On photography at conventions

Those of you who’ve clicked a link from the convention forums, or been given a card at a convention photo shoot, click the galleries in the top right.

… but I suggest you read this short message about photography.

As you look at the gallery, you’ll see some of the pictures appear to be too dark, too light, or oddly coloured. As you can hopefully see, the original wasn’t just dark. It was far too yellow, details weren’t visible, and it didn’t do justice to the really nice cosplays. Strange though it may seem, this is natural and even desirable

When photos are taken in the wild, such as at an anime convention, conditions are rarely perfect. The lighting, the scenery and so on are simply what is to hand. Even photos taken under studio conditions can look odd in their original form. There is a good reason for this: they’re not supposed to be viewed in their original form.

A normal camera, when you hit the button, tries to take the best photo it can. This means it looks at the lighting and so on, and adjusts the picture before saving. It’s not a genius, but it’s good enough for most people.

Shooting in RAW is different. It keeps the picture in its original form, with every detail intact, and leaves the adjustment to be done later. This is because a piece of software like Photoshop, with time and attention, can get a much better result than any automatic system.

This is also why professional cameras have suchhigh resolutions, like 8 or 12 megapixels. You don’t need 12 megapixels to print a photo – you need 6 at most, and you can get phone cameras that do that. But by storing the extra detail, it has more information with which to do adjustment later, resulting in a higher quality image.

If you’re interested in any of the pictures you find in our galleries, drop us a line and we’ll happily spend the few minutes necessary to correct the image to make it look right. But with hundreds of images, that’s not something we have time to simply do for all of them.

So click the links at the top and take a look.

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