During August my team and I venture out to Cologne, Germany for the annual GamesCom conference. Since taking up photography and buying a few bits of half decent kit, I figured this will make for an ideal chance to find out how much I’ve learned.
I made the decision not to take the A65 DSLR, instead I would rely on the smaller, lighter RX100. I would be spending many, many hours on my feet and didn’t want to carry lots of heavy equipment around with me all day… Mistake #1
The conference is an amateur photographers nightmare, large dark rooms, coloured lighting, thousands of people moving way to quickly and no one stops, ever. You try to take a picture of something still, someone WILL stand in front of you. The colouring of everything is… well just wrong, I have spent so much time in post-prod trying to adjust white balance it’s embarrassing. Particularly as I was shooting in JPEG only format. Mistake #2
Only one thing for it, I have taken the scatter gun approach, I took somewhere in the range of 600 pics during the 4 days, and in all honestly, most of them genuinely stink! Luckily there are a few that I kind of like, otherwise this journal would be looking pretty text heavy right about now!
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The show itself is always great fun, Lots of people turn up in Cosplay (dressing up like game characters) and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between hired actors and members of the public! The stands and booths are always bright and noisy and offer a number of challenges for a photographer. I’ll admit, it required greater skill than I have, hence the extremely limited number of photos of the booths in this Journal.
I did manage to grab a bit of downtime while I was there and took the chance to take to the streets. One of my favourite parts of this new hobby is street photography, while my attempts at capturing life as it happens around me are somewhat fumbled, I really enjoy the challenge. You’ll see this, by the fact that most of the photos uploaded in the last few days are street photography. Also, it helps that this is something my new compact RX100 camera excels at.
Where I really missed my bigger camera, was when taking photos of the city itself. Cologne has some beautiful builds and sights, particularly along the river Rhine, the photos taken on this trip really don’t do it justice and next year for sure, I will be taking the A65.
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