Well...the thing about this sort of event is that the people who get all dressed up in costume expect to get their pictures taken. What they don't expect, typically, is for a photographer to get as close to them as I wanted to. Most of the above were taken just beyond the minimum focusing distance of my 24-70 f/2.8 lens...so about a foot-and-a-half from the subject. Because of their costumes, every photographer takes full-body shots of the players, but I wanted to try and get a different result. All I had to do, though, was ask them politely if I could take their picture close-up.
It was definitely a good exercise, but looking at the stuff when I got it home made me realize that I still need to be more conscious of my f-stop. I found that I ran it wide-open most of the time. My images could probably have been much sharper had I stopped down a bit.