On Saturday the 24th I attended the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 – I’d been to the event a few years ago, and back then it was much smaller. This time around, it was huge! It was also a little expensive – $25 at the door per person, and that didn’t get you anything more than in the door. It was a fun event, though it seems like they had too many people for the amount of space they had – it was crazy busy! It was really cool to see all the comics, action figures, graphic novels, famous people, and people dressed up as any number of different characters from comics, fantasy, and sci-fi. Lots of photographic opportunities if you were courageous enough to ask the people to stop so you could take their picture (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t).
I took my Panasonic GF-1 to the event, but I really should have brought my Nikon D300. I thought I could get away with the nice and small GF-1 – especially after I stopped on the way to the show and purchased a 14-45mm lens (which is 28 to 90mm on the GF-1) – but ultimately I was really disappointed with the quality of the images from it. The GF-1’s images turn to crap noise-wise at anything past ISO 800, and I’m so used to shooting with the 20mm f/1.7 lens on the GF-1, it was an ugly transition for me to start shooting with an f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens. Picking up a new lens and having no practice with it is never a good idea, but at the time I thought I’d stand out too much if I brought my big iron (Nikon D300 + f/2.8 24-70mm lens)…there were plenty of others with big DSLRs there, so I should have just brought the damn thing. The lighting was predictably awful, so more often than not my shots were ISO 1200 or ISO 1600 (since I abhor flash photography). Here are a few of the shots I took…
(Yeah, that’s Brent Spiner, AKA Mr. Data, above)
