Cherry Blossom Festival of Southern California

The Cherry Blossom Festival of Southern California was held in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo on April 10-11.  Last month, I wrote about taking photos at Lake Balboa in Encino, where there were many trees with blooming cherry blossoms.  Little Tokyo also has a few trees capable of producing cherry blossoms, but the blossoms have long since died off.  Still, there’s no reason why they can’t hold a festival.  This is a festival that gets larger every year.  I first came here two years ago.  The festival had moved to Little Tokyo from it’s former home in Pasadena.  It ran along two streets in Little Tokyo and consisted of a few food and merchandise booths, two small stages, and a martial arts demo tent.  It now sprawls over a large area.  There are three stages with entertainment, including the massive main stage, the Hawaiian Stage, and new for this year, the J-Pop Stage.  The martial arts pavilion is still there.  There are also a lot more booths filled with merchandise, food, information, and services.

One of the weekend’s events was a cosplay contest sponsored by Pacific Media Expo. I was out there to support a few of my friends who entered. This was the first event held on the new J-Pop stage and the first cosplay contest for the Cherry Blossom Festival. Usually, the only official cosplay contest held in Little Tokyo is held during Nisei Week in August. It’s nice to have another contest at this rapidly growing festival.

The eventual winner of the cosplay contest turned out to be a personal friend of mine–cosplayer “Sushi Monster” who was dressed as Vanille from the newest installment of the Final Fantasy video game series.  She was one of the cosplayers featured in Cosplay Underground v. 003.  Which reminds me, I need to get to work and start putting another one of those together.  It’s nice to see her still having fun with cosplay.

As far as cultural festivals go, this is one of my favorites.  For me, it’s just the right size.  There’s plenty to see and plenty to keep you entertained enough that you can spend a day here.  The crowd is big enough so that the atmosphere is fun, but not so overwhelming that it becomes too cramped.  Nisei Week is fun, but it can be overwhelming at times.  It’s great that it’s still growing and including new forms of entertainment.  It’s definitely a festival that I’d keep coming back to year after year.

Cherry Blossom Season

In Los Angeles, we are fortunate to have a place where you can see a large amount of cherry blossoms every spring.  For us, it’s Lake Balboa in Encino.  There are a lot of us who monitor this area every year to find out when the best time will be to go out and take photos here.  If we’re lucky, we’ll have two weekends where the cherry blossoms will look absolutely spectacular.  If you miss it, you’ll have to wait until next year.  It’s a bit of a strange ritual for us, but these days, with the popularity of social networking sites, it’s very easy to keep a large group of people informed about what conditions at the lake are like.   A lot of us keep our weekend plans on hold and when it appears that the time is right to visit the lake, we do it.

This year was the third year in a row that I’ve been out to the lake with a bunch of friends to take photos with the cherry blossoms.  On March 20, a picnic was held at Lake Balboa by the same people who put on the Anime Los Angeles convention.  Coincidentally, it was on the same weekend that the cherry blossoms began to look their best.  Usually, it’s only a few dozen of us out at the lake to take photos.  This year, we had a lot of company as this day turned out to be a wonderful event for the Southern California anime and cosplay community.  I was quite amazed since the date for this picnic was finalized back in January.  It turned out that this date was one of the best days of the year to be at the lake if you like to take photos or have your photo taken.

As I’m writing this, there is still one weekend left where the cherry blossoms will look decent.  Back in January, I went to another anime convention related event called Otaku Rehab.  The home for this event is actually a park in Ventura County, but the next event will be held on March 27 at Lake Balboa after convincing the people who run it to move it to this location.  So this weekend, we have another opportunity for a fun anime and cosplay related event at the lake.  It’s probably the final weekend for the cherry blossoms.  If you miss it, there’s always next year.

Chinese New Year

On February 20th, I went to the Chinese New Year celebration in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.  I was a little worried because of the rainy weather on the night before, but it turned out to be a very nice day.  It was the second year that I’ve attended this.  Since last year was the  first time that I went, I missed out on a lot of things.  So, this year, I arrived a bit earlier and was able to look at the festival portion of this event.  It was fairly standard stuff.  There was a main stage that featured plenty of local entertainment.  Like many Asian events, there were many East Asian countries that were represented in the festivities.  It wasn’t just limited to Chinese entertainment and culture.  The main event of the day was the Golden Dragon Parade.  It’s a very large parade.  I’ve seen the parades at Nisei Week and the LA Korean Festival and this is probably the largest parade I’ve seen for any of the cultural events that I regularly go to.  It’s also the best attended.  There aren’t a lot of empty spaces on the sidewalk during the parade.  It’s really a great sight to see.  Since it was the year of the tiger, every float seemed to have at least one tiger prominently displayed.  There are plenty of lions and dragons as well.  It’s also not just and Asian-themed parade.  There are groups represented from all parts of the city.  There are some things in this parade that you wouldn’t expect to find in a Chinese New Year parade.

Unlike last year, where I left as soon as the parade was over, I actually took some time to walk through the neighborhood and found a few interesting sights.  I’ve lived in Los Angeles for awhile, but I rarely visit Chinatown.  I visit Little Tokyo frequently, but Chinatown is just a short walk.  Sometimes, I forget that I live in such a great city that has so much to offer.  I would definitely love to visit Chinatown more often, but then again, that’s what I said after attending last year’s Chinese New Year festival.

Otaku Rehab

Otaku Rehab is a new event created by the same group that created MikomiCon, an anime convention held on the campus of Cal State Northridge.  MikomiCon has been one of my favorite anime conventions over the past few years.  I’m not a huge fan of very large conventions.  I like the slower pace of smaller conventions and generally, they have a better atmosphere for socializing.  Also, being on college campus, MikomiCon has the best location of any convention in Southern California for taking photographs.  It has had its share of struggles.  It’s the smallest convention that I attend.  Attendance has remained steady at around the 1,000 mark.  It has a big problems with convention “ghosts”–people who come to the convention to cosplay, take photos, try to get freebies, etc., without purchasing a convention membership.  For large conventions, “ghosts” aren’t as damaging to convention’s income as they are to smaller conventions.  For the smaller conventions, every paid membership counts and if there aren’t enough paying customers, it could mean that the convention won’t survive for another year.

For 2010, the creators of MikomiCon decided to hold two different events.  The large convention would still be held at Cal State Northridge, but renamed as MikomiCore.  Otaku Rehab is the second event, consisting of two pre-events and a main event to be held in May.  The pre-events are basically a cosplay gathering and picnic held in the same park as the main event.  The main event would be a one-day mini convention, complete with a dance in the evening.  The first of the pre-events was held at the end of January at Borchard Community Park in the city of Newbury Park, CA.  There haven’t been very many anime related events held in Ventura County.  This was something new.  I went to this event and I really didn’t know what to expect, but I kept my expectations very low.  However, the turnout was surprisingly good for an event of this type.  About 30 people attended this event and to be quite honest, I didn’t expect more than 10-15 people.  This is good news for this struggling convention.  It shows that there is an interest in their events.  The event was definitely a small success.  In the end it seemed that everybody had a good time and enjoyed the picnic.  Hopefully, this is a good sign for MikomiCon.

Anime Los Angeles 2010

Last month, I attended Anime Los Angeles 6, which was held at the LAX Marriott.  It was the second consecutive year that this convention has been held at this location.  I’ve attended all six editions of this convention.  It’s quite impressive that this convention has grown from about 600 attendees in it’s first year to this year’s total of slightly over 3,2oo attendees.  This event is no longer simply a convention attended by Southern California residents.  People come from all over the US and a few foreign countries to attend this convention.  Honestly, I think a lot of its success has to do with the nonstop efforts of its staff to promote the convention.  They attend many events to get the word out about their convention.  They also try hard to improve the convention every year and are very open to suggestions from its attendees.  If there’s a problem, it gets addressed and it usually gets fixed.  Fans take notice of that and decide that this is an event worth going to.

For me, I’ve seen so many changes at this convention.  It used to be a pretty laid back convention for me.  It was mostly a convention for relaxing and socializing.  This year, with the larger attendance and a lot of friends coming in from out of town to get here, this convention has become really crowded and hectic.  A lot of people seem to be really busy.  Honestly, it’s not as relaxing as it used to be.  I still try to get to the cosplay photography aspect of things.  People expect that of me, so I do it.  However, anybody that knows me and knows what my style of working is knows that I hate cramped quarters and conventions that are “zoos”.  If it’s too crowded, I get very unmotivated and that’s one reason why I tend to avoid conventions like Comic Con International and Anime Expo.  Anime Los  Angeles is rapidly becoming one of those “zoos” that I really don’t like.  People were taking photographs everywhere including the parking garage, neighboring buildings, the small green spaces in front of the hotel.  Cosplay photography at conventions has become a big rat race and honestly, it isn’t very fun anymore.

Since I felt that I needed to do some photography to justify spending three days at this convention, I was really thankful that they have a photo studio that’s open for all attendees to use.  Anime Los Angeles is the only convention that I go to that has this kind of facility.  I’ve never been too much of a fan of indoor cosplay photography, particularly at conventions were it becomes a really big hassle.  Indoor photography usually involves blocking a hallway which is a huge inconvenience for people who just want to pass through.  So I made the choice to simply spend most of my time in the photo studio, tell a few friends, and see who shows up.  It felt a little awkward especially since I’m used to using things like trees, rocks, stairs, and whatever else I can find when I’m doing my cosplay photography out and about.  In this studio, I basically had nothing except a backdrop and a few lights.  On occasion, I’d throw a chair into the studio, but that was pretty much all that I had.  I learned quite a few things about how to get some good results and I actually enjoyed shooting in the studio all weekend.  Honestly, my flash was probably the most rarely used piece of photography equipment that I had.  I used it mainly for interviews news articles, but not for a whole lot of other things.  I liked studio shooting so much that in the weeks after the convention, I bought two more flashes and a lot of other lighting accessories–light stands, umbrellas, snoots, filters, straw grids, etc.  It’s something new to learn and I’m ready for the challenge.

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