All participants in the Queen of PIAE competition

Introduction

For the weekend of August 2nd-August 4th, I had the immense pleasure of photographing the Hawai’i Tattoo Expo, also known as the Pacific Ink and Art Expo. This massive tattoo convention brings people in from all over the world, with over 200 artists present. Many of their clients were entered into the numerous contests held at the expo, ranging from best traditional tattoo, tribal tattoo, to portrait tattoos. The amount of talent, dedication, and passion on display can’t be overstated. In this post I’ll describe how I even became a part of such an incredible experience, what I did to prepare for it, how I captured the photos presented, and most importantly what I learned from this event. All photos from this event are visible at:

https://justonphotography.pixieset.com/hawaiitattooexpo/

How did I get this assignment?

To be honest, I wasn’t aware this event was happening this year until a month or so prior. The Tattoo Expo was cancelled from 2020-2023 due to the Covid pandemic that greatly affected this island. My wife, with her usual wisdom, made an appointment with an artist that would be appearing at the show. She immediately suggested that I go with her to photograph the event for fun. Initially, I read the guidelines and saw that, on paper at least, cameras like mine weren’t allowed at the expo. I tried the number on their page to inquire if they were in need of an additional photographer for the event. When I received only an automated message, I was initially dismayed. I reached out to the @HawaiiTattooExpo on Instagram in a last ditch effort. I put the thought out of mind for several days, not wanting to get my hopes up, only to receive a notification a few days later that Danny, the owner of the expo, had responded! After a brief discussion and allowing him to review my photos from the recent Kawaii Kon (I have a blog post about that here) we arrived at an agreement that I would be given a VIP booth right next to the main stage. This luxurious 10x20ft space was more than I expected, and I took advantage of this space as much as possible. Having only 7-10 days to prepare, I had to act quickly.

Preparation

Coming off of Kawaii Kon, I knew there were a few things I wanted to change about my setup. First off, lighting. Lighting is the single most important part of an photo or video. Lighting outranks your lens, camera, filters, SD cards, laptop, desktop, anything you can think of; LIGHTING IS KING. For Kawaii Kon I used my most portable setup'; a pair of Godox TT600 speed lights. Inexpensive, basic, but they got the job done. Not without a variety of shortcomings. First and foremost, batteries. I was so tired of constantly monitoring, charging, and swapping these frustrating AA’s that are the only power source option for these lights. Second, was power. While you can get a ton of work done with such humble flashes, I knew I needed more. I was shooting the majority of Kawaii Kon at ISO 400-800 in order to keep my aperture at 2.8 or above. To remedy this problem, I opted to purchase a pair of Godox MS300-V Studio Flashes. While not AS portable, these are small and lightweight lights that easily fit into my new dedicated flash photography bag from MagicLine. Wall powered with an upgraded LED light meant I could actually see my subjects much more easily, had faster refresh times, and way more power than I needed, which is always nice. These performed very well at the expo, with only one giving me any issues. I had forgotten to turn off the modeling lights when not shooting for a period of 6-8 hours, and I believe the heat build up caused one of the lights to refresh a little bit slower. This was very rare, and something I’ll keep an eye on in the future.

The second issue was my backdrop. While I loved the design of the grey abstract one I used for Kawaii Kon, it had a few issues. It wasn’t a through pocket design, had this awful white border on every side, and was only 10 feet tall. I quickly ordered a black 10x20ft from Limostudio on Amazon, with the through process being that I could fake a seamless backdrop design by having 4-8 feet of the backdrop draping across this floor. This mostly worked, with the illusion being further helped by a handy lint roller and my portable steamer from Chi.

*Quick note, this handheld steamer has been one of the best purchases I’ve ever made as a photographer. I highly recommend you keep a steamer on hand if ever doing anything remotely close to work like this. for outfits and backdrops, it’s a little miracle worker.

The last remaining issue was equally simple to solve, and that was my cameras battery life. My Canon R6 Mark II does very well on a single battery, in no small part due to years of me building the muscle memory of constantly keeping it off when not in use. I did finally cave and purchase the BG-R10 grip from Canon ($350, really Canon? The new one is $500?!) which gives me double the battery life, as well as identical controls when in portrait scenarios. I wound up loving using this grip, despite the additional weight in hand. Sacrifice the body for the shot I always say.

Shooting & Editing Live

I arrived early Friday morning, got my media badge, and setup as quickly as possible while making sure everything was accounted for. The backdrop was simple enough making sure to keep a sandbag on each side. I used 3 lights; the aforemented pair of MS300V’s and a single TT600 with a small diffuser as a rim light. I used a red gel for this and I personally thing it was the most iconic part of the entire set of photos. Being a tattoo expo, I wanted dramatic, edgy portraits with a ton of character. This modest red light, and later I added a 4th opposing purple light, were a huge part in defining the look of this shoot. My booth was up and running, and I got straight to work. After a quick test photo, I decided on a simple goal; to edit and upload every single photo from the event live, with all being uploaded before I left each day. I could just shoot JPEGs, but I my name was (literally) on every photo, and I needed them to look their absolute best.

During Kawaii Kon, where I had a similar goal, I figured out a few essential workflow rules that would help me tremendously here. Using Lightrooms build in star rating system (frustratingly capped at 5) I would use this as a framework for organizing within the software. Every hour or two I would dump Card 1 of 2 onto my laptop. Batch 0 would receive no stars, 1 would receive 1 star, and so on and so forth. This would allow me to focus on the photos in 1 of 6 batches ever day, while keeping each day in it’s own album within LR. At the start of the first day I grabbed a volunteer and took a few test photos to confirm lighting was where I wanted it, and to settle on an edit for the album. For Kawaii Kon, I utilized a lot of masking. This allowed me to further separate my subjects from the backdrop, and to further blur the backdrop by reducing clarity and texture on the background. While the effect worked beautifully, I hope, it was extremely slow and taxing on my laptop. Fortunately, this new black backdrop and tremendous increase in light power made this unnecessary for the Tattoo Expo. This was potentially the most useful change in regards to my speed and workflow.

I used my Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 for all of Friday. It is one of my favorite lenses I’ve ever used, but unfortunately the poor thing didn’t survive and on Saturday morning, I was heartbroken to see that a recurring issue I’ve had with it reared its head for the final time, locking my focus at 5ft. This may be a simple enough fix, but I’ve contacted Canon this morning to inquire about service. For now, RIP my little friend. I’ll fix you sooner rather than later. Going forward, I primarily used my Sigma EF 35mm f/1.4 ART lens, supplemented with the Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 at various points. At one point I basically had a small Canon presentation on my table.

The accidental Canon display. Pictured are the Canon EF 135mm f/2, Canon R7with Sigma 24mm f/1.4 ART, and Canon R6 Mark II with Sigma 35mm f/1.4 ART.

My default settings across the entire 3 days of shooting were as follows:

Shutter Speed: 1/200 , Aperture f/2.8, ISO 100. Key light at 1/16, Fill at 1/32, and rim lights at 1/4. I would occasionally adjust the aperture for more or less depth of field, and the lights to compensate for different subjects and tattoos. I wanted to keep my aperture at 2,8 as the baseline in order to keep my entire subject in perfect focus, stopping down further for group shots when they presented themselves. My ISO being as low as possible was a huge goal for me, and one very easy to meet with the increase in light power.

For the baseline edit, the one that would be copied to every photo and refined for exposure individually, I went all in on a dramatic and edgy look. No masking was necessary, but I wanted to make this set look very different from my usual look. I settled on a fairly high contrast look, boosting the highlights while reducing the shadows in both the sliders and the curves. I didn’t want to split tone this set at all, but I did highly modify my HSL tab for nearly every color in some way. I wanted red to be strong and vibrant, with the blues reduced and pushed more into a cyyan. I pushed green far to the right to make it much deeper, then desaturated it roughly halfway. I kept my white balance unchanged from 5600 in camera, but did shift the orange and yellows ever so slightly. I added a small dash of clarity and texture, with a very subtle vignette for chunks of photos. I didn’t do masking or retouching by default, save for a few special photos (the Queen contest specifically) where I felt a bit more attention was warranted. This kept my workflow tight, fast, and simple. I would copy the base edit over, make the proper adjustments, and marked the photo as complete with a flag indicator before moving onto the next one.

An example from the 2nd Day of the Hawaii Tattoo Expo

I used contests throughout each day as a reliable anchor to swap my card out, dump it, and keep shooting. I was literally editing photos while watching each contestant pose, show off their tattoo, then head down the side of the stage to my photo booth. I’d finish each batch, copy the last photos edit, then export the batch by limiting the displayed photos to only that star rating. I never removed or emptied the second card until the end of the day. At this point I would remove card 2, dump the entire card into one single folder labeled “DAY X BACKUP”, then I would reformat both cards in camera. This meant that no matter what, I would have at least 2 copies of every photo all day while working. Once home, I would copy this backup folder onto my external storage, keeping the rule of 3s as intact as possible. I’m happy to say that I did accomplish my goal of live releasing every single photo. By 8pm on Sunday night, I had successfully edited and uploaded 1,008 photos to a public collection on my pixieset site.

After

Much to my surprise, there was an afterparty the following day (Monday) on the beach about a half hour from my house. I packed up, headed over, and spent about 4+ hours grabbing shots of everyone present, getting to spend one on one time with the people I had only briefly spoken to during the expo, and managed to snag a spontaneous shoot with the model Brookelle Bombshelle. Once I had all of these edited, delivered, and I was finally caught up, I had a few thoughts of what I would do differently for m next convention, Comic Con Honolulu coming up in September.

First, Lighting again. The MS300Vs performed very well for me, making the usage of one, and later two, Godox TT600s even more frustrating in comparison. For the next con, I’m debating on which studio flash to grab next. Another MS300? Perhaps, or I’ll grab a bigger and better light and relocate one of the MS300s to take over as my rim light. I have a few weeks to decide and make my purchase, but I’m FOR SURE done dealing with battery swaps.

Second, my flash trigger. The Godox Xpro (C) definitely gets the job done, but it’s not without problems. It is very temperamental about how hard it is locked to the cameras hot shoe. Too loose? It won’t fire. Too tight? It also won’t fire. Once it’s set, I like to just leave it alone. Unfortunately, I did have to figure out it’s delicate setting every single morning. The newer flash trigger looks to be an upgrade in every way, for a modest price tag. I think I’ll snag one of these up as well, if anything to save myself a few headaches down the line.

Finally, my banner is in dire need of a replacement. Not only did it get fairly messed up on the trip home, it is too small and lacks clear communication. A simple change that I’ll be making today. Otherwise, I can’t say I would change very much to how I approach this style of shooting. I’m very proud of the images, my ability to complete this journey with no assistance this time, and very honored to have been a part of this event. *I also need to remember to setup my GoPro so I could have AN behind the scenes footage to promote myself on my instagram, @JustonPhotography . Social media is a massive tool that I’m still not utilizing fully enough.

The full setup at the start of Day 2. Surely I didn’t forget the banner on Friday, right?

Huge shout out to Danny @HawaiiTattooExpo for giving me the chance to help out. This was an amazing experience and really transformed me into a new photographer. Another to Jaymi for helping to organize such a beautifully managed event. Seriously, this convention was so well prepared that I was in awe at multiple points. Of course, a massive thank you to Warren for being an AMAZING MC the entire show. Hearing my name on stage shared with hundreds of people over and over again was genuinely surreal. Lastly I have to thank my Booth Buddies at Hella Fresh Tattoo. This pair of women were so sweet and welcoming, and incredibly talented. I couldn’t have asked for better neighbors for this event even if I hand picked them myself. One more big thank you to everyone else involved in bringing this expo together. I’ll definitely find a way to be back next year for the 10th anniversary!