Running an anime photo booth
Tl;dr, I ran a free photo booth at Kawaii Kon 2024 in Honolulu, Hawaii. This details why and how. It was awesome. Shout outs at the end for those who helped make this a possibility. You can see photos in my portfolio here.
Backstory
In 2023 I attended what I believe to be the best anime convention I’ve ever been to; Kawaii Kon in Honolulu, Hawaii. Sprawling the majority of the massive Honolulu Convention Center, this convention never ceased to impress me across the 3 day weekend. From an artist alley that was bigger than some conventions I’ve attended to engaging panels and A-List voice actor guests, it left little to be wanted. Well, aside from one thing that I have seen at many larger (and even some smaller) conventions; a photo booth. I spent my 3 days touting around my Canon R6 Mark ii and an overpacked bag of lenses. At my wifes suggestion, I began offering to take photos for the attendees. Completely free, “professional” photos, that they could just message me on Instagram for and receive a fully edited copy. It took no time for this to catch on, resulting in receiving a few hundred messages, a few thousand photos, and nightly batch editing sessions. The most consistent reception I received was just the level of gratitude to not only have a higher end photo than a cell phone selfie, but that I was simply doing it for fun. It was rewarding to give back to a community that has been a major part of various points of my life, and I knew by Monday morning that I wanted to do it again the following year. This time, however, I wanted to go bigger. More legitimate, more precise, fully using an additional years worth of experience as a free lance photographer and videographer.
Motivation
I was largely disappointed with how many of the photos I took came out. Unsurprisingly, I'm like most photographers in that my standards for my own work are at times, unreasonable. I was shooting with minimal gear, no additional lighting, in the middle of a room with 20+ foot ceilings and walls even further away. No bouncing flashes to give me an additional light. My R6ii was brand new to me, and my inexperience with it resulted in some haphazard moments. I knew for the next convention that I’d want to impress not only the attendees, but myself. I had the “genius” idea of running a simple, free photo booth. Why free? Why hurt the “photography community” by offering high end photos for free? Simply put, because I wanted to. This convention is orchestrated almost entirely (if not actually entirely) on the backs of volunteer staff, their only form of payment or recognition being in the form of free entry into the con. Because I get paid to do what I love, I should only do it for money? It didn’t seem right. On the rare occasion I was able to go to conventions growing up, I did so with zero money to my name. As an adult this is fine, but it left the 13 year old me feeling lesser than and left out of the fun that I couldn’t participate in even an inexpensive photo booth. I can’t do many things I’d like to in my adult life, but I can give some cosplayers a digital photo to commemorate such an amazing weekend. Plus, I love taking photos, talking to fellow fans, practicing my craft, and pushing myself to do something new. So don’t come at me.
Initiation
The initial difficulty was finding out how to even set this up. I began 6-7 months prior to the con and emailed one of their many email addresses on file. I wasn’t sure if this was a support issue, vendor, artist alley, admission, or what. So I started with general inquiry. After receiving no response for a few weeks, probably because I was messaging the wrong accounts, I moved onto support. Then artist alley, which resulted in a response that the artist alley waitlist was already hundreds of submissions deep, and probably too small for a booth anyways. In the end I reached out to Vendor support and was shown how to apply for and receive a vendor booth. This seemed like the perfect plan, except with one small hiccup; Vendor booths cost money. Obviously they do, they’re points of sale for vendors. Not only are these spots coveted, but they’re expensive. I knew that if I paid the price (I will not be listing, consult Kawaii Kon for this information for 2025) I would have no choice but to charge something for the photos just to hopefully break even. This added a massive amount of complexity to the plan, and largely went against the spirit of what I was trying to do to begin with. I wanted an all inclusive photo booth so anyone and everyone could participate. I wanted as small an overhead as possible to remove an negativity for myself regarding success or failure, and to remove any ambiguity for the cosplayers. Feeling fairly defeated, I was nearing the point of abandoning the idea entirely. Until a few weeks later I went to the Japanese Cultural Center for a new years event in January of 2024. I wanted to bring my gimbal and capture as much B-roll footage of the event as possible for future ideas. I was accompanied by my wife, and my 2 photographer friends. During the course of the day, we quickly became separated. I lost an untold amount of time doing what I do best, talking too much to someone about their booth, which was a display on very rare child sized katanas from Japan. I eventually left the convention to check on my car, when I received a call that my wife and one of my friends had the fortune of running into a manager of the Kawaii Kon, Buma! They told him about my idea, and he was on board to discuss it further! Finally, a breakthrough in this process. A genuine point of contact to make this happen. I immediately sent a new email while standing in the parking lot, shamelessly name dropping that Buma had requested I reach out again and explained the situation in full again. After showing my website, instagram, and full portfolio and clarifying that I had no interest in charging or even accepting tips for the event, we came to an agreement.
Preparation
Having spent the past 6 months freelancing entirely solo as a full time job, I had a decent idea of how I wanted to handle the shoot. I had done a small photo booth for a friends themed ball the year prior, which gave me a lot of insight into what works, and what doesn’t. First of all, batteries. I need batteries to spare, and then some. This was easy enough to secure, as my modest flashes use simple AA batteries that I recharge. I wanted a backdrop, but couldn’t quite settle on one. My wife eventually found a beautiful abstract grey backdrop after we found that something like this was especially common at anime conventions. The neutral colored backdrop would allow the subjects to really pop, but the abstract pattern would give a bit more visual interest than just a blob of color. We kept the budget as low as possible, resulting in a mere $40 investment for a large 8x10 backdrop. This size was pursued to accommodate group shots, something I learned from previous work. While it has compromises, being it wouldn’t be seamless and it was fairly thin upon arrival, it would elevate the photos. Next was some form of signage to clearly state the photos were free, and how to get them. I decided that the absolute easiest method of getting your photo was to make a large Google Drive folder, separate it into 3 days, and keep it open to anyone with the link. Not the most professional setup, but it was effective and worked with few problems. I ordered a 3x2 foot vinyl banner from Vistaprint, designing it to closely match the Kawaii Kon font and color scheme stating the booth was free and my name, with a custom QR code that went directly to the main Drive folder. Another small $35 investment, but one I have no regrets on as it seriously elevated the legitimacy of the booth. All that was left to do was decide on a method of taking the photos, getting them into lightroom, and getting them uploaded as quickly as possible. This was genuinely that hardest part.
Delivery
The ideal scenario was to take test photos upon arrival, with my wife graciously posing in her adorable Nami cosplay as the perfect subject. I would then move these photos to Lightroom, create a massive preset edit, and copy this edit to every photo after. This will allow for some level of uniformity, but also room for exposure and color adjustments. The initial idea was to use Tethering in Adobe Lightroom to instantly send my photos to the PC, have my assistant Drew Mendez ( @voyager_and_beyond on instagram) copy the preset onto each of the best photos, make the necessary adjustments, then export to a live folder on my desktop that would instantly upload to Google Drive via a hotspot on my phone. I wasn’t going to use public wifi with my personal computer, hence the hotspot. I quickly ran into an issue; my Canon R6 Mark ii is not supported in Adobe Lightroom for tethering. My friends R8 is not supported for tethering. Keep in mind that the R6 Mark ii released in November of 2022, 16 months prior. This lack of support is either entirely Adobes, or Canons fault. Either way, it’s ridiculous. So i went to my first back up plan, which was to use Canon Capture software in EOS Utility to live copy the photos from the SD card. Unfortunately, Canons software has always been lackluster in my experience. In this particular instance, it was flaming hot garbage left to bake under Sozin’s comet. It would work perfectly for 4 photos, no more or less. Then immediately state the connection to the camera was lost. I tried both wired and wirelessly, and never found a setup that worked more than this. Again, utterly ridiculous on Canons part. This left us with back up plan 3; my R6 Mark ii shoots onto 2 SD cards, mirror images of each other for redundancy. Every half hour or so I would turn off the camera, remove card 2, and copy the images to the PC as, for example, Day.1.Batch.1 . This would keep the days and batches separated through the entire signal chain. These photos would be copied directly to the PC, and to an external 1tb SSD. This left us with 3 copies of every photo:
1) On card 1, which was never removed or formatted
2) On the external SSD
3) On the PCs internal SSD
Lightroom was organized into 3 albums, each KawaiiKon2024Day1 (or 2 or 3), then each batch was labeled with its corresponding star rating. For instance, batch 1 were all labeled 1 star, and so on and so forth. This gave us 5 batches a day, keeping everything in one daily album. This meant importing, organizing, and exporting were all simplified with this batch system. For a last ditch plan, it worked fairly well. In fact, any sort of tethering option would have several limited my mobility while taking the photos, and I will fine tune this process for future events. We exported each batch separately, using LR filter options to isolate by star rating, into their own batched folder and uploaded live throughout the day as fast as possible. I’m happy to say everyones photos were uploaded the same day they took them. Was it difficult? Sure. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
The Day of the Event
Finally, we arrive at the day of the event. I created an exhaustive list of everything I would need to bring in the days prior, quadruple checking it and my pre packed bags. I left early, planning to arrive before 8am for setup, as the con officially opened at 9am and I wanted to be ready. This work had my name on it, meaning there was no room for unprofessionalism or tardiness when avoidable. I arrived at the convention, went straight to my table, and began setting up the event alone as my assistant was delayed due to a family medical situation. Everyone was fine, and he arrived later that day, so no worries. I propped up the backdrop, using a lovely portable steamer from Chi to remove any last minute wrinkles from transit, and clamped it tightly in every direction. My table had m banner clamped to the edge, crude but effective. My laptop attached to a power strip on m extension cord, with the USB-C dongle and external drive, mouse dongle, mouse, and pad all ready to roll. My business cards, something I’m particularly proud of, casually scattered across the table. I’ll make a separate about my cards and why I made them this way, but they act as small glimpses into my portfolio. Everything was looking great, until I finished situating my light stands and went to mount my flashes and diffusers. If you analyzed the list fully, you’ll notice one important thing was missing; my flash to bowens mount adapters. I had recently changed my entire bag setup, resulting in removing the adapters from my light stand bags. Why? I have no idea as they weigh practically nothing and lived there for a ear straight so I would never forget them on a job. Of course my arrogance, seeded in experience and routines, would bite me in the ass on today of all days. I frantically brainstormed any way to attach the flashes but came up empty handed. I checked my local camera shop, but they were out of stock online. When it rains it surely pours. M wife was at work, and couldn’t bring me the adapters! Finally, I remember that I plan for myself to forget things and packed my Godox SL60W LED light as an emergency backup in case a flash died. I quickly set the light up as a key, and cranked it to 100%. This wasn’t perfect, but it was progress. Next I began fine tuning the location of the light and my exposure settings. Everything was looking surprisingly good so far, so I added another light; an on camera humble Godox TT600 flash. Logic would say that this was a foolish idea, and it would ordinarily be correct. Not in this instance though. I pointed the flash directly up, using the 16+ foot ceilings as a bounce light. It shouldn’t have worked, but to my amazement it worked perfectly! I had well exposed photos, with controlled directional light.
With everything set up, I threw all backup batteries onto their respective chargers, and went to work. Initially I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would people come by? Would they ignore me? It was a completely mystery, but one that was soon solved. After my first few attendees cautiously approached my table, expressing great skepticism that it was, in fact free, the word began to catch on. I quickly edited and uploaded the first 20 photos as proof of concept and went right back to the grind. Most were concerned that while the photo may be visible, it will be covered in a large watermark i.e. yearbook sample photo style. I let them check the link for themselves, revealing the only watermark was my handle at the bottom right of the image, in a position where it could be easily cropped out if needed. As sweet as ever, I’m happy to report that next to no one cropped out the tag, and in fact tagged me on Instagram, often as a collaborator! For a young business, that level of social media reach can’t be over stated, and my appreciation knows no bounds. I tried to return the favor by tagging everyone I could find as well.
Day one, Friday, was long and fairly busy, but it gave me a lot to think about. I stayed at the convention until roughly 8-9pm that day, not wanting to take the photos home for final editing. Day two, Saturday, started off much more favorably, with me remembering to grab my adapters that morning, as well as a preemptive coffee, something I was sorely lacking Friday morning. I’m glad I did, as Saturday is notoriously crazy at Kawaii Kon and my booth was no exception to this. I again arrived at roughly 8am, had to find parking down the road due to the increased attendance, and began setup just shy of 9. Today was the day I would have a full 3 point light setup, retaining the SL60w as a simple hair light, with matching TT600s for fill and key. These were controlled remotely with the Godox X1 wireless transmitter on top of my camera. I’ll discuss the gear at greater length further down. My wife offered the advice that while she loved the photos from day one, she knew I could take even better and more dynamic shots. Posing has always been a weakness for me, but I was confident I could overcome it. Day two allowed me the chance to push myself further than I ever have, both creatively and nearly physically. I was posing groups of people at a time, digging deep into their characters stances, poses, mannerisms, and more. Finally, decades of binging anime paid off. I told my mom it wasn’t a waste of time to burn Death Note to 6 DVDs in 2009, hogging the family PC overnight to make my low res copies. I was right; kind of. Let me have this, okay?
Day three, Sunday, was the final day of the convention. I was exhausted in every way possible, but determined to keep up the momentum and deliver the best photos I could. While not quite as busy as Saturday, the difference felt fairly negligible by 5pm when we finally closed up shop, and went to Ala Moana for lunch. This concluded my 3 day photo booth at Kawaii Kon 2024, affording me an experience I will never forget. The people were amazing, expressing levels of creativity that I feel I’ll never match. My supporters, my friends and especially my wife, were unyielding. Even by the end of the day, when my malnourished and highly over caffeinated self was notably snippier and less considerate than I’d have liked, they still helped me close up and carry my 5 over flowing bags of gear to the garage.
Gear
While I try not to focus on gear too much, I do feel it is relevant here as I used some fairly unconventional means to capture this convention. For starters, my camera body is the Canon R6 Mark II, a highly capable hybrid camera that nearly perfectly fulfills my needs a hybrid shooter. It’s 24.2MP Full Frame sensor doesn’t leave one wanting much. Or at least, needing much. We always want more. I adapt all of my lenses from Canon EF Mount to RF Mount, with the sole exception of my Canon RF 100mm f/2.8 L Macro. The main lens for this convention was a recently acquired Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L lens, typically shot at f/4 or above. There were instances where I stopped the lens down for dramatic effect, but this wasn’t the typical shooting scenario. I did occasionally pull out my Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens for some shots, as it never fails to deliver. My entire lens lineup that I brought with me was as follows:
Sigma 24mm f/1.4 Art (EF Mount)
Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art (EF Mount)
Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L
Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
Canon RF 100m f/2.8 L Macro
Canon EF 135mm f/2 L
For lighting, I used the previously stated TT600 pair as a key and fill, and the Godox SL60W as a hair light. While not its’ intended use case, it filled the role perfectly. The flashes were controlled using the Godox X1 wireless transmitter. Note to those in a similar position: If you have an issue where your flash begins firing randomly, change your channel in camera settings, the controller, and the flashes. At a convention this size it was unsurprising that there were other photographers using flash near me. This caused interference with my flashes, giving me a number of issues until I solved the problem. While these are fairly budget speedlights, and one video light, it goes to show how much you can do with modest gear. I will say that higher powered lights will be present at my next convention, but only because lighting is king above all else. A well lit photograph on an M50 with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 will always look better than a poorly lit photo on an R5 with the RF 85mm f/1.2.
The settings across the board were typically shutter 1/200, ISO 800 or less, and f/4 as the default. I surprisingly rarely pushed my lights above 1/32, resulting in fast refresh times and long lasting batteries. I’m pleased to say I only missed a routine battery swap once, but was able to make the swap in seconds with minimal disruption.
Credit Where It’s Due
I want to give a few shout outs to those who supported and encouraged me every step of the way.
Firstly, Buma, Justine, and the rest of the Kawaii Kon crew for not only hosting this incredible anime convention, but for taking the leap of faith on me and giving me the chance to run this booth. It was rewarding in ways I can never full convey, and my appreciation knows no bounds. I’ll cherish this weekend for the rest of my life as not only a professional goal fully realized, but as a personal experience that left me feeling incredible.
Second, to Drew for donating his time to assist me in this endeavor, and keeping my head fully secured throughout the process. His was assistance gave me the confidence to pull off something as massive as photographing a convention of roughly 20,000 people.
Next, to Derek for making that first point of contact with Buma and helping make this entire thing come to be. He was supportive and encouraging every step of the way. He wanted to assist, but was unfortunately unable to attend except Sunday due to work.
Last, but absolutely not least, thank you to my wife Kristina. When I first suggested the idea, she wasn’t only supportive, but fully invested in making it a reality. She pushed me and encouraged me the same way she always does; by telling me straight up that I can do more than I think. My imposter syndrome knows only her as a boundary. As is the running story of our marriage, I’m not sure where I’d be without her. Certainly not photographing Kawaii Kon 2024. Probably not even photographing anything at all. It was her hard work, sacrifices, and encouragement that have allowed me to pursue a life long dream of film and photography, leaving me indebted to her in ways that are probably incalculable. I did do the dishes last night though, so I think that’s a fair starting point. She even found a way to accept that while she was cosplayed as the ever adorable Nami from One Piece for the entire convention, I was simply moving too much and stayed too busy to truly be her Sanji. Maybe next time.