Tsukino-Con 2015 Part 1

Tsukino-Con's dance always takes place thursday night, before the con, as a place to pick-up badges and entertainment to start the weekend. The last few dances at Sunset Room venue, I've discovered that it's better to take people outside to get shots than inside.

Inside I'm fighting with other people's movement distractions to the model and house lighting. Outside its me and my camera alone with the subject.

Friday came and the convention started in earnest and I had my largest group shoot. Eleven members of a cosplay group all doing Akuma No Riddle. We shot in three areas of the UVic campus over a hour. I was very happy with the end results.

Friday was also the Lolita Fashion Show, for which I was late, but managed to get some great shots.

Tsukino Con 2013

As always Tsukino-Con is a labor of love. In past years I've been the Media and Public Relations person for the con, this year I added Webmaster. No easy situation for an Anime Convention with as many staff and departments as ours. The staff and departments though are what makes it easier on all of us putting together a three day convention with 1743 attendees.


The great thing about my job with the con is that all my work is done in advance, giving me the convention to be a semi-official photographer.

Thursday after helping with setup, I attended the pre-Convention dance on getting some great shots of Chelsea spinning her hoops and a good crowd of cosplayers dancing to three different DJs. Anya won best costume for her Vanellope von Schweetz costume.


Friday I got in a little photoshoot with +Alex Rodri and her friend Ali, as they cosplayed Bunny and Jack Frost from the film Rise of the Guardians. I had fun with Ali's Jack Frost hoodie enhancing the frost detail that she had on it and giving her a paler complexion. As for Alex's Bunny, I used a contrast enhancement to bring up the detail of the fur and my usual method for giving smooth skin to models.

Saturday saw more Homestuck Cosplayers and I asked Jen if the tricksters were always supposed to be grey skinned, sometimes I saw them with faces and/or hands that weren't coloured so I wasn't sure. Once she confirmed, I knew that I needed to work on a post process to fix the tone of some tricksters flesh where the paint wore off, and where some people didn't paint.


Sunday was another great day for pictures and I got more of Jen, this time as a Gothic Lolita Trickster from Homestuck.

I also met a Tinkerbell who's an actress and wanted copies of her shots, so we did a set of 22 images and got some great shots. I love it when someone really knows their character.

Tsukino Con 2012

Victorian Lolita by
Astra Crompton

This year's Tsukino Con is over, but my editing of pictures is just getting started. I managed to take just under 1300 images over the course of the four days.

Street Fighter by
Tyler Krembrink &
MJ Brown

Day 1 of the con for me was Thursday February 16th with a noon start to set-up. At the end of set-up I helped with pre-reg badge pick-up. Then I got some pictures of DeeJay Yukkuri 's Unlimited Dance Works over at Vertigo. Various cosplayers dressed up and dancing to the hard beats.

Day 2, Friday the convention starts in earnest and I get in a series of shots of a Street Fighter duo. Tyler and MJ did a lot of posses and I'm actually still editing a few. I had never met MJ before, but quickly discovered how excellent a Cosplay Model she is.

Rachel as Spock
from the new film.

Day 3, Saturday, always the most going on. I think I got in 3 group shoots before the Cosplay Contest at 1pm, then another before I had to get to my do my panel at 4pm. That in its self was an adventure. I went to my panel room 15min early to set up and do a but of a dry run, only to discover the presentation file on my tumbdrive had become corrupt. Its a good thing I have some improvisational skills. I managed to stumble through my Cosplay Modeling presentation with a few picture shown on the screen from my computer, but defiantly not the kind of presentation I wanted to give. I even lost a half-dozen people about ten minutes into the panel.
The day continued with more individual pictures and a few more set, like one with Vanessa in her Black Widow, from Marvel Comics.

Home Stuck

Adobe Bridge is an organizational software application created and released by Adobe Systems as a part of the Adobe Creative Suite. Its primary purpose is to link the parts of the Creative Suite together. Bridge has many functions such as batch rename and utilities to help with organization. Organizational features include assigning coloured labels and star ratings to images, the ability to edit metadata embedded within an image file.

Day 4, I think I was starting to get a little tired, I kept talking to the Home Stuck cosplayers and calling them Home Sick, Home Suck, Home Tuk and probably a few other names. By the end of the day I managed to be part of a gathering of about 40 Home Stuck cosplayers for an amazing set of pictures.

After the convention I've encountered a few editing issues. first my Photoshop kept bogging down, any time I had it and Bridge running. So I started editing one image then shutting down Bridge. A real pain in the rear to have to do every time I want to edit a new image, but I dealt with it. Now my Bridge program is not displaying image preview planes correctly, which makes it really hard to see what files I want to take into Photoshop to edit into a final image.

I'm starting to get some more editing done but I have a full time job to work around. I expect to work on some photos from the Hunger Games shoot I did with Alex and Jen.

Reborn

From Saturday at Tsukino Con 2011. Morgane (L) and Aimee (R) as Adelheid Suzuki and Chrome Dokuro from the Anime/Manga Reborn.

Hungary for Turkey

Dylan and Alex as Turkey and Hungary from Hetalia, an animated series where the characters represent various European countries.

Taken on Sunday at Tsukino Con.

Cross Universe

Managed to gather three individual cosplayers for a display of their powers. There was a Poison Ivy around that I got separately, but she's a villain anyways

Right now I don't know who any of these Cosplayers are.

Astra in Blue

Astra Rae in her hand-made OC costume.

This is Erdyne from Ul-Zaorith an Original Character from her Original World and RPG.

We did this series of shots in the basement of the Elliott Building during Tsukino Con.

Want Some Tea

Starting to get some images up from Tsukino Con 2011. The convention was held at UVic back on February 24 - 26 of this year. I had a great time and took over 850 images. There will be more posts from the con in the coming days.