AnimeShow24: Bratislava

I almost missed the event! Some of you might know that photography at this point in time is just a hobby of mine and as most of us, I have an ordinary office job. Well, the weekend of AnimeShow we had a major event taking place at my workplace which I was part of, therefore my only chance at AnimeShow 2024 was on Sunday. At first, I was a little skeptical that there wouldn't be many people because of the cold weather, and I was tired from work, but I pushed back and went, oh boy, it was a very good decision.

I picked up my old trusty friend Tomas and took him with me. This year, I had big plans for him a reflector and a light, so on top of his main task he would be also my photo assistant. His main task is to scout for interesting cosplays that I might miss.

We got the entry tickets for the day, had a quick pitstop for coffee, which I have to say was very delicious and I give kudos to the lady for brewing the coffee at an event like this with a manual espresso machine. The one where you generate the pressure by pressing down on a lever. Tomas is not a big fan of coffee so anytime we went around he was upset that how many more cups of coffee I can drink.

Now, onto the main reason we're here: portraits, I love taking photographs of people and recently I want to get into portrait photography, but it's kinda hard to get models, if you don't have a portfolio, bothering your friends can get you only as far. But AnimeShow is the perfect place for this, you have a lot of people who put huge effort into making their cosplays so it's only natural to capture this moment for them in a photograph.

As this was my second time at AnimeShow as a photographer, it was not so bad like last year. I was more confident in approaching people and asking them to pose for me. We deployed the same strategy that we did last year. Basically you just walk around the perimeter and, if you see nice cosplay you approach and ask for a picture. This way you get different lighting and backgrounds.

I set a personal target to photograph at least 30 unique portraits/cosplays. This took me over 6 hours of just walking around and asking people for pictures. Due to colder weather most of the people were inside the building where I didn't like the lighting as much. However those 6 hours were truly a time well spent.

I have learnt again a lot of new stuff, I found out that I need to focus more on work with the camera to be able to quickly setup my exposure, I also need to talk more with the models, but at the end we managed to get a bunch of nice pictures.