Handy Recorder to act as a secondary separate source of audio. I’ve never tried recording interviews before, so I th...

I attended Anime World Chicago on Saturday August 4th.  This time I was partly collaborating with a friend on content for our new site  cvfta.blogspot.com . I was juggling various things, so I didn’t put in as much time into photography as I normally would.  Facebook Gallery   For this convention my equipment was: Pentax K-01 with the 10-17mm Fisheye lens for video and a few stills. Pentax K-5 with the 24mm f2 lens and flash. Sigma EF-530 DG Super flash with a mini soft box diffuser and 1/2 CTO gel. While I had intended to use a standard lens with the K-01, I switched things up at the last minute and focused on using it for video. The K-5 was all for photos with the flash attached to it the entire time. The flash setup was the first time I had tried using the little soft box I had as well as a color correcting gel. The gel was a “color temperature orange” at 1/2 stop light loss. The main intention here was to try and equalize the flash’s light and the majority of...