Photography



Etiquette and Protocol

 

Photo Etiquette - Guests/Actors

 

 

Photo Etiquette - Con Attendees

Portions taken from Dementia's "Everything you wanted to know about Dragon*Con" post.

 

 

Showing Off Your Photos

What good are Dragon*Con photos if you're not going to show them off? And how are people going to find them?

 

Your best bet is to carefully tag your photos and put them in an online gallery. There are several gallery sites that are both free and popular amongst DC attendees.

 

Also, consider taking part in the Dragon*Con Photo Hunt, a photo scavenger hunt.

 

Tagging

If you intend for you photos to be shared, be sure you tag them with the common 'dragoncon' tag. On the major web gallery sites this means your pictures can be searched by that tag so plenty of other people will be able to view your shutterbuggery. It's also recommended that you included the year as a separate tag, and you also might want to include the day and a subject tag, IE. celebrity or costume or another_dude_having_his_ass_kicked_by_ray_park.

 

Official Photo Galleries (D*C Website):

 

Official photo galleries can be found here: http://photos.dragoncon.org/main.php 

 

Fan Galleries:

 

For fan photo galleries, please visit the Fan Photo Galleries page or visit the dragoncon_photo LiveJournal community.

 

Simple Tips for Better Pictures

Spending a fortune on a huge new DSLR and a load of kit is all well and good, but that's money you don't get to spend at the convention. If you want to get the most out of your little point and shoot camera (or, if need be, your cell phone's camera), there are a few things to do to get the most out of it.

 

Regarding Flashing

On a smaller camera you'll usually have a flash. Because the camera is small, the flash is located very close to the lens. This isn't automatically a bad thing, but... well yeah, it can be a bad thing. A flash close to the lens can result in some uglier pictures. The light will reflect back closer to said lens, which will cause weird highlights (bright, shiny noses), redeye, or uneven exposures. But there is a painfully simple, inexpensive way to compensate for it. You just need to know one word: diffuser.

 

A diffuser, in photography terms, is a small translucent thingy you use to cover the flash. It prevents the flash from being too harsh and it spreads the light out a lot, which will give you much more even lighting in most situations. And the best part is, you don't necessarily need to spend money on it. If your flash physically pops up from the camera body at all, one of the best options is to use an old clear plastic film container. Cut a hole in it, put it over your flash, and voila! Instant diffuser. If even that is too expensive, get a bit of cheap toilet paper (unused of course) and cover the flash. Works like a charm! Be sure to take the time to play around with it before the convention. It will lower the amount of light a flash puts out a little bit. Usually it's not noticable, but you might need to learn to tweak your camera a bit to make up for the slightly lower light (like a slower shutter speed).

 

Shooting in RAW

This one's a tad more technical, and definitely more time-intensive, and means you'll be able to take fewer pictures... but in the end it will give you more creative control of the pictures, even if they didn't turn out great.

 

Not all cameras have the option, but many of the more expensive point and shoot cameras will have an option in the settings to shoot in a format called RAW. If you use one of the other settings (S, M, or L are the common ones it seems), once you've taken the picture the camera will do some automatic editing for you, and in the end you'll have a .jpg image that looks all well and good. It's pre-processed. Shooting in RAW means it will not process it for you: the image file that you get is exactly what your digital sensor saw, and nothing else. When you go to download the picture to your computer you can then take it into an editing program and have a LOT more flexibility in the post processing. If the picture was too dark you can (to an extent) increase the exposure without making it look weird and overly bright. You can adjust color tones more readily, or other things.

 

There are a lot of downsides to this, as was mentioned. Going through all your pictures and editing them can take a lot longer, plus you'll need the software to do so... though most cameras come with a CD containing such software anyway. The learning curve can also be a little steep, though such software will have easy-to-use options a lot of the time. RAW files are also just uncompressed dumps of data, which are really very large compared to your pre-processed and compressed pictures.

Regardless, if you're feeling serious about photography it's a good habit to be in, and they're important skills to have.