My Photo Collection

Since my dad bought his new camera, he and I have been taking pictures of anything and everything, just catching pretty moments in time. I was taking pictures today, and while emptying the memory card, I was perusing my many albums of random shots that no one is ever likely to see. Except, I kind of think that some of them are good. So I shall display a bunch of them here, and I'll continue to put up a few at a time, and share my amateur photography with whoever has time to kill.



These two pictures were taken just after we got the camera. I'm not even sure whether it was I or my father who took them. We both spent a lot of time playing with the settings and testing things by taking pictures of the chickadees and mourning doves through the garden door.


This is another one that was taken not too long after we got the camera. I was impressed by the zoom the camera had - the bird was far enough away that I didn't know it had anything in its mouth until I looked at the picture.


This was part of my experimentation with shutter speed.



This was more fooling around with shutter speed, and trying to get clear close-ups.


This is a porcupine, obviously. What was funny about him is that his backdrop is my house. It was early spring, I'd just gotten home from school and was about to head upstairs when I saw him right outside the garden door and stopped short. So I headed outside with the camera and took lots of pictures. He was scared to death I think, because he hardly moved. Eventually he decided that he'd had enough and waddled off, but I was out there less than a meter away from him for a good 15 minutes.

Gamerama

Image via Wikipedia

I can't seem to find any inspiration anywhere for another blog post (or whatever it is you'd like to call it). I have three unfinished posts started at various points over the last month and saved in case I felt like going back to finish them, but I never quite went back, and obviously, now I've completely lost my trains of thought. And, to make my amateur-writer's block more bearable, I've gone and installed my favouritest video game ever, the one that made me want to start gaming in the first place, and the one that is the inspiration for my internet pseudonym, Neverwinter Nights. So, in the spirit of nostalgia, I'm going to be writing various random tidbits about my games.

I think that the earliest video game I can remember playing was Super Mario Kart for the SNES. I know I played games before that, because I remember there being a DOS computer with huge floppy discs and games at my grandma's house, but I don't know what the games were. My brothers would always kick my ass at Mario Kart, and I hated that. Especially in battle mode. I wasn't completely hopeless in the racing department, but as soon as we got into battle mode, my sorry little balloons would just pop and pop and pop. But, I still had fun playing that, and (surprisingly enough, considering my age, which must have been about 5 or 6 I think) watching everyone else play. My dad is colour blind, so he'd get me (and/or whoever else had to sit out that round) to tell him what colour his shells were; red or green. I loved getting to help him play. It wasn't until years later that I found out that despite his colour blindness, he knew damn well what shell was what the whole time.

Around the same time as Mario Kart, my brothers and I would play Mario (and of course Kirby Superstar - that's the one cartridge I can ever remember losing. It just vanished). The ones that stick out in my memory are Yoshi's island and Super Mario Brothers 3 (I'm not even sure that one was actually for the SNES - it's on this four-in-one cartridge that I think were all NES games ported). Those stick out for me because I wouldn't play them, I'd "play" them. I'd go along until an enemy confused me or hit my character, then I'd pause it and hand it over to my brother, who would get past that part and hand me back the controller. Looking back, I don't know why he put up with all that. He would basically beat every level for me, and all the bosses too. I guess he's a better brother than I ever knew.

Next came - wait for it - the N64! But that will have to wait for another time. I'll continue this random stream of thoughts and memories later.