I enjoy watching anime, but I’ve never been to an anime convention. By happenstance, I discovered one was coming to Toronto in August, so I figured, “why not?”
The convention is a mix of several genres: anime, horror, sci-fi, gaming, and comics. While there were workshops, shows, LAN games, and many vendors, I spent most of my attention on the people and costumes, capturing the more interesting as photography practice.
As an aside, the masquerade event (people showing their costumes on stage), was surprisingly good. You’ll see some mediocre pictures of it in the full set (my angle was terrible), but the MC for the event was quite funny. Some of the acts were good, too… although some were embarrassingly bad. Some acts would come on stage to music, or have voice-over dialogue that they were would lip sync or mime to.
As an experiment, I took some of the more easily distinguishable costumes and paired them up with pictures of the characters. To my chagrin, I discovered the hard part isn’t stitching two pictures together, it’s finding an appropriate image on the Internet. :/ I did a few before I gave it up as too time consuming.
The video’s not very good quality, you can’t see how good the costumes are. Higher quality montage pictures are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/relgar/sets/72157606930635654/
The full set of high quality pictures from the Expo are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/relgar/sets/72157606933762931/
. There are lots of good costumes that weren’t in the montage video.
