AnimeNEXT Costume contest and lack of lighting
2004
When
you get into photography, part of your mind changes when you get really
obsessed with light. You learn to appreciate and work with light's
focus, intensity, direction and color. You learn to deal with the
challenges that lighting offers, but sometimes you can't overcome those
challenges. That happened at AnimeNEXT in 2004, where the costume
contest crew chose to dim the lights in the main ballroom, to the point
there was not enough light to be able to resolve usable images of the
costume contest on Saturday night. There was no explanation of the odd
decision; apparently someone on the convention staff decided the
show would be improved by turning off most of the lights in the room,
and then saying no flash pictures could be taken. The edited image on
the left was an example of the best the author could produce with his
Olympus C-2100UZ digital camera and image editing software. It had to
be heavily brightened, but the original image was so dark because of
dim stage lighting that the exposure change shows the "noise floor,"
the underlying pattern of noise you'll get from any digital camera when
it's set at its highest imaging sensitivity. Rather than inflict a
series of noisy, grainy and washed out image on visitors to this site,
the author gave up taking images of the costume contest and tried to
get pictures of contestants after the show was over. However, the
contestants scattered when everyone was ordered out of the room for the
dance setup, so the only contest pictures on this site are from the
award ceremonies - when the lights were inexplicably turned back up
where they should have been all along.
It was an odd set of circumstances. The contest was delayed an hour
because the stage crew couldn't get an installed set of microphones to
work. During that delay, the lights in the ballroom were on full and
there was plenty of light to be able to get images of the contest. But
when it was finally time to start the contest, nearly every light in
the ballroom was turned off. For a couple of minutes, the convention
staff couldn't decide which lights they wanted, switching lamps on and
off until the room was all but totally dark. Some members of the
audience were shouting that they couldn't see the stage. And
while one member of the convention staff told the author that flash
picturetaking would allowed, the master of ceremonies announced, just
before the lights were turned out, that they would allow no flash.
To get a decent exposure under the extreme dimness would have required
an exposure of several seconds, even with the C-2100UZ's maximum imager
sensitivity of ISO 400. That would have meant hopelessly blurred images.
Here's
an comparison to demonstrate how poor the lighting was, using two
images of the same costumer. This first image is a one-to-one crop from
a picture taken at ISO 100, f/2.8 at 1/125 of a second. It was
illuminated by a pair of Sunpak 383 flashes, bounced off a white
ceiling about nine feet high - the author's standard convention setup
when he's operating out from a table and selling prints and books.
And
here's a similar one-to-one crop from an image of the same costumer on
stage during the costume contest. The same camera was used, set at ISO
400 and f/2.8, and set for an exposure of 1/30th of a second. It's hard
to believe that the same person is shown in both images, but it is -
with the second image using the lighting selected by the costume
contest stage crew. The C-2100UZ has an image stabilizer lens, which
lets you take decent images without a tripod at shutter speeds as low
as 1/30th. Anything lower and it's hard to consistently stop motion -
and a costume contest has lots of people in motion. Even through the
imager sensitivity is set far higher in the this image and the shutter
speed is more than four times slower, the image is unusable because of
the lack of light.
As
a further comparison, here's an identically cropped one-to-one exact
pixel section of a costumer from the Project: A-Kon costume contest two
weeks earlier. This was taken with the camera set at ISO 200, f/2.8 and
the shutter at 1/100th of a second. No flash was used in this image:
the lighting was so good that none was needed.
When
you get into photography, part of your mind changes when you get really
obsessed with light. You learn to appreciate and work with light's
focus, intensity, direction and color. You learn to deal with the
challenges that lighting offers, but sometimes you can't overcome those
challenges. That happened at AnimeNEXT in 2004, where the costume
contest crew chose to dim the lights in the main ballroom, to the point
there was not enough light to be able to resolve usable images of the
costume contest on Saturday night. There was no explanation of the odd
decision; apparently someone on the convention staff decided the
show would be improved by turning off most of the lights in the room,
and then saying no flash pictures could be taken. The edited image on
the left was an example of the best the author could produce with his
Olympus C-2100UZ digital camera and image editing software. It had to
be heavily brightened, but the original image was so dark because of
dim stage lighting that the exposure change shows the "noise floor,"
the underlying pattern of noise you'll get from any digital camera when
it's set at its highest imaging sensitivity. Rather than inflict a
series of noisy, grainy and washed out image on visitors to this site,
the author gave up taking images of the costume contest and tried to
get pictures of contestants after the show was over. However, the
contestants scattered when everyone was ordered out of the room for the
dance setup, so the only contest pictures on this site are from the
award ceremonies - when the lights were inexplicably turned back up
where they should have been all along.
Here's
an comparison to demonstrate how poor the lighting was, using two
images of the same costumer. This first image is a one-to-one crop from
a picture taken at ISO 100, f/2.8 at 1/125 of a second. It was
illuminated by a pair of Sunpak 383 flashes, bounced off a white
ceiling about nine feet high - the author's standard convention setup
when he's operating out from a table and selling prints and books.
And
here's a similar one-to-one crop from an image of the same costumer on
stage during the costume contest. The same camera was used, set at ISO
400 and f/2.8, and set for an exposure of 1/30th of a second. It's hard
to believe that the same person is shown in both images, but it is -
with the second image using the lighting selected by the costume
contest stage crew. The C-2100UZ has an image stabilizer lens, which
lets you take decent images without a tripod at shutter speeds as low
as 1/30th. Anything lower and it's hard to consistently stop motion -
and a costume contest has lots of people in motion. Even through the
imager sensitivity is set far higher in the this image and the shutter
speed is more than four times slower, the image is unusable because of
the lack of light.
As
a further comparison, here's an identically cropped one-to-one exact
pixel section of a costumer from the Project: A-Kon costume contest two
weeks earlier. This was taken with the camera set at ISO 200, f/2.8 and
the shutter at 1/100th of a second. No flash was used in this image:
the lighting was so good that none was needed.
