After skipping Fanime’s Masquerade last year, I decided to go this year because I knew several of the people doing skits, and because I wanted to exercise my 5D Mark II a bit. Specifically, I wanted to try out three things: my new Sigma 100-300 f/4 lens, the 5DII’s high-ISO capability, and the 5DII’s video recording. Because I arrived about 40 minutes after seating started, I was stuck at the very back of the balcony. On the bright side, this had one advantage: I could stabilize the 100-300 lens on the 4-foot wall behind the last row of seats. This was important because I didn’t have a tripod, I was going to be shooting at or near 300mm the whole time, and that lens doesn’t have IS.

Because of the dark background the camera’s auto-exposure wanted to overexpose everything, so it took a bit of fiddling to find the right camera settings. I ended up photographing everything in ISO 6400, and even then, the shutter speed was somewhat slower than I would have preferred. In the end the images are a bit softer and noisier than I would like, but given I was taking them from so far away, with no flash or tripod, I think they came out reasonably well. Certainly my previous camera, the 40D, wouldn’t have been able to take anywhere near as good photos. Also, I cropped some of them closer, which makes the noise and blur a bit more obvious.

The videos didn’t turn out that bad either. They are a bit shaky because of the lack of a tripod, but the biggest issue is focus. The 5DII’s video mode does not autofocus during recording, and the 100-300’s focus ring was very easy to hit while hand-holding the lens for video recording. I frequently accidentally knocked the lens out of focus and then had to manually refocus. Also, video mode appears to have been hacked into the 5DII at the last minute, making starting and stopping recording harder than it should be, so some of the videos start a bit late. All in all, though, it wasn’t too bad for a first attempt, but I think I can do much better next time.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the Masquerade:

You can see the rest of my Masquerade photos at http://photo.oscarc.net/gallery/8389387_uTJgd, and you can view my Masquerade videos at http://photo.oscarc.net/gallery/8322316_jFAKT.

Shortly after picking up my press badge for Fanime, I did my first photoshoot of the convention with KittyCatChi and Wren. In fact, this there were a lot of firsts in this shoot: my first shoot with a 5D Mark II, my first shoot with PocketWizards, my first shoot with the 100-300/4 lens, and my first shoot with this light stand. Fortunately, Kitty and Wren were very patient, and we didn’t run into too many glitches. They also brought along a friend (whose name I don’t remember, unfortunately) who wasn’t in costume and who was willing to help me with the lighting. Without her help moving the umbrella when needed, the shoot would have taken twice as long. She also kept the light stand from falling over when the wind started to pick up. The cosplays themselves were excellent, with some fake blood and other makeup adding the finishing touches to two well-made outfits.

Here are my favorites from the shoot:

The rest of the photos from the shoot can be seen at http://photo.oscarc.net/gallery/8291095_Fnj4L.

This past week I attended David Ziser’s “Digital Wakeup Call Tour: A New Dawn” photography seminar.  The description sounded promising — for $59, get four hours of tips and tricks from one of the top wedding photographers in three broad areas — photography, software post-production, and building your business. I attended expecting lots of useful information.

So, you may ask, how was it? Overall, it was excellent, and I was very happy I went.

During the photography section, Mr. Ziser rapidly went over a flurry of tips on how to take high-quality, distinctive event photos. A few of the tips, like always taking indoor flash photos in M[anual] mode, I’d stumbled onto myself after lots of trial and error. Most, though, like manually zooming your flash when taking wide angle shots, were completely new to me, and will be very helpful the next time I’m in those situations. Mr. Ziser has a very different style from mine, and his photos are aimed for a different audience, one that prefers large prints over Facebook, so some of the tips didn’t apply. However, overall, I learned a lot, and I think the info from this section will do a lot to improve my photography.

The software section was where the tour sponsors became painfully evident. Given the relatively low admission price for such a high-quality seminar, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of the tour’s expenses were being paid for by corporate sponsors, and that those sponsors were promised advertising in exchange for their support. Mr. Ziser did seem genuinely enthusiastic about the products he talked about, and they all seemed helpful for most event photographers. They appeared to be less useful for me personally, for two reasons.

First, my style of cosplay photography is very high-volume — historically I’ve done more con coverage than selective photoshoots. That, coupled with the fact that cosplay photography pays, on average, $0/photo, means that I can’t spend that much time on each photo. In general, I try to spend no more than one minute editing each photo, including cropping, color, exposure, and contrast. Even with that goal, if I post 2000 photos from a convention, that’s 2000 minutes (or about 33 hours) of photo editing. If I tried some of the techniques described in the software section, it would take me six months to post all the photos. Though as I do more private photoshoots, I’ll probably start posting fewer photos, and have more time to edit each one.

Second, I do almost all of my photo editing today in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software. (The one major exception is noise reduction, where I use Noise Ninja.) DPP fits into my existing workflow very well, and I have no good reason right now to make changes. In the future I may move to Lightroom, but I haven’t felt I need its complexity or power quite yet.

After the software section, the seminar concluded with a section on growing a small service business. While the examples were, of course, all photography-oriented, they could easily be adapted for any small business. The most important tip, to me, was one that I still struggle with — Don’t undervalue your work. As a small business its easy to convince yourself you have to compete on price, that your business has to have the lowest prices, and has to win over every potential customer. A better approach is to charge a sustainable price, ignore unprofitable customers, and accept that you won’t be the best fit for everyone.

While in general the business tips were excellent, the technology-related tips did seem a bit behind the curve. Blogs were mentioned, but some other leading-edge techniques were ignored, including the importance of a good corporate web site and building awareness of your business on social networking sites.

I wasn’t very surprised by these omissions, because in general there was a very obvious gap between Mr. Ziser and today’s younger generation. Mr. Ziser has been very quick in adopting new photography technologies, including digital photography, the latest high-ISO techniques, IS/OS/VC lenses, and dSLRs with video recording. However, he doesn’t seem to have adapted as well to changes in how people view photography and paper prints.

For example, Mr. Ziser still believes looking through a physical wedding photo album is a better experience and is more romantic than looking at the same photos together on a computer screen, and he’s right, for most people down to the age of about 25-30. Younger than that, though, I believe the mystique of a physical wedding album is much less, and in many cases will never be preferred over looking at the same photos on the computer together.  In my experience people below the age of 25 very rarely want prints, regardless of the occasion, even when they cost $0.19 each; if you ask them to pay $10 or $50 a print they’re going to look at you like you’re trying to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge.  And, no, I don’t believe they all will regret the lack of a physical album in the future.

Mr. Ziser was also a bit behind the curve on data archiving. 45GB of data still seems like a huge amount to him. With today’s 1.5TB drives around $120/each, it’s a trival amount to store. Except, of course, when you’re trying to burn the data onto DVDs. Wait, why DVDs? Well, apparently, Mr. Ziser believes that DVDs are better for data archiving because they have been certified to last 100 years. Putting aside the obvious question of how media can be certified to last 100 years without a time machine, will it even be possible to find a DVD reader in a 100 years? (Consider 5.25″ floppies, and how hard it is to read one of them less than 20 years after they were the #1 storage medium.) A better solution is to archive data to the largest available storage device today (1.5TB drives), and then recopy the data every few years to a newer, higher-capacity solution. For example, I originally archived my photos to 700MB CDROMs. When DVD burners came along, I consolidated my CDROM archives into a few DVDs, which were later consolidated onto 250GB hard drives, which recently were consolidated onto one big 1.5TB drive. Because digital media changes so fast, archives have to be constantly moved to newer media, so as long as your archival medium lasts 3-4 years, you’re set.

Mr. Ziser also all but admitted he doesn’t really understand social networking sites like Facebook. In general, his customers appear to be on the older and fairly-well-off side. That’s certainly an enviable position to be in, but one that limits how much exposure he has to today’s younger, middle-class photography customer. Because of differences in how a screen and a printer render a photo, a lot of his photos don’t look that great until you see them on paper, preferably 10×14 or larger (or on metallic paper). This is perfect for his client base, but is less desirable to other customer demographics who want photos that also look great on Facebook.

I felt the seminar was well worth $59 and four hours of my time, despite the sometimes heavy-handed sponsorship messages. I came away with lots of mental notes on things to try the next time I’m in the field, and am very happy I attended. I recommend this seminar for all event photographers who wish to improve their craft and their business.

My new Canon 5D Mark II camera arrived this past Monday, and the 24-105 f/4L lens followed on Wednesday. Due to my work schedule, I wasn’t able to do much with it (other than a few family portraits) during the week. Today, though, we all, along with Ian, Peggy, and Erin, went over to Vasona Lake Park in Los Gatos to have some fun and take lots of photos. Ian also got some new camera gear this week (in his case, the Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS lens), so we were both eager to experiment with our new gear.

The weather was ideal by my standards — overcast, slightly windy, and a temperature around 65. Surprisingly, Vasona was not crowded. Perhaps the rain in the morning scared everyone away? In any case, we couldn’t have asked for a better place for the kids to play and for us to walk around.

The 5DII and 24-105 performed surprisingly well. Focus was fast and accurate, exposure was dead-on about 80% of the time, and the photos were sharp with lots of detail. Because the 5DII is full-frame, I had to keep my aperture smaller than I would have on my 40D to avoid depth-of-field issues.

The only major disadvantages to the 5DII so far are all file-size related. Photos eat up space on the flash card much faster (4.6GB in less than 2 hours), take longer to copy off the card, are slower to open/edit, and take longer to upload. I could save sRAW (small RAW) instead of RAW, but then I wouldn’t capture as much detail or be able to crop as much. I’m a big believer in always setting a camera to maximum quality to ensure flexibility in future post-processing.

Here are my favorites from Vasona:

You can see the rest of my photos at http://photo.oscarc.net/gallery/8085521_prHit, and you can see Ian’s photos at http://photos.codrus.com/gallery/8085728_76J6S.