Nad (Luka), Mad (Rin) and xrysx (Miku) were cosplaying Vocaloid Race Queens at SMASH! 2010 and while I got a few shots in at the convention (the first few photos in the gallery), we did a proper shoot the next evening, at a carpark.

It went until very late, and we were harassed by people driving around in loud cars and the extreme cold on the rooftop parking. However, I think we managed to get some good shots out of it.

This was despite the fact that I lost half of my flash assembly at Town Hall (never to be seen again, I'm afraid) and was jury rigging my systems. In the end, I used a flash trigger on one light, with the other light reflected from an umbrella from a cheapo YongNuo unit set to optical slave mode. It worked really well, so I am thinking if I should get another of them.

Thanks for visiting, xrysx! You were awesome, and we hope to see you in Australia again.

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Did a shoot with the excellent Jill, zimiel and Miyu on Sunday, for Gintama.

Shot at a decidedly dodgy alleyway, as well as a Japanese room.

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Here are some photos from SMASH! 2010. Most of my stage shots failed, and I felt I took less photos this time round than before. Nonetheless it was one of the most enjoyable cons I have been to.

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Or, “Life with an f/1.2”.

We executed another Basara shoot with Straw and Su at a park, depicting the characters as so-called “ordinary school boys hanging out”.

The challenge of course was that everything was so ordinary, it was quite a task to find stuff which would be distinctive. I mostly failed to do so for many of the shots...hopefully I rejected all of those in processing.

To help with extracting the beautiful out of the mundane, we looked at using basic fill flash, back-lighting with the late afternoon sun, and isolation via large apertures.

How large? f/1.2

I have fulfilled one of the main reasons for getting an NEX camera, by using a version 2 Minolta Rokkor 58mm f/1.2 on it, with an adapter from ebay. No mount modifications needed!

The lens itself, I got from Yahoo! Japan auction site, attached to an old Minolta XE film SLR camera. Managed to get it a bit cheaper than what f/1.2 lenses normally go for (I think it cost me around $300 AUD total including shipping).

As you can see from some of the pictures, the extremely shallow depth of field means very fine control over which elements are in focus, thus providing a great way of isolating subjects.

The EXIF data will show f/1.0 for those shots made with the 58mm and NEX combination, because the adapter does not have contacts. Aperture control is manual, on the lens, as is focusing. But the NEX nicely compensates the shutter speed when I push it into A mode. I think the scene modes like Handheld Twilight are also possible, meaning I can actually use this lens with aperture value of f/8 or whatever I want in that mode, if I wanted to (on the electronic lenses, the aperture is automatically pushed to as large as possible in that mode, with no option of changing it).

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