FAnime 2008

Last weekend I took my annual trip to San Jose, CA, for FAnime. For four days, I photographed hundreds of people in costume, many very eager to model and pose for the camera. Some of them are either trained or natural models, and can pose themselves well.

Surprisingly, there were some people who recognized me from last year. I'll grant that I don't carry around the most common point and shoot camera, but there are nearly as many photographers as there are people to shoot. This year I came prepared with actual business cards with my name and website address instead of pieces of scratch paper.

I had studied more portrait photography techinques in the weeks leading up to this event, and modified my own style of setting up a shot. I brought a reflector meant to bounce light up as fill light, hoping to brighten up the faces of my models posing outside. For the first time in my life I set my flash to manual mode, and adjusted flash power and aperture to try to isolate my subjects.

All told, I took nearly 1600 pictures over three days (Monday was a loss; the hotel wasn't staffed to handle everyone leaving on the same day), compared to about 600 that I took last year. I'm much more comfortable having my flash on manual, and am glad I just jumped in the deep end in that regard. I only took short breaks to sleep for a few hours, eat with my anime-fanatic friends, and even watched some myself. I was able to do some very basic processing of my pictures where I could take advantage of Aperture to automate simple tasks. My laptop lacks the RAM to quickly do more--those corrections will have to happen once I get home. Sometime over the next few days I'll be uploading many of my images to anywhere.

Happy New Year

Last week I learned the smell of redwood trees can make me homesick for the Bay Area, which is particularly sad given I wasn't in the Bay Area, but near a small grove of those trees near Sonya's mom's place in Yorba Linda.

Jason's uncles learned they're ready for a few boys of their own.

We were lucky that both our flight out and our flight home weren't affected by storms in Chicago; the day before and the day after each flight had storms so severe flights out of O'Hare were cancelled. California was so much fun to visit, I think we'll go back next month!