Dragoncon - The Photos

Here are some of the best of the almost eight hundred photographs I took during Dragoncon 2010. Click on each picture to get a super-sized view. 

If you want to see the full album, click HERE.
To see photos from Dragoncon 2009, click HERE.

Below: the main atrium level of the Marriott Marquis, where everyone gathers to see each other's costumes, mingle and party. On Saturday and Sunday night it became so crowded that hotel staff began refusing entry to the hotel to anyone who didn't have either a room key or a Dragoncon badge. It was wall-to-wall bodies!

Below Left: one of the vendor isles is jammed with people, like an artery clogged with cholesterol

Below Middle: The costume of the main character in the video game Portal, complete with lighted portal gun. Portal is a puzzle game in which you use the portal gun to create two inter-dimensional portals to jump through a series of challenging obstacles in a secret underground testing facility...until something goes wrong. Very cool!

Below Right: Characters from the video game Bioshock, a game about genetic enhancement gone terribly wrong in an undersea city. The details are impressive!

Below Left: My costume, Snake Plissken, with a zombie Slave Leia. She did a fantastic job with her makeup and costume! She stayed in character, acting like the un-dead. This is perhaps my favorite picture.

Below Right: The Mars Attacks alien spy in female form

Left: Snake Plissken in his natural habitat: a dark city street. I had to shave the beard for the Dragoncon parade that morning; I was in my Imperial officer uniform

Right: A clever manga mini-karate figure, animated by rods connected to the legs and arms

Below Left: Two classic steampunk costumes. Steampunk is a genre of fantasy involving an alternate reality powered by boilers and steam, and costumes have lots of brass and Victorian-era flourishes and details. Steampunk has been very big recently at costuming conventions. Lots of fan fiction has been written of steampunk worlds.

Below Right: Alice In Wonderland costumes, obviously hand made and undeniably works of art. The talent, work and devotion (not to mention money) that goes into some of the costumes is incredible. This really is an art form in itself

Left: A bloody bride. I feel sorry for the groom!

Above right: There are lots of film screenings at Dragoncon; some are fan films, others animated shorts, others premiers of new movies or TV episodes. This is a zombie film screening room. Zombies are a mainstay of the costuming world 

Below: I'm not sure what this incredible costume is, but it sure attracts attention!

Left: trying to get from one host hotel to another means squeezing into a river of bodies. If you are claustrophobic, this is not an event for you!

Left: Okay, I don't know what to make of this one...

Right: These guys were getting into the whole cigar smoking, GI Joe, mercenary thing

 

Above Left: Okay, I don't know what to make of this one either...

Above Right: Atlanta has elevated walkways connecting three of the host hotels so that people don't have to  go on the streets to get back and forth, very handy if you are in a cumbersome costume with reduced visibility.

Below photos: various costume pictures taken at the Marriott Marquis, where most Dragoncon attendees gather

 

 

 

 

Below: Pictures of the Dragoncon parade and staging area, before the parade begins. The cardboard costumes are impressively painted and are classic super heroes.

 

Below: While I marched in the parade I was able to get some nice crowd shots. The number of people who turned out to see the parade was incredible. In some places the crowd was more than ten deep!

Right: this picture captures Dragoncon to me perfectly. It is a busy weekend in which lack of sleep, fatigue and exertion is part of the experience. Afterwords many people endure "con-crud", the tired, not-quite-right feeling that lasts a couple of days.

Below: The main atrium of the Hilton, the hotel I stayed in. Last year I was at the Marriott Marquis

The morning I checked out there was a fire in the hotel. Fortunately it wasn't serious; it was an electrical overload fire, limited to one elevator power conduit, but the hotel smelled of smoke. Six fire trucks arrived and fire fighters were ripping out ceiling panels on the eleventh floor to find the source of the fire