Day 72: Comic Celebration Finale

2026-04-19

Hello!

I found the flash button!

This event was incredible, representing a portion of student life that's alive and thriving: the arts. While I can get similar group shots of sports players, it's not the same. The joy and acceptance of everyone, casual artist or commission veteran, keeps my heart beating.

The lighting in this room is awful after sundown. All the lights have an inconsistent green tint that I can't get rid of without serious editing I don't have the patience for, so I was forced to use the flash button. It charges a bunch of energy to the on-camera flash and it goes off in a huge burst of power at once.

I usually don't use flash, because the direct lighting coming from the same direction as the camera has a characteristic look that I want to avoid. This time, I think it's cheesy enough to flip around and become a good decision again. I've never used it, even when I probably should have at the celebrity banner and my summer job, but I have some ideas on how to tone it down and modify it for future use.

I keep pulling into my bag of tricks, as I said yesterday. I'll reveal two of those tricks that are specific to taking pictures of kids, teens, or families in this kind of atmosphere.

• Count people down. Let people know that you're about to take a photo so they can freeze or quickly reorganize themselves. If you're loud enough, you can get people's attention and get them to look at the camera. Of course, you should always use the Official Countdown Standard.
• Take multiple photos with different prompts. I'm sure the rule of threes has something to do with it, but I tell people to pose for "a serious photo, a regular happy photo, and then one that's seriously silly". In this case, that second regular photo would be them posing in-character for whatever cosplay they had dressed up as. For me, that allows for a set up, a main photo to publish for the school, and a fun punchline that they can keep. On the off chance that my settings are screwed up (which happened a few times!), I can catch that at the first photo and quickly fix it before taking the two other photos that they'll actually see.

These tips don't work so well with older or serious folk, but I'm not as interested in them anyway. They act too much like me :-).

Finally, I've been doing some research into the arts. Art deco, Japanese yokai, and Chinoiserie are taking up space in my mind and I love it. Over the next few days I really want to highlight some amazing work and hopefully put my camera through some artistic experiments. So while I don't have a link for today, I do want to leave you with this: the arts are amazing and are waiting out there to be discovered, not by the world, but by you. It's up to you to find them again.

Cheers,
David