Okay, exposition time: I've already confessed to being a fandom convention fan, by that I mean things like science fiction conventions. ; As opposed to what are theoretically serious business affairs. ; When I say convention I mean the sort of event that is basically a weekend long party held within a hotel. ; It's not necessarily what you might think they are if you've never been to one, but at the same time the stereotypes are perhaps true to some point or another. I've been to one this year with several more coming up that I may or may not make it to, but first I wanted to post some shots from another event last year. The styles of conventions vary. ; The first one I ever went to was what is described as a relaxacon, meaning they don't have a lot of formal programming and it's really meant more as a.. well.. relaxed, informal event. ; My favorite memories of that event involve sitting out on the pool deck having weird conversations with the other people I was there with, or chatting with other people who stopped by. ; But they also had a dance floor, which in that case meant an open area in the hotel where they'd set up a CD player and a stereo system. ; And a single dance lighting accessory to give the place a little bit of a high energy look. I don't even dance.. I'm one of those people who are so afraid of looking silly on the dance floor that they're never able to relax and get into it. ; Oh sure, everyone else was looking silly and I thought it was great, but I just couldn't do it myself. ; It's an annoying but iron clad inhibition, at that event neither a great deal of alcohol or a beautiful girl in a slinky black dress could change it. ; Eh, so be it, I hung out on the sidelines, listening to the great musical selections that the DJ was making and watching the mayhem unfold. The local con is quite different, they have a lot of activities, known in the con world as panels, going on. ; Their musical style is also different. ; They have no dance floor as far as I know, and their music is apparently exclusively "filk". ; I still don't really know what that is, but it appears to be a cross between folk music and obsessive, geekish fandom. ; The one filk song that I caught last year was a spoof of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again", redone to make fun of Microsoft. But I'm not much of a folk person. ; Even as a confirmed non dancer, I still love dance music. ; As I type this I'm listening to a dance mix I acquired from somewhere or another. ; When I say dance music I mean electronic stuff. ; I don't dance to it.. but I have used it as accompaniment while driving a racing simulation and strangely enough it helps. ; You can use the rhythm to do things other than dance. So anyway, after that local con I found myself at another one that I knew would have a dance floor which I'd seen some people refer to as a rave. ; I was a little intimidated, I'd never been to such a thing, nor really hung out with the type of crowd that would typically go to such things. ; What's more, I DON'T DANCE. But I wanted to see it. ; I was hoping I might find some people dancing with glowsticks in some fashion or another, letting me do long exposures and get images of the streaks of light. ; I'd seen such images from the previous year and wanted a chance to see what I could do. What I saw went way beyond what I had hoped. ; What I saw was Poi Dancing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poi_%28performance_art%29 If you've never seen it.. it's sort of vaguely like the fire dancing you can see at Festival of the Lion King, except instead of a rigid stick the style uses two lengths or rope, one swung from either hand, and of course in situations like this fire isn't used, they use glowsticks or LED lights or whatever. ; You can do a search for poi dancing on youtube and see a bunch of examples of it. I figured maybe I'd see a few people swinging some glowing things around, but what I saw were people who were fairly good sort of putting on a performance for the whole dance floor. ; I once saw a couple people taking turns, when one would get his ropes tangled up he stepped out and another guy literally jumped into the circle of open space and started swinging. ; It was quite an experience. ; I started wondering how hard it would be to learn what they do, and as I started researching it I realized how complex some of the motions are. ; I couldn't even figure them out without having every step spelled out to me, and I'm guessing it would take a lot of practice to be able to do even the basic moves. The second night was the best. ; They'd been having trouble with the sound system on the first night, some component was overheating and the sound balance wasn't right, plus the second night they had a laser set up, sending glittering beams of light over the dance floor and projecting kaleidoscopic patterns onto a wall. Even though I never really did any dancing it was a great event. ; I can tell exactly what my favorite part of the entire convention was, a certain part in one of the DJ's sets. ; He did a transition between two songs that just.. really worked for me. ; I wanted to try to explain it but I can't. ; It was just one of those things where the moment just came together, everything just felt right. ; From that point on the night just got better and better. ; I kept seeing more cool things.. new dancing styles.. at one point I saw a break dance battle. ; You know the movie cliche of two people taking turns dancing, trying to outdo the other person? ; Well I really got to see that. ; I was in the circle of people surrounding the two dancers. ; It was awesome. And then on the way out, once I'd decided I had to call it a night and try to get some sleep, the disembodied robo llama head spoke to me. I'm serious. ; I did NOT partake of any party drugs, thank you very much, it was a remote controlled setup, a costume head done in the style of a cyborg llama that was sitting on a table, hooked up to some batteries. ; I can only guess that there was a camera somewhere in it, because when I walked up to it it greeted me by my badge name which meant somehow the guy operating it had been able to read my badge. ; The mouth moved when it talked and everything. So, picture posting commencing. ; I'm not hugely pleased with my results, I still have no idea how to go about shooting this kind of thing. ; I will say that I'm pleased I was able to remain even slightly steady with exposures as long as I was using. ; Oh sure, the background is blurred, but I was WAAAAY past the hand holding rule of thumb, the fact that you can see the checkerboard pattern of the floor at all pleases me. ; I mean that shot of the laser pattern on the wall? ; That was .8 seconds. ; In a way the laser helped, it was constantly moving so it never really blurred, it looks sharper than everything else. ; I don't know if that makes sense, but.. I swear there is an effect at work there, the image that you see was never visible all at once. ; The laser kind of painted it out as it moved, sort of like a vector CRT screen. ; Which meant that the earliest parts of the image were only visible for a short time, so when I moved the camera they didn't continue to blur because they weren't there any more. ; So basically, instead of the entire pattern becoming blurry if I didn't hold my camera steadily the lines being drawn by the laser would end up crooked. I think that I should try experimenting with slow sync flash, I think that'd make for better results, having the dancer apparently frozen in time even as the glowing things leave light trails suggesting motion around him or her. ; But if I did that I'd want to set it up in advance. ; I'd want their permission before I go blasting them with a flash while they're trying to put on a good show for us observers. If you're uncertain what that red blur picture is, it's a double bladed light saber. ; There was another thing.. I have no idea what it was, imagine a full length martial arts type staff, but make it out of a transparent material, make the ends a little fatter than the middle part, and make the whole thing glow. ; At one point I saw someone use it, they clearly had some martial arts training, they knew how do some cool stuff with it. That was what the experience was to me. ; Just constantly seeing new stuff. ; I saw two people doing what I'm roughly guessing was some sort of mock taekwondo sparring, I mean they weren't actually fighting, they were dancing with each other, but it looked at least vaguely like taekwondo, at least from what little of it I'd seen. ; Someone was doing something that looked like Irish step dancing, at one point I saw what I'd swear was drunken boxing dancing.. Everyone was there to do their own thing and have a good time, I really liked that. 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