Dragon*Con 2010 Photo Hunt / Discuss

vatavian says:

I didn't find every single thing on the list but I had a lot of fun looking.

I had given up taking photos at D*C because all the possible photos to take were just too overwhelming. This list gave me a reason to try bringing a camera again, this time with a more focused mission than the impossible "take a picture of everything interesting."

I got a chance to experiment with a couple of different cameras borrowed from friends and with my phone and made some important discoveries for future camera shopping.

1. Although my phone is very handy and always with me, it takes poor pictures indoors and even outdoors it takes mediocre pictures slowly.

2. A camera that may look small and inadequate to a "real photographer" can still be too large to easily tuck away when someone else wants to take your picture and too heavy to ignore its weight and bulk in your costume's limited carrying space.

3. There is a new generation of ultra-compact cameras with a nice zoom range that take great pictures and fit much more easily into any carrying space you may have.

4. I wish cameras had a separate knob for choosing what the flash does. Every time some cameras power on, they turn the flash back on and it takes time and attention to turn it back off again. Perhaps it is no wonder so many people keep using their flash even though DCTV asks them not to.

I also got a chance to experiment with some free photo editing tools. I have not found something yet that easily does all I want, but IrfanView is great for quickly looking at images and doing some basic cropping and pasting together. The GIMP is very powerful and I get the feeling I could learn to do great things with it. I had not used Flickr much before and learned more about how it works. I now see I was perhaps too timid at first, uploading smaller versions of my pictures than I needed to.

Finally, I learned more about several aspects of D*C and fandom as I tried to track down photos. I had not heard of the double rainbow meme, I had not visited the filk track before, I had barely heard of Last Airbender, I had no idea the Stargate universe was so varied, I learned more about comic books, who Christopher Nolan is, and more about WoW.

Thank you to the organizers for putting this together.
Posted at 9:00PM, 13 September 2010 PDT (permalink)