DragonCon

I have a number of terribly important, if slightly ponderous, postings sitting as half-done drafts -- but they will have to wait. I have bought myself a flickr.com pro account as a more convenient way to serve images and I have loaded up some photos I took over the Labor Day weekend to try it out. So, a bit of photo-blogging about DragonCon.

DragonCon is a huge SF / Media / Comics / Gaming / etc. convention held yearly in Atlanta in the later part of the summer. DragonCon gets bigger every year and this year, despite the high price of gasoline, it seemed bigger than ever. Some fans, who concentrate on a particular area, may tend to disparage DragonCon for its sprawling lack of focus. Those who are mostly interested in written Science Fiction, for instance, may tend to prefer the smaller, more bookish, World Science-Fiction Convention that rotates from location to location rather like the Olympics (this year it was in Glasgow and next year L.A.).



One answer to that is that DragonCon is so large that if you take just the written-sf program items and ignore the rest you have a decent World Con. This, for instance is a very World-con-esque photo of Anne and Todd McCaffrey who read excerpts from a novel they haven't quite finished.



Anne Crispin hosted a memorium session to remember Andre Norton, a very popular fantasy writer who died this year after a writing career that spanned over 60 years. [See teleoscope: Andre Norton RIP]



Also on the Andre Norton memorium panel was my long-time frind Brad Linaweaver, a writer who lives in California. Brad is currently collaborating with ...



... actor Richard Hatch, shown here discussing a plot element from one of the Battlestar Galactica novels on which he and Brad are working.

One of the chief pleasures of DragonCon for me is the opportunity to see my old frinds, like Brad (above) or Bill Ritch (shown here announcing that the performance of the play he had written would be slightly delayed while they got the sound system to work.)



Bill is a computer programmer who lives in Atlanta and spends his free time producing radio drama with the Atlanta Radio Theater Company ...



... (shown here performing an adaptation of A E Van Vogt's Weapon Shops).



Bill also writes and directs plays for the Mighty Rassilon Art Players.





MRAP (pronounced Em-Rap) usually put on one play during the convention and this years offering -- Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter -- is a musical...



... and actually quite good.

Another attraction of DragonCon is the large number of attendees who make some sort of costume to wear at the con. Some of the costumes involve many people and hundreds of hours of work...



... such as this one which won first place in the Masquerade.

Other costumes are "hall" costumes which people wear around the convention.

 



Some of the hall costumes are amazing examples of craft, aesthetics and hard work.





... and other costumes consist mostly of attitude...



... or of paint (for which you will have to view my slide show). [Warning: not work safe.]

And, of course, DragonCon is a good place to meet new people.



Well, that's all I have time for. I tend to spend much too much time tinkering with my images. [One of the photos above had a partial figure removed, can you guess which one?] And all the tinkering slows me down. But I do enjoy it. Consider the following image from Romeo and Ethel. The subjects were moving and blurred and the light was a bit dim for proper autofocus so the original image was quite blurred. But I kinda liked it. I liked the motion and the way the blurring abstracted the images. But I also knew that if I posted it to a photo blog it would just look like a crappy picture. So, I tinkered a bit more...