It’s amazing what you can find in the smallest places, if your eyes are open. Having a camera with me helps me keep my eyes open to things such as this, but taking pictures like this reminds me to do it more often in everyday life.

Often times there is so much beauty in the world that goes completely unnoticed, simply because we are not looking for it. If I look for it in small or unusual place, I’m sure I’ll find it. This is likely the only photo that will ever be taken of this particular Cabbage White Butterfly, so there is its moment in the spotlight.

Signatures include:

• Tommy Tallarico (Earthworm Jim, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Metroid Prime, Advent Rising)
• Jack Wall (Myst III, Myst IV, Splinter Cell, Jade Empire)
• Hideo Kojima (Creator of Metal Gear Solid)
• Yuji Naka (Creator of Sonic the Hedgehog)
• Elijah Wood (Actor, Lord of the Rings, Sin City)
• Marty O’Donnell (Halo, Halo 2)
• Nolan Bushnell (Pong, Atari, Chuck E. Cheese)
• Toby Gard (Creator of Lara Croft & Tomb Raider)
• Bill Roper (Warcraft)
• Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia)
• David Jaffe (God of War)
• Dweezil Zappa (Guitarist)
• Doug Tennaple (Earthworm Jim, The Neverhood)
• David Perry (Earthworm Jim, Aladdin, Enter the Matrix)
• Chris Stone (Dragon’s Lair)
• Richard Jacques (Headhunter, Outrun)
• Lorne Lanning (Oddworld Inhabitants)
• Bill Brown (Rainbow Six)
• Michael Giacchino (Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, The Incredibles)
• Nathan McCree (Tomb Raider)
• Gary Coleman (Actor)
• Laura Karpman (Everquest II)
• Christophe Heral (Beyond Good and Evil)
• Tom Salta (Ghost Recon 2)
• Vince Desi (Postal, Postal 2)
• Jason Hayes (Warcraft III, World of Warcraft)
• Gerard Marino (God of War)
• Tim Larkin (Myst)
• Laurie Robinson (Advent Rising, Video Games Live Vocal Soloist / Performer)
• Benoit Grey (Jaws, Video Games Live Orchestrator)

There are some big names in there for sure. Although I’m sure many people reading this are not as into video games as I am, imagine many of your favourite artists getting together to sign a poster, and then giving it to you. Thats how I feel when I look at it, now hanging on the wall in my room.

Thanks VGL! This is probably the best part of my video game collection to date, whcih is saying quite a bit!

I’ve attended every performance they have done in Ontario so far.

Actually, more than that. I’ve volunteered to help out at every performance in Ontario. On March 13th and 14th they performed in Kitchener, where I helped out by running their costume contest and worked as a photographer. This grants me full backstage access and the ability to sit anywhere in the concert hall I’d like, which is simply amazing. So I spent my evenings last weekend taking photos of something I was passionate about, and filled my 16GB memory card twice. Here’s one of my favourite photos from the show:

Needless to say, it was a sold-out show both days.

The conductor, Jack Wall, is a video game composer himself. His recent success was with the Xbox 360 and PC game Mass Effect, one of my favourites from last year. He also did a lot of the music in the Myst series of games, among many, many others.

Tommy Tallarico, the main guitarist, is quite accomplished as well. He’s done a lot of composing himself (Earthworm Jim, Advent Rising to name a few) but also was a co-host on the G4/TechTV show Electric Playground.

The music was performed by Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. One of the best performances I’ve been to! They always use the local orchestra to do the performance.

Splitting Adam was touring with the group this time. They work for Electronic Arts and had a song featured in the game Need For Speed: Undercover. Great tunes from these guys as well, I wish them the best of luck!

All in all, it was a great show. There were a few new segments I hadn’t seen before, but even the older ones were great to hear again. Each show they always play a different set from their list of 30-40 different segments so it’s always something different. You’ll find a larger selection of photos below, and if you want the whole set of “keepers”, you can grab ‘em here (warning: a lot of photos). I’m not sure when they’ll play next in the area, but I’ll be sure to help out. Always a blast!

P.S. Almost all of the concert photos were taken at ISO 3200 or ISO 6400. I am extremely impressed with my cameras performance at these settings!

And here is the result:

I usually don’t plan for pictures to this degree, but it was a neat idea I had that I hoped would turn out nicely, and I think it did.

I often compare Canada to other nations and I’m very grateful to be where I am. While Canada is not perfect, no place in the world is. With that in mind, I think it’s as close as you can get. I’m Canadian, and proud of what that means.

edit: I changed the aspect ratio of the photo to be that of the true Canadian flag, which is 2:1. Looks a little better this way

What did the photos look like? Well, I still have the thing! Through a complex series of steps and peripherals, you could get the thing to “print” to a parallel port on a computer and saved as an image, just like this one:

As a 12 year old, I got a very creative idea. How would I be able to take a colour photo from a black and white camera? Hmm. I remember around this age getting really close to a TV to try and figure out how it worked. Dad told me that each bit of colour was made up of red, blue, and green of different intensities, which sparked the whole idea. I also had tons of fun playing with those “3D” pages in certain magazines that required you to use the glasses with one blue lens and one red lens, isolating colours for each eye and producing an image with perceived depth. Blue things showed up black through the red lens, and red things showed up black through the blue lens!
So then, what would happen if I put a filter over the lens of the camera, one red, one blue, and one green to try and make a colour image?

I couldn’t figure out how. I got the three images, but I had no idea how to merge them into one image. It wasn’t until a number of years later that I fully understood image editing on computers and learned how to edit individual colour channels of an image. So, simply using each “filtered” image as a specific red, blue, and green colour channel produces…

Neat, eh? So that’s how you take a colour photograph with a camera that isn’t capable of it. Even though the original images were only four shades of grey, when combined they can produce a wide variety of colours. Once I figured out how to do it, I had some fun and tried a few others. Check them out!

For those technologically inclined, read the rest of the post for the tech specs of the machine, basically a list of every part I put in it.

Complete Part listing:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (2.66ghz, 1333mhz FSB, 12MB cache)
Motherboard: ASUS P5E3 Premium WiFi @n (X48 chipset)
RAM: 4x 2GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600mhz RAM (8GB total, but as 8GB it runs @ 1333mhz speed)
Video: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4870 (512MB GDDR5 memory) | Radeon HD3470 (multi-monitors)
Sound: Creative X-fi Titanium Professional (PCIe slot)
Storage: 2x Western Digital Caviar 640GB in RAID0 + 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black (storage)
Optical Drive: LG G-H20L-S10 Black DVD+RW Lightscribe drive
Power Supply: Corsair HX1000W
CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS9700 LED
Case: Antec 900 (midtower)
Operating System: Windows Vista Ultimate (64bit Edition)

Needless to say, I’m quite happy with it

Music created for video games often has an extremely high production quality, and game music is probably the biggest market for composers. The orchestral scores of many big-ticket games are great to listen to. I’ll throw together a playlist of tunes while I do homework, edit photos, or just tinker with anything else.

So when I found out that Square Enix had a Final Fantasy XI Premium Box set of all the music from the massively-multiplayer role playing game, at clearance prices… I jumped on it! It arrived today. Holy crap is this a huge set! All of the soundtracks from the game and every expansion, plus a great piano remix CD – complete with all of the sheet music for every song! Well beyond my ability to play, but nice to have none-the-less.

This should keep me entertained until my new computer arrives… UPS says its on its way in a couple days