My first venture towards the Telford venue for the newly rebranded MCM ComicCon, and a thoroughly good time it was.  Only a single day deal, but large enough and popular enough to be worth a visit, plenty of nice costumes on show, yet small enough to be cosy and relaxed as an event.  Perfect  way to start the 2013 con season.

It gives that extra bit of hope for the year to come, it’s easy to feel a lot of love for the things being cosplayed, it’s not done for attention or fame or anything other than dressing up as something ridiculous that you have a passion for!

Taken some time but here’s some photos from the Expo weekend gone by, EuroCosplay had us caught up for the majority but there’s still the odd shot and the Sunday masquerade to go around!

A team effort this time around, with myself, Littlegeeky, Luki, Locke, InvisiGirl, Meltopian, Oz, Shenny, Drift, Yuka, Pounce and Foxy all pitching in the time and effort to cover ECC in full.

Who would’ve thought moving home and starting a new job would eat so much time? Finally the time has been found to sit down and spend some quality time with a shuttle wheel. Here’s the third Cosplay Cascade video featuring cosplayers out and about the Keele University campus at AmeCon 2012! Due to the building works and general faff it’s not got the amazing scenery and variety I had planned but hey, at the end of the day it’s about people in brightly coloured costumes throwing things at each other. I think.

More lessons learned, and the steadicam had gained a loose screw which went mostly undetected but now has been found and severely punished, hopefully I won’t have the same troubles next time!

As an offshoot there’s a quickish video made entirely out of Avatar cosplay footage, that’s just how big the groups were over the weekend!  That can be found on YouTube here.

New addition to the album list – London Film and Comic Con – taking place in a temporary venue due to the almighty Olympics.  It’s a far more Western media-focused event than I usually attend but as it’s not far from me thought I’d take a look-see.  Can’t pass up chances to take more pictures now, can I?

LFCC boasts a guest list the likes of which I’ve never seen before, including several people I’d have quite liked to meet which is rare!  Of course this is me so priority goes to people in daft outfits over actual celebrities.

Only attended for the Saturday so the gallery is a little light, it’s also not as cosplay-heavy as many events I cover, and the temporary venue has little in the way of photo-taking-space so apologies for that.

Another Expo, the first one I got to experiment on with the steadicam, unfortunately also the one interrupted by another event double booking the entirety of the useful outdoor area, sigh. Dragging people to calmer areas (quite the walk!) took an annoying amount of time and I didn’t get to catch remotely the number of people I was hoping to. Still, made the most of it and hopefully got some good footage. Won’t find out until I check of course, but first come PHOTOS!

Kinda slacked on the photo front to accommodate videoings, outside of the masquerade at least, so apologies for sparseness. I’m hoping whatever I churn together on a timeline will make up for it! This is mostly due to the outside area being offlimits nearly the entire weekend, inside kinda sucks, the loss of space meant everything was packed tight, the weather didn’t help, and I pretty much had to drag people down the entire other end of the ExCeL to find space.. Even doing it every waking hour of the day before the masquerade I only got a fraction of the people I usually do.. Apparently the tree garden was opened up late on Saturday but by then I’d considered it a writeoff and patrolled the other end, and Sunday I only get a few hours of expo time between doors open and masq start T_T Normal photography service should resume next event, as long as EuroCosplay doesn’t keep me busy anyway!

As always, if you spot photos of yourself and want nicer copies, throw the NertCam number at me in private via whatever means you wish! Use ‘em as you will, uploading to whatever social media of your choice is perfectly fine, credit’s not a requirement as long as they’re photos of yourself.

I’ve also set up something of a Facebook page now, I’ll be uploading some of the highlight photos from each event there as well as here so they can be tagged and be all web2.0 and I can pretend I’m popular! XD

So throw all your love and likes at: ManyLemons on Facebook

Updates can also be found on some other social networky thing called Twitter over at ManyLemonsUK

First event of the new year for me! HyperJapan returns for its third outing in an even larger venue and appears to have smacked its queuing problems on the head from last year, the event is only improving and this year was host to the UK qualifiers for both the European Cosplay Gathering, and – for the first time ever – World Cosplay Summit. The UK is finally on the WCS map!

Congratulations to our winners for both!

Lex and Sands are our representatives for the 2012 World Cosplay Summit with their excellent Vampire Hunter D (Amano version) costumes and performance, and will be attending the finals in Japan.

Yuka and Dahlia will be representing us at the 2012 European Cosplay Gathering with their costumes and performance from Final Fantasy XIII, as with Nomes with her Son Goku from Dragonball Z (which sadly I missed seeing!) at the finals held in France.

Other prizes went to contestants for: Judges’ Choice, Best Junior, Best Individual, 4th place, and 3rd place.

Standard blurb applies, feel free to thieve for personal and non-commercial use (Profile pictures/albums/CosplayIsland/Coscom/etc), editing or deletion requests, as well as requests for unwatermarked copies, are typically honoured from those featured in them. Any other uses, get in touch and we’ll figure something out.

Thanks to everyone at Kita, had a good time.  Especially good to learn from/annoy/steal photos from all the photographers I usually only see fleetingly at expo XD

Will write more later, so, so busy -_-  8000 photos WHAT THE HELL