London MCM Expo 24th Oct 09

Been shooting wildlife a leeetle too intensely of late, and my right hand has got a mild ache after last weel's romp through bushy park and the RSCC (hand feels almost back to 100% as I type this). Thought I'd take a few weekends of not trotting 6kgs of glass and metal around the uk and skim it down to er... 4.5kgs. 

Light levels were expectantly low, thankfully the d300 does awesome at these crappy iso 1600-3200 levels. Would be even better if I had a medium range 2.8 zoom, but the 16-85VR would do for most of the time.

I'm also field testing my latest piece of kit - a Lastolite Micro Apollo 45, the smallest of the flash adaptive softbox in the series. I was going to pick up a Lumiquest softbox, but couldn't find them in stock at the two shops nearby, but one had the Lastolite. It seems bigger in size, so why not? The above image was shot with the SB600 gelled with 1/4 CTO held up camera left. The shadows aren't as harsh as from the flash directly, however it is very fiddly to hold up the flash in one hand, and a almost 2kg body+lens in another, and use one hand to control exposure and af etc (did I mention I love the Nikon controls? :P) however, it is a pain, so after a few shots, I just left the softbox on camera.

Here's it straight on mounted on-camera. I think the softbox does introduce soft shadows, probably not as nice as a raytraced area light, but hey it's only a few inches across.

Here's an example I shot holding it up to the left. Camera was set to (in a stupid way) to make the ambient exposure underexposed by at least a 0.7 to 1 stop - on purpose - and the flash be the main key to the left. It works, but I'm not too much of a fan of my pictures being too contrasty so I went back to A priority metering.

The lighting indoors was interesting. I brought along Plus Green and CTO gels to balance the flash. Once inside, the lights were actually roughly daylight balanced, perhaps slightly warmer. I just popped on a 1/4 CTO to slightly compensate, and that actually helped for the outdoor shots later. To be honest I know little about shooting in mixed lighting conditions and was just driving by my pants :)

There was this ULTRA COOL steampunk section that I neglected to take pictures off.

Outside, there were tons of Bleach and Naruto cosplayers.

I assure you, when I mean tons, it was not rhetorical.

My namesake was there to promote their latest.... squeakquel...

Two beautiful ladies dressed as the pricesses Daisy and Peach :)

Gunblades so rule....

Snipe! One of the rare chances my 70-200 actually could be used. I think a short zoom like the 17-55/2.8 would be optimum at outings like these.

I only saw this batman + gang there at the day.

The well known FF fire summon :)

LOVE AND PEACE!!!!

The super kawaii lady cosplaying a GG character :)

Team Zelda will rule all!

How many bad guys can you think off that kills of a main player character?! Aerith oh aerith, why must you die!? Oh yeah this is one killer Sepiroth cosplayer :)

One of the oddest things I've seen yesterday, is it one of those treasure boxes from Ultima that are actually monsters? ala Mimics?!

This dude truly looks like jack sparrow!!!

So much awesomeness!!!!

Let's finish this post up - first some BSG goodness :)

Perhaps my favourite suit of the day! An anthro Nanaki!!!

~fin~


(going to shoot flowers)