• Drove past a hot air balloon that had landed on the side of the rode while coming back from a friend’s house.
• Two days later drove under a massive lightning storm coming back from the same friend’s house.¹
• Tried taking some end-of/post-flood pictures around town, but did not want to cause any problems for those working in the affected areas. So pictures were all taken from the car while driving through the affected areas and they all pretty much sucked or at best were no better than the dozens of other drive-by photos already posted to Flickr.
• Gave blood and it left me feeling wiped out for days afterwards.
• Attended Convergence with AWelkin, Bryon, Amabaku & Oyarsa Elentari.
  • Had a complete blast but also got totally worn out.
  • First night of the con, while leaving to go out to get dinner, I thought I was on the bottom step when I was still 1 step up. Walked out, didn’t feel ground underfoot and fell smack down on my ass folding my leg under me and scraping my arm. Ankle got twisted a bit and is still vaguely sore.
  • Ate a lot of good food.
  • Bought my wife a ren-faire style corset. Yum!
  • Saw many good costumes around the con. Even got a few photographed.²
  • Went to a flip-book animation panel and watched the panel-host get rather confused by all the adults at the panel. He clearly was expecting this to be almost a form of baby-sitting.
  • Drank much good coffee & tea at the con’s CoF₂E₂ cabana.
    • Especially liked the Moon over Madagascar tea (Chinese Black and Ceylon teas blended with bits of bourbon vanilla).
    • Also quite fond of the English Toffee/Vanilla Latte they made for me.
  • Watched a stunning presentation from a local raptor center.
  • Attended a panel on GMing which gave me some ideas for a game I want to run.
  • Almost played in a steampunk LARP, but the intro panel killed my interest in it.
    • It was this particular group’s first year running a LARP.
    • They based the LARP on some sort of “How to Host a Murder Mystery” thing.
    • They tried to design it to allow players to continue to enjoy the con.
    • Except the players weren’t given any sort of characters. You were expected to go around the con searching for clues.
    • You could interact with the people running the LARP as the characters they were dressed up as or as “norms”. If you tried to interact with them in-character, they said they’d respond by interacting with you based on your costume. I only rarely run around in a costume and didn’t have one for this con, so that pretty much killed my interest.
  • Painted a miniature thanks to Reaper’s demo painting. That was fun and something I haven’t tried in several years.

¹ We were cat-sitting for them.
² Several I only saw when either I or the costumer were running different directions and so I didn’t always get photos. *sigh* There was one kid in a really excellent TF2 Medic costume. Photos will be posted later, as I have to go through them all and clean them up in GIMP. Especially as my camera fritzed a few times and the image turned out all “purple-ly”.

Post Flood Update © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I haven’t felt much like writing anything here of late, but I started to get into the habit of carrying my camera with me everywhere. Since the camera is handy, I’m taking more photos¹. When I walked out of the house the other day, the light on this bush in our appealed to me

¹ Just snapshots really.

Red Flowers © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

11 Dec 2007. Iowa. Cedar Rapids. The weather did suck. Mightly. 12 Dec 2007 everything was coated in a beautiful¹ layer of ice. Fortunately my employer allows me to work from home and I did so yesterday. I still went outside, cleared off the cars and moved them to the other side of the street. Just in case the plows decided to make another pass at cleaning up our street. It wasn’t too bad out but I had a blazing headache, plus work to do and all. I took my camera outside with me and snapped a few hurried photos before rushing back inside to the warmth. Then I spent the day fighting my headache and trying to get some work done. But you don’t care about my suffering, you want pretty pictures. So go look at them already!

¹ Beautiful provided you didn’t have to clear it off your car and try heading into work.

Ice Storm Photos © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Over the summer I dug out my old Pentax K1000 SE and started taking pictures on 35mm film (specifically, Fujicolor Superia X-TRA 400). In part this was to help out a friend with her upcoming costume feature in AniCoz and in part it was a desire to go back to a camera where I had all the control. I’ve finally gotten around to scanning some of the photos I’ve been taking on film and have posted them online. Please take a look at my 35mm gallery and let me know what you think.

New Photos © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Looks more like E.T. reaching out his finger to “phone home” than what you linked to.

In response to A Somewhat Omnious Cloud Shape Today of All Days by John Scalzi.

E.T. in the Sky © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Mostly, I’m uploading this image because I want to test a new WordPress/Flickr integration plugin I installed on my blog. However I also want to point out Ken Rockwell’s Camera Adjustments: from Blah to Aha! is a great article. I tired making his recommended adjustments to my little Canon P&S and found to my very pleasant surprise that the colors were much, much better. I’ll definitely be using those adjustments in all my shooting from now on. Unfortunately the majority of the shots I took with those adjustments, did not turn out the way I wanted (composition-wise, wind blew leaves the wrong way sort of thing).

Update: The plugin worked perfectly. Wahoo! This means I’ll be more likely to blog about any new images I add to my Flickr account so you my faithful minions won’t have to either visit me at Flickr and don’t have to did through my gallery to see new images. Instead they’ll just appear as regular posts. *glee*

Bolted E © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, some friends and I went to Chicago to see the King Tut Exhibit. It was amazing. Unfortunately, they had a no photo policy on that exhibit. With the crowd and all the security people, I didn’t want to get kicked out so I didn’t take any pictures of that exhibit. But our tickets included general admission to the rest of the museum, and I took these photos while we were there.

Well.… To be entirely frank, I took a lot more pictures than just these 4 but the rest turned out to be crap. Maybe when I have a chance to work on them a bit with GIMP they might be worth posting, but I’m not holding my breath.

Chicago’s Field Museum © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Using my feed? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Mr. Coulton also has a selection of his other songs (also CC licensed) on his website which are worth downloading.

Creative Commons Works! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

On those occassions, the fire department has car wrecks in their parking lot. The cars can be half crushed, upside down, missing doors, etc… Unfortunately, they finished up with their training and removed the cars before I got over there to take photos. *sigh*

Still, there’s also some new construction which just started up along my commute and I think it’s for an expansion on CPL. Given that they’ve only dug out a big hole in the ground so far; I think I’ll have time to get some photos before they finish up. :D

Morning Commute © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.