Ito

That means a lot, honestly. I will be running it again on Saturday at 5:00 if you want interested in going! Though not sure if I am going to be filming it or not lol.      
Only the top skiing photo and the Bee and Puppycat cosplayer (the one with the plushy) are the only strobbed shots there. I will have to post more of my strobbed, but to be completely honest, flash has been the single most difficult area of photography for me to understand. First off, I hardly ever shoot with the flash on camera. If I do, I am certainly bouncing it off of a ceiling or a wall. I am not going to make any assumptions on how much you know about photography, so sorry if some of this is a little basic. The softness of your light is directly proportional to the size of the light source in relation to the subject. Essentially, if I want really soft flattering light, I need to figure out how can I make the light bigger. Bouncing off a wall (assuming the wall isn't colored) can help a ton. The down side of this is that it uses a ton of power, especially if the walls or ceiling are higher or far away. You can use a bulbous diffuser right on the flash (like the Gary Fong Lightsphere). This will give you a marginal increase in softness (and still sometimes a bit of an unflattering look if the light is on camera).
 
The absolute best thing you can do is get your light off of camera and with a modifier. Shoot through umbrellas are probably the cheapest way of getting this done, but I really love the look of a soft box (I use my 43" apollo orb soft box as my main modifier). When you take a photo with a flash right on top of the camera, you are lighting someone, but you are taking away so many of those shadows this give depth and contrast. Shooting off camera flash can add really add to the depth of an image. I have been looking for a great solution for what to buy in terms of off camera flashes for a while and am on my to my third set - 3 yonguo YN560 IV's with a YN560 TX transmitter, all for around $300 with great remote manual controls, these things seems great so far.
 
All of that said, I shoot more often with natural light. Most of the time I am walking around a con I have my 35mm f/1.4 lens on with the aperture set to max (1.4), the shutter speed between 1/60 and 1/200, and then I adjust the ISO to whatever gets me in that range. I don't know what kind of camera or lenses you are shooting, that would make it a lot easier to recommend things. Be warned though - the lights in the dealers hall at Acen flicker at about 1/200th so never let your camera get above that speed when you are in there.
Since I Acen is coming up in a week (!!!), here's a shot from last year using a super ghetto rigged flash setup.
 

I'm almost positive the second is Riku from Phantasmagoria era.

The top one is definitely Tsunehito from D. No clue on the bottom one.

Too much awesome for one photo
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Too much awesome for one photo
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Too much awesome for one photo
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Happy bday Ito 

Happy birthday @Aion and dear @Ito-san. <3

spot the paw-prints on my dusty mirror
Hyura, you are painfully cute. XD
I had some extra time in my works photostudio, so I played around for a couple of minutes

I thought that was a can of easy cheese in the back

EX
CITE
BIKE
Ooo I hope Latin Maria is included in the DVD release.

That means a lot, honestly. I will be running it again on Saturday at 5:00 if you want interested in going! Though not sure if I am going to be filming it or not lol.      
Only the top skiing photo and the Bee and Puppycat cosplayer (the one with the plushy) are the only strobbed shots there. I will have to post more of my strobbed, but to be completely honest, flash has been the single most difficult area of photography for me to understand. First off, I hardly ever shoot with the flash on camera. If I do, I am certainly bouncing it off of a ceiling or a wall. I am not going to make any assumptions on how much you know about photography, so sorry if some of this is a little basic. The softness of your light is directly proportional to the size of the light source in relation to the subject. Essentially, if I want really soft flattering light, I need to figure out how can I make the light bigger. Bouncing off a wall (assuming the wall isn't colored) can help a ton. The down side of this is that it uses a ton of power, especially if the walls or ceiling are higher or far away. You can use a bulbous diffuser right on the flash (like the Gary Fong Lightsphere). This will give you a marginal increase in softness (and still sometimes a bit of an unflattering look if the light is on camera).
 
The absolute best thing you can do is get your light off of camera and with a modifier. Shoot through umbrellas are probably the cheapest way of getting this done, but I really love the look of a soft box (I use my 43" apollo orb soft box as my main modifier). When you take a photo with a flash right on top of the camera, you are lighting someone, but you are taking away so many of those shadows this give depth and contrast. Shooting off camera flash can add really add to the depth of an image. I have been looking for a great solution for what to buy in terms of off camera flashes for a while and am on my to my third set - 3 yonguo YN560 IV's with a YN560 TX transmitter, all for around $300 with great remote manual controls, these things seems great so far.
 
All of that said, I shoot more often with natural light. Most of the time I am walking around a con I have my 35mm f/1.4 lens on with the aperture set to max (1.4), the shutter speed between 1/60 and 1/200, and then I adjust the ISO to whatever gets me in that range. I don't know what kind of camera or lenses you are shooting, that would make it a lot easier to recommend things. Be warned though - the lights in the dealers hall at Acen flicker at about 1/200th so never let your camera get above that speed when you are in there.
Since I Acen is coming up in a week (!!!), here's a shot from last year using a super ghetto rigged flash setup.
 

Yup, I have certainly shot video with them. If you want to see me being a goon on rollerblades, this was shot entirely on those two cameras:

 
I also shot all the female sections in this video with my 6D

 
As far as Acen goes....Maybe? xD That requires me to bring a tripod and actually recording it....and makes me wonder if I really want to show my dumb panel to the interwebs lololol
 
    I shall show you the way! Seriously though, any questions you have, hit me up and I would be more than happy to help you out. And thanks of course!

Have some more sports this time around
 

 

 

Have some more sports this time around
 

 

 

Have some more sports this time around
 

 

 

Time for a couple more:
 

 

 

Yup, I have certainly shot video with them. If you want to see me being a goon on rollerblades, this was shot entirely on those two cameras:

 
I also shot all the female sections in this video with my 6D

 
As far as Acen goes....Maybe? xD That requires me to bring a tripod and actually recording it....and makes me wonder if I really want to show my dumb panel to the interwebs lololol
 
    I shall show you the way! Seriously though, any questions you have, hit me up and I would be more than happy to help you out. And thanks of course!

I wanna scream because I'll never have this sort of quality in my photos ;; -claps a lot-

Have you ever shot videos with those cams? Maybe you can do a Acen panel video shoot. The possibilities are endless... *overflowing ideas*

Officially my Photography sensei. Wish you'd teach Photography over here, these are wonderful shots!

Personally I think there are several ways to look at a "worst song", a song that you dislike because of the way it sounds, and a song that you dislike because you've heard it so many times you're sick to death of it.
 
For me, THE FINAL falls into the second category. I really don't think I need to hear or see it live again for the next decade or so, but I don't think its a bad track per se.
 
In the first category it's a lot more difficult, because several of the songs I used to dislike I enjoy nowadays because of their freshness value, and some tracks I used to adore ten years ago I might be tired of, like THE FINAL.
 
I have often said that S is their worst track in my opinion, but at the moment I think The Domestic Fucker Family is worse.
 
The beauty of this kind of discussion is that no one is wrong. I'll just be silently judging everyone calling tracks like Я TO THE CORE and HYDRA -666- bad.

I've always found the whole "this sounds AMERICAN" opinion to singlehandedly be the laziest excuse I've ever read on a J-Rock forum. This sentiment is always meant in a negative light to imply a song is somehow "inferior" because it doesn't sound "Japanese".
 
Here's the one big problem with this argument: all of the music discussed here follows Western harmony. There is literally zero difference between the music any Japanese band makes vs. any other Pop band in the world outside of language.
 
This whole "Americanized" argument is just a lazy excuse presented by someone who has 0 knowledge of the music they're discussing. Something "sounding American" is just another way of saying "I don't like this style of music" except far more pretentious.

I am someone who has found Mejibray to be largely forgettable (like literally, I can't recall a single one of their songs), but man Eiki is going to stick with me. Sadly, not for any of the right reasons. Those high pitched vocals are some of the worst I have ever heard outside of karaoke.

Time for a couple more: