Wicked Comic Con 2023 Saturday Gallery By FirstPerson Shooter, Part 2

So, what’s the deal with these slightly blurry photos that you mentioned in the last Wicked Comic Con gallery article? Well, since you asked…

Over the course of the last five years or so, I’ve noticed an increased occurrence of getting slightly blurry images in some galleries shot at some conventions. It hasn’t been happening all the time, but it has been happening more often over those years. Unfortunately, three of these past five years have been during the pandemic, and I’ve hardly shot any photos at conventions, so I wasn’t able to determine a specific trend until just this past weekend.

Also unfortunately, it has been happening about the same time as an increase in my hand shakes due to Essential Tremors (an inherited but harmless condition, not life threatening like Parkinson’s). So, I just assumed that I needed to keep my shutter speed high enough to compensate for the shakes, and the Optical Stabilization in my preferred con lens, my Sigma 17-50 f/2.8 continuous, would handle the rest.

But the photos from Arisia, and from PAX East this year mostly didn’t have that problem. Then there was Anime Boston. I set up all the Canon R6MkIV bodies and the ridiculous Canon 27-270 zooms we rented (we being Anime Boston, not Nerd Caliber. Since 2022 I’ve been serving in a management role in the Photography Department as a volunteer at AB). In the process of setting them up for the photography team, I was regularly hand-holding at 1/50th of a second, zoomed all the way out to 270mm. And those test images were sharp as a tack.

Armed with all that new info, when I looked at the Wicked Comic Con 2023 photos on my PC’s large monitors and noticed the blur was back, I realized the problem likely wasn’t me and my old man hands. And sure enough, a quick Google search told me that the Optical Stabilization in the lens can at times interfere with the Autofocus as it tries to find a focus point. It will either cause the focus to be off slightly, or even do the opposite of what it is designed to do — add blur instead of removing it.

There’s a couple of pieces of good news here. First, preventing the blur from happening again is dead simple — change lenses or turn off the Optical Stabilization. Second, my tremors are not nearly as problematic as I thought.

In the next article I will explain why the lighting completely changes near the end of this gallery. Short version: User error also related to my tremors.

Cosplayers in this gallery include mikami_cosplays, Bil from the podcast This Week Was Way Better Last Year, lee.xoxo.18, yueryder, ragdollmurderer, Zombie Leader, ktbakes7, styx.cosplays, bioweapon_lakota72, graphicsignworks, ae_cosplay, liztalkcosplay, Inevitable Betrayal Cosplay, animesuckx, hail_rosequartz, gracedbycosplay, Colonial Armory, dagodofthunder, sarkazm2112, snowdog.1138, and many more.

We use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This allows us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.

To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.

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