Atlanta Fashion Police 2012

Dragon Con, Atlanta's annual sci-fi/pop-culture convention, has the most costumes, the best costumes, and the most diverse costumes of any convention I've ever seen. Atlanta Fashion Police exists to catalog that vast troupe of characters. My goal is one photograph of every costume, individually numbered to prove uniqueness.

In previous years I did Atlanta Fashion Police in addition to normal convention activities. In 2012, I dedicated the entire con to the project, and more than doubled the number of costumes recorded to 2053. Many of those are in the parade staging area, which is perfect for my purposes since lots of people in costume are standing near each other with nothing to do but wait. I photographed several hundred costumes, then was informed that the staging area was off-limits to anyone not participating in the parade.

Mugshots

The thousands of costumes I catalog each year are only a small fraction of the costumes present at Dragon Con.

The sign

Mugshots are numbered sequentially starting from 0000, so it was easy to see how much I had done so far. When people asked me how I was doing, I'd point to the number on the sign.

The plastic sign has a pair of slits cut in it, through which I threaded four loops of paper with the numbers 0-9 printed on each one. I updated the number by tugging on the appropriate loops to reveal the proper digits. I had to be vigilant to prevent introducing errors in the sequence when rolling over multiple digits (e.g. 0699 to 0700)

Trends

This year's most photographed costume was Commander Shepard from Mass Effect.
A suprising number of T-45 Power Armor, a very challenging costume.
Captain America and Loki were also popular, helped by the release of The Avengers earlier that year.