We went to the last day of Florida Supercon 2016, making this the 4th year in a row we attend this particular convention.
Unlike any prior year, we now had Ansel to accompany us, and he had a blast!

While I was the one carrying the majority of the gear, you can see Mary brought her Fuji X-E2S along with the very capable 18-55mm f/2.8-4 kit lens.

I brought a ton of gear with me, just to be sure I wouldn’t regret not having done so. I used the Canon 6D as main camera, paired with Canon’s 50mm f/1.4 lens. I also brought and used the Canon 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens (great lens for the price), the Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro, and the Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS for use in the costume contest. I was using a Yongnuo 568EX II flash on camera, with a diffuser. I brought a monopod to use…details below on what ended up happening to it.

Did I mention Ansel was a hit at the convention? Well, he was!

That photo, and most photos of that day, were taken using the 50mm f/1.4 lens at around f/2.8. I’ve mentioned this before and I will continue to mention it…your worst enemy at conventions is the lack of light. So having a fast lens is very helpful here. Sure, I’ve taken photos at conventions using kit lenses and using f/4 and smaller apertures…but f/2.8 or faster is really preferable to keep that ISO down.

This Captain Jack Sparrow had a fun twist on the current political campaign. I had a chance to photograph him individually later on in the day, and I used the 50mm lens again to achieve a good background/subject isolation.

I mentioned above that limited lighting is your biggest enemy in an indoors convention. But there is also something else that I find very problematic and difficult to overcome: busy/distracting backgrounds. Most times, I’m just spending seconds with any one cosplayer you see in my photographs. That means I don’t have the luxury of moving the cosplayer around, of cordoning off an aisle so I don’t have constant foot traffic in the back of my photo, etc. This is probably why I tend to prefer portraits, rather than full body shots, so I can leverage the assistance of bokeh in isolating my subject.

I took this photo using the Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro at f/2.8, to accentuate the bokeh while capturing the fine details of the cosplayer’s face and the texture of the helmet.

Sometimes I use some more aggressive editing to highlight my subject, including using Photoshop and using some of the camera effects provided by the Nik Collection. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoy the results.

Having said what I said above about missing light, sometimes you can use shadows to your advantage…

These guys were creepy, creepy, creepy. Their masks and make-up were expertly done, and had tons of details. I shot this one with the Canon 16-35mm f/4L IS because I wanted to exaggerate their features and wanted to use the distortion that 16mm would create. To make sure I had enough depth of field to capture all the details, I shot this at f/11. Lastly, I used the flash as fill to bring some of their facial detail out. With a little bit of editing using the Nik Collection, I ended up with an image I very much enjoy.

By the way, these guys run the Fright Nights Haunted Houses in Florida. Having seen their masks in person, I don’t think I want to be scared by these guys in a dark haunted house. But if that’s your thing, these guys had a great attitude and I’m sure you’ll have fun.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any behind the scenes photos for this convention. It was hectic, tiring, but lots of fun. We’ve attended Florida Supercon since 2013, back when it was a small con run out of the Miami Airport Convention Center. By now it’s so big, that it has been hosted at the much-larger Miami-Beach Convention Center for the last two (or three?) years. It’s a big event, and very crowded – yet, it was fun and felt like it was run well. No complaints about the logistics.

The folks who frequent these conventions are friendly and love getting their photographs taken. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone turn me down when I’ve made a request… which certainly encourages you to keep photographing.

We like going to the karaoke event if the convention has one. Why not? It combines karaoke (awesome!) with cosplaying (awesome!) – that’s a winning combination to me. The karaoke event from this convention was run by DJ Anim8ted, who was great. Check him out on his website here. I look forward to attending more karaoke events hosted by him, that’s for sure.

But, there was one BIG problem with this event. He turned off the lights on me! Oi!

I mentioned early on in this blog post that I brought my monopod along. This is where I put it to use thoroughly.

With the lights off, I was shooting at f/1.4 1/60 and had to bump up the ISO to 5000 and sometimes 6400 just to get barely enough light on my subjects.

Here is gamemaster Nick Roche delivering his brilliant rendition of Pilot’s Magic. The glow behind him is from DJ Anim8ted’s laptop…that’s how little light we had to work with.

I relied on the monopod for all these shots, as I don’t trust my hands to be steady enough at 1/60 and slower.

By the way, I chose not to use flash as it would have been disruptive. As I mentioned before, most of these guys don’t mind one or more photographers snapping away. But don’t ruin their fun. I was in the front row, and sometimes getting awfully close to the singers, and it just felt like constant flashing wouldn’t be welcome. You may wish to ask, or you may wish to do as I did and make the best of what you have. Your call.

This was a great karaoke event. So great, I forgot I was photographing and not performing…and I started to get a bit active. So active that I eventually broke my monopod. Somehow, I managed to snap the bolt that screws to the bottom of the camera clean off the base of the monopod. Ouch.

I think that’s enough rambling, don’t you? It was a great event, and we plan to continue attending Florida Supercon for the foreseeable future. Feel free to say hi if you see us.

There are a ton of pictures of the convention on our Facebook page. Click here to see the rest of the convention photos. I have a separate album for the karaoke photos, as there are so many. Click here to check out the rest of the karaoke photos.

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