Wicked Comic Con 2023 Saturday Gallery By FirstPerson Shooter, Part 3

I mentioned I would explain why, at the end of the second gallery from Saturday at Wicked Comic Con 2023, the lighting in the photos changes drastically. Since the first two articles about WCC had pretty lengthy explanations, why not keep going. Strap in for some lighting talk, or just skip down to the linked image and go to the last Saturday gallery.

In the first 80 percent or so of the images from gallery 2 and all of the images from gallery 1, it looks like I am using a single flash, slightly off to my right shoulder, or to the cosplayers’ left. Then suddenly it looks like three flashes — that main light, a key light to the cosplayers’ right and slightly behind, and a floor-level flash with a blue gel as a rim light. That change was when I realized that only the main flash could shoot at a high-speed sync, and I was shooting at 1/320th of a second, above the 1/250th that most flashes (including my two manual backup flashes) synced at.

While syncing the flash with the shutter speed of a camera at up to 1/1000th of a second is used for lots of cool lighting effects, I had been using it at PAX East to compensate for that assumed problem with my hand tremors. Turns out, the reason few images from PAX East had the blur problem is that I was usually focusing with a huge window of bright light behind me and shooting at f/4.5 or above to make the vast space of the lobby behind the cosplayers as dark as practical. So, the two main trigger conditions for the Optical Stabilization problem (as I mentioned the previous article) to happen were eliminated.

As soon as I looked at a completely blown out image early afternoon at WCC and noticed I had accidentally bumped the shutter speed down to 1/250th of a second, I realized the problem wasn’t that the two other flashes weren’t firing, but that the shutter was just moving too fast to catch them firing. Makes me feel a bit like a faker when that afternoon I was on the panel of the Cosplay & Photography Shoot-Out as a “pro” photographer.

When the article with the photos from that Shoot-Out get posted in a few days, you will see some amazing shots. I think this was the most consistently high-quality set of creative photos we’ve ever had to judge from. Everybody on each team of photographer and cosplayers really put a lot of effort into the scant 20 minutes they were given to make their photo submissions. Kudos to all involved.

In this final Saturday gallery you will find cosplayers hiddencrowncosplay, lostgirlcosplay14, makermage, Allison Chase Cosplay, Lunsum, the__devil__you__know, stro_lord, _________lesliebailey, shinydoctorcosplay, hailiumworkshop, duske2dawne, emdashcosplay, iameenae, kieraelizabethh, Jen Eyre, lazcosplays, theadmiralmb, isisadesu, cuzako, missnikkimuffin, Rachel Maksy, 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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