Photos: MomoCon, day 1

Originally, I wasn’t necessarily intending on going to MomoCon on Friday, but as it turns out my work let out early, and already working close to Downtown, it seemed like a good idea to go see the sights and hang out, instead of sitting in the dawn of holiday traffic and go home and be bored.

It’s a good thing I did too, because it allowed me to get my experimental picture taking out of the way during the “early” time of costumers.  That being said, because I’m a nooby novice with my picture taking still, I actually had to unfortunately scrap a bunch of pictures, because they were too blurry, out of focus, horribly framed or all of the above, and I’d rather not post things that simply aren’t decent quality.

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Talking pictures, MomoCon and its future

This was my favorite picture that I took at MomoCon. It’s slightly out of focus, and the framing on it stinks because I was using a portrait lens and had to take like 15 steps back, and I hate making people wait for me to push the goddamn shutter as it is, so I admittedly rushed it.

However it’s still great because it’s the kind of picture that evokes a real response, in my opinion. I know I take way more pictures of girls than I do guys, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m pretty selective and superficial when it comes to deciding on the things I want to take pictures of, but when the day is over, it’s pictures like Fiddlesticks versus a 6-year old Captain America that really makes me stop and smile at a picture that I took myself.

I could probably drag out a thousand word narrative like a low-rent Stephen King about everything that’s right about this picture, but I’ll just cut to the chase and say that I like this picture because I think it kind of captures the fun that conventions are supposed to be.

As far as picture taking goes, I do believe I have a lot of bad habits I need to break in the future, and that I probably need lots of reinforcement. Namely, I need to take my time. I have this inherent fear that I’m pissing people off if I’m taking too long to shoot a picture, and I know I rush when I feel like I’m inconveniencing someone. Frankly, if a person wants to diva up on me, then I probably wouldn’t want to take their picture anyway. There are way more talented people than me who might put up with it, but I won’t.

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Photos: A Day at MegaCon 2014

At long last, the MegaCon pictures have been finished.  I’d say it took longer than I had expected, but considering the seemingly endless quest to try to find a happy medium in which I like to display pictures I take, I guess it’s no surprise that it took a full week after all.

In a single day, I managed to take well over 200 pictures, and because I have little idea what I’m doing with a camera, turns out that quite a few were unusable and blown out, because I foolishly keep shooting into the sun, and combined with my determination to competently shoot in full manual mode, mistakes occur.  Regardless, when the smoke cleared, I still had right about 200 photos to share with the world.

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Thoughts on MegaCon

Preview image: I think this Kayle costumer is beautiful.

No, this isn’t the post with all the pictures; I’m still working on them. I took over 200 pictures in the one day that I went to MegaCon, so it’s taking me a little bit of time to review and process them. I’ll admit that it’s times like this that I miss when the editing process was sizing down a bunch of jpegs that took substantially less time, but at the same time, even though I’m a noob amateur with a camera, the quality of pictures that I’m taking now are substantially superior. I’ll take that trade off, even if it leads to being more time consuming.

Anyway, I’ve got a little bit of time to write, so I felt like jotting down some words about the MegaCon experience, in general, before they vanish from mind, and I’ll feel dumb if I blab on about it way later.

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OP Xin boots

Ordered a pair of tabi boots for my eventual Xin Zhao costume.  Personally, I think footwear is one of the most underlooked component on most peoples’ costumes, and I’d rather not try and alter or modify something that I can’t really find on my own for men, and after looking at Xin renderings for hours, I decided that tabi boots seemed like the most logical direction to go and build off of, and fortunately for me, I was able to acquire a pair that was already blue (in spite of the crappy photograph, it was done on my hacked point-and-shoot).

Ultimately, these are a great foundation to work from, and I think I’m going to shape EVA foam or something, and build directly on top of these boots.  Not only will doing this save me a tremendous amount of trouble of figuring out footwear, because they’re legit tabi boots, when I put the costume on, I’ll have a +25 armor, take reduced damage from opponents, and I’ll have a massive amount of mobility out of the gate.  GG

The weekend of productivity

Since the start of the new year, I haven’t really done much. Just about every weekend has been spent at home, where I ultimately have done nothing but play a lot of League of Legends. Now it’s not that I don’t enjoy the game immensely, but the bottom line was that I was not being very productive with my weekend spare time, and I think it began to creep into my head that I was really wasting a lot of time.

Wasting time is one of my biggest pet peeves, and you really haven’t seen me get bent out of shape until you see me when I start feeling like my time is being wasted; especially when it’s by circumstances caused by someone/something other than myself.

Long story short, I challenged myself to get off my ass and actually do something this weekend. At any given time, I’ve always got a project or three that I want to do, but have always sat on my hands and done nothing, until I felt they were warm enough to start spamming QWER keys and right clicking on LoL. So basically I said to myself to simply fucking do something this weekend.

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Photos: Otakon Vegas

Otakon Vegas was somewhat of a testing ground for me, being the super-n00b novice picture taker that I am.  I’m almost naive enough to believe that simply equipping a prime lens and utilizing an external flash will yield better results, but obviously, that most certainly was not the case.  In all honesty, and as much as I hate to admit it, almost 30 pictures were deemed unusable, and not worth posting at all, for a varying reasons, and never the reason of the subject(s).

Anyway, I didn’t really take that many pictures at the convention itself, and frankly I didn’t want to drag my camera out on the Strip or during my gambling escapades, because with it’s upgraded accessories, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to lug around for anything other than appropriate picture-taking times.  Aside from taking a few pictures of some select costumers, I apparently took a ton (no pun intended) of pictures from the sumo wrestling exhibition, and on Sunday, I chauffeured tagged along on an external shoot that was outside the city limits in Red Rock to close out my picture taking endeavors.

Regardless, I hope these are somewhat enjoyed, and to the maiden crop of people whom I shared a photo card with, I hope you guys are pleased with the pictures of you guys I took.

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