{"id":73,"date":"2009-10-05T23:05:14","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T04:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/?p=73"},"modified":"2013-07-01T00:14:40","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T05:14:40","slug":"new-york-anime-festival-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"New York Anime Festival 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been kinda busy.\u00a0 I just had enough time to go through the photos and pick the ones that were viewable posted them up.\u00a0\u00a0 So this write-up’s for NYAF is\u00a0 a bit late.<\/p>\n

On Friday morning as a couple of friends were trying to maximize their day in NYC and planned to come into the city early.\u00a0 So I asked them to do a photoshoot\u00a0 as\u00a0 I told them all they would be doing is waiting in a line until 1PM when the convention opens.\u00a0\u00a0 I took them to the NYC Highline <\/a>which is an old overhead railroad tracks that were used to bring meat from Penn Station to the meat packing district ages ago.\u00a0 Now its been reperposed into\u00a0 a walking park over the city streets.\u00a0 It was an interesting experience as we were far from the con and it was too early for people to be to be in costume to seem normal for NYC.\u00a0 We had a few people stop and ask but the best part was there was a Parks Services guy who I guess was managing the park that walked up to us.\u00a0 I was expecting it to be one of those we needed a commerical permit or to tell us keep off the plants speaches\u00a0 as we were close to the edge, but it turned out the guy was into Manga and he even had a sketches in a book of his.<\/p>\n

\"NYC<\/a>
NYC Highline Park Services Guy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n

Then for the afternoon I went to work and stopped by the Javits during lunch.\u00a0 Man my first impression of the Javits was damn this place is depressing without carpet.\u00a0 It looks like NYAF’s hurting still because they still couldn’t afford to carpet the place.\u00a0 They also decided to host the World Cyber Games National final.\u00a0\u00a0 I only went to see one artist Ryuske Hammotomo<\/a>.\u00a0 I really like this guy’s work and wanted to pick up a copy so I didn’t have to worry about holding all day.<\/p>\n

\"Ryusuke<\/a>
Ryusuke Hamamoto with my commission<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At night I returned as they finally had some nighttime programming worth attending.\u00a0 And it lasted till late night which is rare at the Javits Center.\u00a0 It was the Cosplay Variety Show.\u00a0 I’m glad I went because that night I found out that the lens I rented kinda broke somehow during the day.\u00a0 It was stuck wide open.\u00a0 So I started to take photos and was thinking man all this stuff is comically bright colored.\u00a0 I did some in camera setting compensation as the f-stop was stuck.\u00a0 I have to say the Nikon 70-200 f\/2.8 I rented wide-open was really fast as it let so much light in.\u00a0 Just having to EV compensate kinda sucked.<\/p>\n

So come Saturday.\u00a0 I again took my friends through a runthough and shoot of Times Square.\u00a0 As the streets are closed to cars we could walk on them and there were places to sit.\u00a0 I personally nickname the section Death Street as my experience of the first section was 4 years ago in front of the Office Depot.\u00a0 I was thinking this was\u00a0 a really cool idea walking around obvious to everything going on.\u00a0 I quicky changed my mind as my face was 4 inches away from a delivery truck going 30MPH because I almost walked onto the real road.\u00a0 There was no barrier and the road and walking area’s all on the same level.<\/p>\n

Back to the shoot.\u00a0 I have access to\u00a0 an office that overlooks at a 34th street intersection.\u00a0 So I thought it’d be cool to get some overhead shots with everyone the size of ants.\u00a0\u00a0 Being the Fashion District I had to get some shots with the needle.\u00a0 Thats when I noticed everything was coming out dark and I couldn’t figure out why.\u00a0 In hindsight being in the morning and not 100% awake I failed to reset my camera’s compensation from the night before.\u00a0 As I normally do a 3-bracket shot I just make it shoot even more frames with an extra 2 stop difference.\u00a0 So we took some shots on top of the new TKTS booth’s stairsteps, they had some stone Baseball glove I spotted earlier that week,\u00a0 and just a few street cafe style shots.<\/p>\n

On the way walking back I spotted some Vocaloids in the corner of my eye.\u00a0 I started to take photos while crossing the street.\u00a0 And stopped on the corner to take a few.\u00a0 They started dancing because someone on the other side of the street stopped them and was video taping them.<\/p>\n

\"Vocaloids<\/a>
Vocaloids on 42nd St.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Eventually I made it to the Con.\u00a0 The floor was way too packed for my tastes.\u00a0 Even worse than last year.\u00a0 So I avoided the floor most of the time.\u00a0 Another friend of mine was in charge of the Maid Cafe.\u00a0 Man every year they get the rug pulled from under them and have to change plans because of things out of their control.\u00a0 Panel wise I didn’t go to any as the schedule was way off.\u00a0 I didn’t feel like going to the concert in the middle of the afternoon.\u00a0\u00a0 So i just walked around and shot what I could.\u00a0 I played with the toy I’ve been ranting about the lensbaby.\u00a0 I also ran into a cool pinhole camera guy I believe is from Japan Halto Mori<\/a>.\u00a0 This camera was pretty cool.<\/p>\n

\"Pinhole<\/a>
Pinhole Camera<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the night\u00a0 the masquarade’s line sucked as I waited 1 hour and a half with fellow VIP passholders and some press.\u00a0 I believe all the VIP passholders we got screwed this year.\u00a0 Even though we were first in line.\u00a0 We couldn’t even get front row.\u00a0 The line for the regular passholders was really long.\u00a0 It worked out well as it was civialized at least when everyone sat down.\u00a0 Overall the show was decent they have a few good acts with some crap that they had to throw in.<\/p>\n

Sunday it rained so the crowd died down a bunch.\u00a0 It allowed me to have a bit more fun time so I broke out my current favorite toy.\u00a0\u00a0 Here are the highlights.<\/p>\n

\"Steampunk\/<\/a>
Steampunk\/ Neo Victorian Cosplayer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Girl<\/a>
Girl sitting on the floor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Madame<\/a>
Madame Red taking the floor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Selective<\/a>
Selective focus in action<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With that the con was at best average for events.\u00a0 I had most of my fun running around and hanging around people I know.\u00a0\u00a0 The industry’s hurting and what originally made this con interesting is for now gone.\u00a0\u00a0 I hope with the NYCC merger it’ll give them time to rethink 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been kinda busy.\u00a0 I just had enough time to go through the photos and pick the ones that were viewable posted them up.\u00a0\u00a0 So this write-up’s for NYAF is\u00a0 a bit late. On Friday morning as a couple of friends were trying to maximize their day in NYC and … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conpics.ws\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}