Orobouros.net @ Otakon 2006
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Being held in the Inner Harbor, one of the largest tourist destinations in the whole state of Maryland, has many advantages and disadvantages. Being held during a high tourism season, Otakon attendees have to contend with not only many individual tourists and families, but major events such as concerts going on. In 2006, two major baseball teams played on all three days of the convention, right next door to the convention center. Baltimore is accustomed to such strains, though, and provides ample hotel space, retail outlets, and restaurant options, all from budget to luxury price ranges. While more expensive than many other anime convention venues, Otakon and Baltimore are only moderately more expensive than conventions held in much less popular and urbanized areas.
At around $55 per attendee and unknown amounts of contributions from major industry, Otakon has a budget that allows for events that most other conventions cannot manage. In 1999, Otakon took up only one part of half of the convention center. By 2006, it has not only utilized all the space in the convention center Ð though perhaps not yet optimally Ð Otakon has expanded into two semi-famous local venues. This year, the masquerade was held in the First Mariner Arena, a fully-sized events stadium, and several concerts were held at Ram's Head Live, a very popular venue for rock concerts in the Baltimore area. While not yet a particularly noticeable feature in mainstream entertainment, anime and the fans' related interests are certainly making themselves visible. Otakon is considered a city-wide event for good reason.
Finally, since the main focus of this site is (now) photography, a few words on the aesthetics of Otakon, Baltimore, the Inner Harbor, and the Convention Center are in order. There is a lot of traffic in downtown Baltimore, and doing cosplay outside the convention is always a bit of a hairy issue. However, the inner harbor does provide a lot of nice locations to shoot. Humidity and temperatures are very high in late July and early August, so many outdoor shoots would probably be uncomfortable at best. The main patio of the Convention Center, though outside, does provide a fairly good shooting area with fewer attendees and many buildings in the background. Inside, the fountain area (formally called the Pratt Street Lobby, I believe) is also a very nice location for photos, though obviously crowed due to this fact. Lighting though most of the upper (300) level is decent during the day, though the other levels are really not recommended for photography. That being said, there are still a number of nice secluded parts of the convention center that are pretty much devoid of attendees. And for those who can be polite in dealing with hotel staff, many of the convention hotels are very fancy and have very nice interiors. Though often difficult to shoot, these provide some of the nicest locations anywhere.
I use an automatic Photoshop process to develop the images from RAW to the website. I'll be happy to manually fix up any particular photos by request, though, since they tend to look better and have less noise. And more photos from various people: The Cosplay.com Otakon 2006 picture thread. |
Convention reports and photos: Orobouros.net
Higher quality images available upon special request.
Images, text, and other content © 2006 Oliver Oberg.
If you wish to link to the website, please link to the main page, http://www.orobouros.net, and please don't link to any images directly from other web sites. You are granted permission to use these images for your own personal use (such as cosplay sites, personal web pages, etc) provided they are not altered in any way except for rotation, cropping, resizing, resolution, and mirroring. Any other altering of these images requires my permission. I reserve the right to revoke use of these images at any time for any reason. This is done for the protection of the subjects of these pictures. If you are the subject of any of these pictures, and wish your likeness to be removed from this web page, please contact me with the file name and the page it appears on. Unless there is considerable doubt that you are not the subject of the picture, your request will be granted in a timely manner.