It’s the London Furs’ yearly summer party! And our dear organizers know how to set up a great location, the Agenda Bar right in the heart of the city.

The summer (and xmas) parties do draw alot of furs from all over the country, and there were some that made it from Sweden (waves hi to neweinstein!) as well as Singapore!

Our fursuit walk for the summer party was rather short, I’m guessing because of the olympic preparations going all over the tower bridge, there was simply no way to walk - heck, I wanted to go down by the riverside to take a clear photo of Tower Bridge but there was simply no way there, short of taking a major detour.

Instead, our end point was at the lush Trinity Square Gardens. Quite a fair bit of tourists around, but difficult to get interaction shots, so I decided to take portraits as best as I can.

If you are seeing a yellow cast on the pictures, that’s probably my calibration going off >.>

I think the fursuiters had a great time today. My main regret is missing a lot of the fursuiters I wanted to shoot.

Back at the bar, there were a few other fursuiters that didn’t go along the walk. More snappy snaps!

Fly!!! Please don’t try this unless you really know your fursuit - these two have been doing it for years, and from what I gather, actually exercise to keep fit enough to *dance* in their fursuits, so, do know your own limits.

To close, I’d like to put up a new con being established, the Nordic Fuzz Con, check out their site at http://www.nordicfuzzcon.org/

Seems like a good excuse to visit Sweden :)

Till the next set of photos!

I’ve always wanted to check out one of CodyDawg’s meets, and the timing this time was just perfect, as I could not take time off for an extended tour - leaving Friday night by boat (StenaLine), I arrived in Hoek Van Holland, Haven at about 7am in the morning.

A half hour train ride brought me to Rotterdam, after which I transferred onto another train that took me to Delft, a short 15 minute ride.

After getting my bearings around the town (and climbing the 100m tall spire in the New Church), I had lunch and went off to meet my fellow fuzzies.

I thought the event was very well organized by Codydawg. Fursuiters that attend these walks know how to manage long walks, and a spotter is assigned to each fursuiter.

The level of the fursuiters were also very high, everyone had a very strong character to play, and the public absolutely loved them (ok, Tycho, the shep above made ONE kid cry, so he gets a paw slap. Bad dog :P)

I also had an unfortunate equipment failure - nowadays I’m being a bit overconfident and do not bring charging cables or even spare batteries out. And for this trip, I had to choose a battery that was failing >.> Near the end of the walk, the camera refused to boot, and showed the battery low indicator.

I knew the battery was in no way low, as I’d charged it, and I had barely shot more than a hundred odd shots  - one battery charge usually lasts me at least 1k, if not more photographs.

Thankfully, I had my LX5 with me - nowadays when I’m on hols I don’t bring out my DSLR - and switched over to my usual square mode and continued on.

Our walk was cut slightly short during our way back due to a sudden downpour. I hope none of the fursuiters suffered any water damage during this brief period.

What can I say? Overall, this has to be one of the most enjoyable fursuit walks I’ve had the chance to photograph. Not only were the fursuiters really good performers, I’ve got the marvellous backdrop of Delft to be my canvas.

My only regret is that I could not be everywhere to capture the moments of the various suiters, and did not manage to cover as many of them as I’d hoped.

I’d also like to feature the photographs from another photographer at the walk. Oh my goodness, those pictures capture the moment so brilliantly! Her depth of field control is sublime, and the composition, superb.

Depth of field is something I can’t actually play with much since I choose to use the flash - usually I’m at like F8/250 to allow the flash to sync, if I were to drop to F4, that’d put my shutter at 1/1000, which is probably like 4 stops less light since it’s now firing in high speed sync mode. I’d probably not get more than a few feet of illumination. Maybe one of these days I’ll take my street shooting/low light setup a go for fursuit photography - my trusty 24/2.8 and 50/1.8.

At the end of the day, the whole lot of us went to a bear-themed restaurant in the Beestenmarkt for a final meal, before the locals and non-locals have to make the drive home. Me, I bid my farewells and returned to my hotel to rest my worn paws.

Sunday I checked out some of the local attractions, and the Vermeer Centrum is highly recommended for those interested in fine art (I’m not, but I found it very educational and all around amazing.) Took the ferry back to London in  the evening, and was at work just a little after 9am this morning :)

I’d like to thank Codydawg for allowing me to do photography, I hope to come again :)

Perfect weather for a london fur meet today, and just as the main organized fursuit walk was to head off, I was pulled aside by a blue bunny asking if I was heading out with the main group, or if I wanted to join a few fursuiters on small walk nearby.

Some hesitation was going on, but I decided to break off from the main group. Tons of photographers with ‘em anyways.

Didn’t linger much along the way, but headed off to the bridge. We were thinking of crossing it but decided to turn back.

One thing I really enjoyed about going off on our little jaunt - and I’m sure the two fursuiters, bhavels and noodlez husky enjoyed too - was to relax and take the time to engage the public. The kids absolutely loved them, and the bunny brought along some candy to distribute too.

Today the sun was out, and appeared to be nearly a stop more light than usual, had difficulty keeping up the flash as it was over sync limits, and limiting the speed just caused massive overexposure.

So I was like, screw it, let the flash give me what fill it can. Kinda sick of my old grading as well, and am trying out some less contrasty, less saturated settings.

Till the next post!

Confuzzled 2012 is the largest furry convention in the UK, and this is the first furry convention I stayed for the full length - arrived a day early in fact.

For those that do not know me I’m an introvert. On a scale of one to ten I probably rate a 12. And the excuse I give when things get too…. noisy at a LF meet, and the last two LF meets have been very noisy, so much I just left mid way the last LF meet when people started screaming into cameras for reasons I do not wish to know.

I dare say Confuzzled 2012 is a really good experience for me. Many individual events that piqued my interest, and if things were too much for me, I could head back to my nice quiet room for some R&R.

There were literally *tons* of fursuiters (15 of them would probably weigh a ton, I guess :P) that cover the full gamut of characters: Realistic suits from Clockwork Creature, toony creations from all over (latin vixen, arend etc etc), animatronic suits, dance suits, and the odd ones that I won’t speak about ;-)

I also ran a photography class, I thought I did poorly by covering way too much ground in a single sitting. I know better now if I attempt something like this again.

I was actually not in the mood for photography - heck in total I shot 188 photos over 4 days, barely used half of a CF card, and I brought 3 lol. I think it’s a factor of trying to push limits to get something new, something fresh that I’m kinda burnt out.

Secondly, it’s also because of the location - I like shooting photos depicting interaction between fursuiters and the public. We were in the middle of nowhere in a business hotel - not much public, apart from passing truckers :)

All in all, it was a fantastic experience, and I look forward to visiting Confuzzled in 2013. Till then, keep snapping!

Thank you very much!!

Has it been 3 months since my last post? Well I need to fix that…

The fursuit walks have been canceled recently (or not - I don’t keep up with the forums) - and I was not expecting to grab any shots. Surprisingly, there were still a fair number of suiters prancing around for most of the meet.

It is also very nice to once again see some of the older, more experienced (read - fursuiters that know how to perform, not just walk around) fursuiters turn up and hang around the area. (Dear Splenda, please bring your buddie Minstrel along sometimes)

Granted, being in the confined area means next to nil interaction type shots with the general public. This means more posed type/portrait shots, and I still get a kick out of the random passer-by going “duh?!” when strolling past the pub.

In other news, I’ve moved on from Bibble Pro to Corel Aftershot Pro (they got bought up by Corel, IIRC). It is basically Bibble, but faster, and I tend to like the colors more, somehow. Also, I’m quite please with just using global contrast and exposure controls on the raws, the curves control hasn’t see any use at all for awhile. Maybe one day when I get really bored, I’ll look into film look curves again.

Onwards!

Today in London, is the Lord Mayor’s Show, which meant that the area around our furmeet and fursuit walk was jammed packed with crowds waiting to see the fireworks.

Minor mishap happened today, flash decided to die at the start of the walk >.> This is my 2nd flash in 2 years, am I really overworking my flashes? Uh, yes. Bit annoying as I don’t want to rely on my on-board flash for fill, mainly as it locks the shutter release when the flash isn’t ready.

The crowds didn’t help much this day either, too packed to maneuver for a clean shot, and everything felt too congested. Hopefully the next fursuit walk will prove more fruitful :)

So the weather has been conspiring against us photographers and fursuiters, and on this really, really hot day in October, we get a chance to go on a new route.

Today’s got to be a new record for me, shot 29 shots in total over 1.5hrs, and some I thought were good turned out to be not so good in review. So, only kept 5. Well, 6 actually but the sixth I deemed to be quite personal for the fursuiter, so I’m not posting it up and sendin’ it to ‘m directly :)

As usual, I’m on the lookout for unique interaction shots or just stand out shots in particular, mostly manging portraits.

Didn’t manage to get many good fursuiter/public interaction shots today… or rather, I did get a few down but I’ve got so many good ones from back in the day, the new ones really need to stand out, (technically, aesthetically, story wise) else I don’t process them.

This is probably one of my favorite shots today - memories of what fursuiting is t some of the fursuiters, just fun :) And in this case, both the kids and fursuiters were having a big laugh. Two thumbs up!

It’s that time of the year again folks! The London Fur’s Summer Party!

Furs, new and old congregate at the Agenda Bar, in my opinion, a top choice by the LF committee. Two thumbs up! (The location may be bettered if there were wild wolves running around hunting deer, but I digress)

As with the LF parties, they bring out fursuiters, new, old and rarely seen. I am pretty sure I’m over my funk and was just so exciting and in the zone for most of the trip around to the Tower of London.

Looking back at the day, it is a *beautiful* day out. And for my style of photography, one of the worst conditions for photography. Harsh, direct sunlight. Heavy shadows, with a very wide dynamic range.

As always, I had my SB600 engaged for fill, to try to reduce the dynamic range, at least for the subjects within fill range. Given that the shutter speeds were almost always exceeding sync speed - and I do not want to stop down more than F9 on a crop camera - this means the flash is almost always discharging the full capacitor.

I’m not sure how long my flash tube will last - but that is the way to go. Using flash brings up 3 critical points

- First, I can raise the shadows of the subject, lowering the amount of dynamic range.

- Second, the flash creates a critical catchlight in the subject’s eyes. Well, that is assuming they are using glassy styled eyes ;-) The catchlight definitely serves to help drive the “aliveness” of a fursuiter

- Third, I have a gel on the flash; a 1/4 CTS gel. This serves to warm up the foreground subject. By adjusting the color temperature of the foreground to be “correct” i.e. cooler, it also cools down the areas not lit by flash; the skies, for example. This serves to further enhance the blues and create color contrast.

In review of the day, I thought I was really not caring about the technical aspects of photography today. Usually I’m metering all over the place and compensating the exposure. Not today. I left it at EV +0.3 and let the D300 take care. Bad bad boy.

It was not too bad though - unlike say, an overcast day where it may be possible to capture most of the dynamic range, the superb 1005 rgb segment meter on the D300 easily exposes for the brightest tones with minimal clipping. And that’s not to say it doesn’t clip and lose all data; it does - but somehow usually in regions that I would have clipped in post anyways. This means the shadows would be quite deep - hence the fill flash on such bright days to balance out the shadows and highlights.

My wish is for the newer generation of focal plane cameras to have an improved sync speed. Unlike leaf shutter (or my Lumix LX5) where the design of the shutter allows it to sync at any speed, I’m still limited to a paltry 1/250, any faster and the fill range drops. Significantly.

I mean, basically, screw megapixels. I really, really feel annoyed when photographers go oh this new camera has XXX megapixels. I mean seriously, how many of us *print*?! Do you use that for cropping? Even on my D300 with it’s laughable 12 megapixels, it easily gives you 240DPI or more for an A4 printout. Going larger than that, it’s more dependent on viewing distance; are people seriously going to use a magnifying glass up close to a A0 print?!

What I’d really love is to see the future cameras stick at the 10-12 megapixels range, and improve a) Sync Speed - either by uber amazing shutter design, or even a totally new shutter and b) dynamic range. Screw megapixels, I want my dynamic range.

This is why I brought my D300 out today, not the LX5 - it’s bright sunlight. The LX5 in this situation would give me very similar results, but it will be a tad more contrasty thanks to the smaller sensor.

Till the next time, and keep on pushing limits!

I’ve been not having a good time doing photography of any sorts lately, it’s obvious I’m uber burnt out from trying to push limits, and you know what? I feel so much better just not caring about trying to move off my plateau, and just shoot from what my gut tells me.

The lack of updates has been a combination of two factors: Mainly, London’s weather not co-operating for the fursuit walks, or, if I do go on a walk, I get all neurotic and stressed out trying to get shots. No more, just gonna take it easy and go with the flow :) Today’s fursuit walk had great weather - i.e. alot of sunlight, which I personally find crap for photography. With all kinds of event photography, I just make do, flash in hand, ev comp on another.

Took my LX5 out today, and a really amusing thing happened. Minutes before the walk was about to leave, I setup my camera and…. it did not work. ?! Feeling concerned, I realized how light it felt and facepawed - I’d left my batteries at home.

Thankfully, home was not far away (I walk to/from the meets at times), and thanks to synchronicity on my side, I had a taxi driver just finishing his break in front of the furmeet. 20minutes and £20 lighter from my wallet, I was standing in front of St Pauls, running towards the Millennium bridge. I basically caught up to the rear end of the walk mid way through the bridge. Woo!

I thought I got some lovely shots today, though at times I wished I had the DSLR as seriously, the lack dynamic range in some shots was quite annoying. One thing I noticed today, is how I approached cropping of the shots. Most of the walk, I was on 1:1 aspect as I had little time juggling the flash on the left, and camera on the right. I tried 3:2 for awhile, but it was not cutting it, time wise for fast moving shots. In a more posed setting, there’s enough time to switch over to 3:2 easily.

Flash as usual was my good ole SB28, paired with Yong Nuo flash triggers. I basically left the flash in Auto mode for F4 @ iso 100, the readout gave me a range from 2 to 15 feet, adequate for what I used. LX5 matched the iso at 100, though I choose to open the aperture up to 3.5 to give the flash more contribution, and occasionally applied -ev to the ambient exposure to let the flash contribute more.

Just keep on chugging :)