I am the worst photographer in history. Give me a camera and I am sure to take the blurriest, most unfocused pictures you can imagine. You cannot count the rolls of film I have wasted in my life time trying to convince myself I could ever take a decent picture. The advent of the digital camera, of course, changed my photographic life. Now instead of taking completely blurry photos I can take only partially blurry photos. But my recently purchased Samsung Galaxy S6 almost compensates for everything I manage to do wrong.
While wandering around Dragon*Con 2015 this past weekend I managed to take a couple hundred semi-blurry images with only one hand (really, barely more than one thumb). Had I been able to use two hands I might have changed the phone’s camera settings to something that could work in a crowd that is constantly moving. Alas! I had to depend on the default settings. So what follows is the cream of the crop.
I’ve always wanted to share my own cosplay pictures. I have no idea of why because, frankly, I don’t know who most of these characters are supposed to be. There are just way too many books, movies, TV shows, comic books, and weird fantastic visions for me to be able to recognize them all with any vague familiarity. So don’t expect me to figure out who all these characters are.
![Cosplay group in the lobby of the Atlanta Hyatt hotel, Dragon*Con 2015. September 5.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/cosplay-group-hyatt-atlanta-2015-09-05-300x169.jpg)
Cannot say I remember this group at all but I have the picture. I had just done a panel for the Tolkien Track called “Westeros vs. Middle-earth”. I could not stay at the convention all day on Saturday so I was heading out to meet my ride. On a whim I decided, “I should take some pictures and see how they turn out.” All in all, I actually got some good pictures.
I have always liked the piratey/Steampunk cosplays. Can’t say I like everything Steampunk but I’m a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, for what it’s worth.
To be honest, I have no idea of how many of these people were supposed to be together. Once the cameras start flashing everyone jostles for position and the cosplayers can sometimes be right up next to each other with no connection other than that they were in the same place at the same time. But I think this group are all together.
![Woman and girl posing for pictures in front of the Atlanta Hyatt, September 5, 2015.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/woman-and-girl-cosplay-hyatt-atlanta-2015-09-05-212x300.jpg)
Is this mother and daughter? I have no idea. As I walked out into the hotel driveway the woman was standing alone, posing for pictures. The cops or security guards to her left (right side of this image) were trying to keep the driveway clear (without much success). I thought, “I have no idea of what that costume is supposed to be but I should get a picture.” And I fumbled for my camera the little girl ran up to her, maybe a little upset. After I snapped a couple of pictures the woman knelt down and hugged the girl and posed for some pictures with her, so I don’t think they were related.
They do kind of have the same eyes, though.
In the background you can see the head of a line of people waiting for one of the main evening programming events. That line stretched down to the end of the block, then around the corner and down the street, and then around the corner again. I have stood in one of those lines (more than one). They are hot, sweaty, and uncomfortable and by the time they seat you in the main auditorium you think, “I am going to be stuck way in the back”. But usually I can get a pretty good seat even if I’m 3 line segments back.
![Part of a very long line at Dragon*Con 2015 wrapping around the Hyatt hotel on September 5.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/line-at-dragoncon-2015-300x84.jpg)
And here is the second section of the line. I took some pictures of the first part of the line but I thought this shot captured the feel of endless people at the convention better than any other. The official tally from Dragon*Con 2015 was about 70,000 people. The weather was actually not bad that day. There have been conventions in the past where people were fainting in line.
They do a pretty good job of keeping paramedics close by. I did see a couple of ambulances throughout the weekend, but that is to be expected in a crowd of this size. And to be honest I was surprised to learn attendance was so high because normally you cannot move at all in the hotel lobbies on Saturday and Sunday. It used to be a huge jumbled mass of bodies and security people everywhere constantly yelling, “Keep moving! Keep moving! Do not stand still!” I guess because the convention now covers five hotels the crowds are not so thick, but I was only able to visit the Hyatt and Marriott this year.
![First of many Deadpool costumes in a long parade around Dragon*Con 2015, September 5.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dragonpool-01-2015-247x300.jpg)
I am sharing the pictures out of sequence, by the way. Here is the first of dozens of pictures of the DragonPool 2015 group/parade that I managed to snap. Most of them are too blurry to share. Deadpool was far and away the most popular costume at Dragon*Con and I guess they decided to celebrate ubiquity. I estimated about 150-200 Deadpools walked around the convention on Saturday. I have one word of advice for these groups: STOP AND LET PEOPLE TAKE PICTURES. I am sure someone made a rule somewhere that said “you have to keep moving” but I doubt very many people got good pictures of this group.
I was in the Marriott when I first encountered the parade. They were coming up the escalator and I stood there with some other people snapping pictures as they came off the steps. Obviously you cannot pause the line there without stopping the escalator but there were just too many to get them all.
When I exited the Hyatt (where I shot the pictures above) the head of the line came around on my left and I took more pictures of them there. They were moving so fast there was just no way that I could adjust the camera to get a good picture (remember, I was doing this one-handed).
![More of the DragonPool 2015 parade on September 5.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dragonpool-02-2015-300x240.jpg)
Some of these guys were chanting “Chimi-chimi-CHANGAH!” and kind of dancing almost conga-style as they passed through the crowd, but there were so many of them that only a couple dozen were doing the dance. The rest were just following along (probably hot and tired by this point).
There were a lot of variations on Deadpool in this group: Cthulhu Deadpool, Santa Deadpool, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Deadpool, Pirate Deadpool. I don’t get the Deadpool gag but I was amused to overhear one of the security guards explaining the whole Deadpool thing to another one. She knew her Deadpool lore to be sure. He was just kind of shaking his head in that “What the heck have I got myself into?” way. Mundanes. Can’t live without ’em, though.
There was one Deadpool guy carrying a sign that said, “Someone calls (sic) Disney. I should be in Avengers, Star Wars & Frozen.” Dear Princess Anna might not know what to make of that.
![Lady Thor cosplay at Dragon*Con 2015, September 6.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/lady-thor-september-6-2015-dragoncon-182x300.jpg)
On Sunday I ran into Lady Thor. She was not the first Lady Thor I had seen but she was the first whose picture I could get. She was posing for someone else and I thought it was a good pose so I snapped a couple of pictures. They turned out pretty well.
I believe I took this picture as I wandered around looking for a good cell phone signal, so I missed a lot of really good costumes because I kept trying to connect to a network. You know, with as much money as Dragon*Con makes I was kind of hoping they would have brought in some routers but maybe their contracts with the hotels don’t allow that. I’m not a big fan of free WiFi (because it’s really insecure even if you connect with HTTPS to anything) but I was thinking, “They must know enough technogeeks that they could do this.” Of course, they would probably rely on the Electronic Frontier Foundation for help and that would, in my opinion, just make matters worse.
Eventually you find a corner where you can connect to something for a few minutes. That was good enough, I suppose.
![Girls in cosplay at Dragon*Con 2015, September 6.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/cosplay-girls-dragoncon-2015-september-6-300x123.jpg)
Here is another group of cosplayers I caught right after I took Lady Thor’s picture. They were posing for pictures for a lot of people and I have no idea of whether they were a group or had just come out of a session or what. But they were good-natured about standing there for what seemed like forever.
Later in the day I wandered through the Marriott again and caught some more pictures. Princess Anna was taking the Lost In Space robot’s picture and I heard him say, “Now I want one with you.” I have a few shots of him by himself but I have to admit I really like the picture of the two of them side-by-side. That is just so fanlike. His wife took their picture.
![Princess Anna and the Lost in Space robot cosplay, Dragon*Con 2015, September 6.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/princess-anna-and-robot-dragoncon-2015-september-6-182x300.jpg)
Although I cannot say I’m big a fan of “Frozen” as 60 billion girls around the universe, I did enjoy watching the crossover on Once Upon a Time. Yes, Lana Parilla, I’m a Oncer although I don’t have time to create all the fan content I did 20 years ago. Wish I could have taken in the OUAT sessions at Dragon*Con but it just wasn’t meant to be. I was on four panels for the Tolkien track this weekend and that left me with very little time for taking in the convention. I usually try to get into the Atlanta Radio Theater Company performance but I couldn’t do that, either.
I was also a big “Lost In Space” fan when I was a kid (I even loved the movie from the 1990s). The guy’s robot costume really moves but I have no idea of how much mobility he had in it. He was able to waddle along a short path while I was in the vicinity. He had some sort of voice device that made his voice sound a lot like the robot’s. Of course, a lot of the cosplayers were wired this year. I guess that is now expected.
There were brightly glowing Borg and a Michael Jackson with a traveling soundtrack (great music but a bit too loud for an elevator ride). One of the cool things about the Michael Jackson outfit was that he was able to kill part of the soundtrack, so you only heard the vocals and drums, I think, while you rode up the elevator with him. At least he thought about people’s ears in tight spaces. Kudos for that, Michael.
This is the last picture I will share in this article. I think they call it “syncronized cosplay”. I will call it that. This is two people working together to create the effect. And this is what they call a “hall costume”, folks. I don’t know if they entered the masquerade with this.
![Syncronized cosplay, two people, Dragon*Con 2015, September 6.](https://www.xenite.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/syncronized-cosplay-dragoncon-2015-september-6-242x300.jpg)
I have no way to describe the motions she was going through. Nor do I know how tall her partner was. But they did a pretty good job, in my opinion. But some people who take pictures use flash on their cameras and those flashes ruin the shots for other cameras. I have a picture of this duo where they are all lit up by a flash and it just looks awful. I don’t know if the camera being used with the flash really needed that.
If you are using a digital camera and you’re afraid the images will be dark, remember that they can be adjusted in all sorts of ways. What you cannot do, however, is remove the flash glow in a picture that is ruined by flash. Well, the average person cannot do that. The hotel lobbies were well, well lit and I just don’t think there was any need for flash photography.
Then again, what do I know about photography?
Hope you enjoyed the pictures.