With no shoots or panels I wanted to see Friday morning, I slept in, and didn’t make it to AX until early afternoon. This turned out to be fortunate; Caroline, Mai and I ended up staying at AX until 11pm that day without any breaks. This was probably one of the longest days without a nap ever for Mai, and as expected we paid for it on Saturday with a sleepy and grouchy toddler. It was also a long day shoot-wise — I had 6 shoots pretty much back-to-back.

My first shoot of the afternoon was with AngelKawaii:

You can see the rest at Yuuko Ichihara (AngelKawaii) from xxxHolic.

Next came KittyCatChi, dressed in a very sexy variant of Matsumoto from Bleach:

You can see the rest at Matsumoto (KittyCatChi) from Bleach (regular version).

After processing & posting KittyCatChi’s photos the first time, I decided to try out a Photoshop plugin I purchased at AX. I reprocessed her photos using this plugin and posted a second version of the gallery:

You can see the rest of the reprocessed photos at Matsumoto (KittyCatChi) from Bleach (stylized version).

From there I had to rush to a shoot with Liberi Fatali

and Jirotaka

You can see all the photos from the shoot at Axel (Liberi Fatali) and Roxas (Jirotaka) from Kingdom Hearts.

Next came a shoot with Shinobi Yukari:

The rest of the photos are at Findor Carias (Shinobi Yukari) from Bleach.

After that I did a shoot with a group of Street Fighter cosplayers, including orchestrafro and LauraC. I deliberately heavily stylized most of the photos in this shoot to give them a very video game effect.

You can see the rest at Chun-Li (LauraC), Guile (orchestrafro), Balrog, M. Bison from Street Fighter.

Next I had a quick shoot with inuashely, who was cosplaying Lelouch from Code Geass. She had ran into someone cosplaying CC and brought her along to the shoot. Unfortunately, the person cosplaying CC didn’t speak much English, and neither of us learned her name before she had to leave.

You can see the rest of the photos from this shoot at Lelouch (inuashley) and CC from Code Geass.

Once all these shoots were finished, I spent the rest of the evening helping with part one of a Transformers shoot, but that is a topic for my next post. Stay tuned!

Caroline, Mai, and I got late start on Wednesday afternoon, so we didn’t arrive at our hotel until around 3am. My first shoot on Thursday was scheduled for 9am, leaving me with about 4 hours to sleep. Needless to say, I was fairly blurry-eyed when I met up with AntiAiChan. I hadn’t had time to scout for location, so we did the shoot in a corner in the lobby. Despite these handicaps, I think the shoot turned out pretty well:

You can see the rest at Valentine (AntiAiChan) and Lucifero from Guilty Gear 2.

Next came a Spike Speigal shoot with orchestrafro:

You can see the rest at Spike Speigal (orchestrafro) from Cowboy Bebop.

After a break for lunch, I caught up with Miss Nintendo and Naxul for a shoot:

The rest are at Chie Satonaka (Naxul) from Persona 4 and Micaiah (Miss Nintendo) from Fire Emblem.

The final session of the day was a late-evening shoot with Hellangel and Aitsuito:

You can see the rest at Sho Minamimoto (Hellangel) from The World Ends With You and Mukuro (Aitsuito) from Hitman Reborn.

In between photoshoots, I did my usual hallway cosplay photography:

You can see all my hallway photos at Hallway Costumes (Thursday @Anime Expo 2009).

Caroline, Mai, and I got back from Los Angeles late Sunday night from four extremely fun days at Anime Expo.  Not surprisingly, I took a lot of photos — over 3000 — and am still sorting through them. I’ve already finished processing one photoshoot (Valentine and Lucifero from Guilty Gear 2), but it will probably take me another two or three weeks before all the hallway and scheduled-shoot photos are up.

Here are some random thoughts about this year’s AX:

• While I wasn’t surprised about the number of cameras, I was surprised at the range. On the very low end, I saw quite a number of people using their Nintendo DSi’s camera or their phone’s camera.
• On the high end, I was expecting the large number of DSLRs, but I thought almost all of them would be low-end (Digital Rebel / D40 range) DSLRs with kit lenses. I was surprised by the number of high-end lenses and mid to high end DSLRs.
• On the very high end, I was very shocked that there were a non-trivial number of hallway photographers with off-camera flashes. One person I saw carried his camera in one hand and a softbox in the other. Another person was carrying around a small tripod and umbrella setup. Quite a number of photographers set up light stands in the various large open areas. None of these would be unusual for scheduled shoots, but I had never seen this level of lighting sophistication at a convention for hallway cosplay photography.
• Overall the convention was very well organized, but there were a number of weak spots. The shuttle buses were a little chaotic, especially on the first day. Security won’t let people congregate at night in the West Hall lobby even though there it was practically empty. (They didn’t have any problems with the same behavior in the same spot during the day, even though it was much, much more congested.)
• The LA Convention center is very beautiful, inside and out. It makes the Santa Clara Convention Center look very plain.
• The quality of the cosplay was amazing. I thought Fanime had some really great costumes, but AX topped it.
• It was big, and the convention space was vast, with long walks through very crowded hallways between various rooms. I don’t know why I was so surprised by this; Dragon*Con is even bigger and even more crowded. Perhaps I’ve been there so many times I’ve gotten used to the crowds and the venue at Dragon*Con?
• Having to take a shuttle bus to/from your hotel is a major pain, especially when you have a toddler. Dragon*Con is much nicer in this respect – leave your room, get in the elevator, and you’re at the convention.
• The Canon 24-105 lens is perfect for hallway photography on a full-frame camera.
• The LA Convention Center Staff were very friendly and helpful — McEnry staff, please take notes.
• If we go next year, we definitely want to arrive early afternoon on day 0, and leave the day after the convention ends.