Gaming, Music, The Internet, Whatever….

I must admit that when I first heard that there were plans to host the UK’s own answer to the incredibly successful US Comic Con conventions, I was a tad sceptical. My previous experience of comic conventions was last years MCM Expo, which while enjoyable was also headache inducing at the same time and also felt a bit too “book what we can” as well, though as I said in my review of it last year, I’m sure that wasn’t the case.

So I went to the first (and hopefully, annual) Kapow Comic Con fearing the worst. And in retrospect, I shouldn’t have.

With ticket sales capped at around 5,000 for each day, there was a nice element of keeping things low key and dare I say it mature, though the trend for women with large breasts in tight clothing in comics at the moment probably belied that maturity. While there were a couple of cosplayers when I was there (a dedicated day for them was on the Sunday, which I didn’t attend) there were certainly no “huggers” there that I could see. In fact, if there were any there, I get the impression they’d have been stared down pretty quickly. That alone probably helped elevate the status of the event in one go.

While the main floor itself wasn’t necessarily the biggest, it certainly packed a lot in and was really well laid out, which certainly made a  change from the MCM Expo’s more “throw it all in the same room and hope for the best” mentality. Also having the talks and events in a seperate area away from the floor of the show certainly helped too. It meant there wasn’t quite as mad a build-up of people as with MCM, although Moon & Source Code director Duncan Jones certainly drew a crowd when he did a Q&A and signing session on the IGN stage when I was there at around Midday on the Saturday.

And on a personal note, I certainly appreciated the gaming section there. It was nothing spectacular and it certainly wont be troubling the likes of E3 any time soon but having someone like IGN on board and them bringing the likes of Portal 2 & Dirt3 along certainly improved matters compared to other aforementioned events.

However, there are a couple of things to take forward for next years event.

1) Why was there not an event program in my “goody” bag given to me when I arrived at the hall? While it’s nice to know that Rutger Hauer is playing a hobo and that he has a shotgun, knowing that there were talks and events that I could attend would arguably be of more use. In fact, it wasn’t until I picked a program up on the way out that I realised I’d missed them. Yes, I could have picked one up earlier and yes, I could have asked about them while I was there but how many others missed out on the talks because they weren’t given a program to begin with? Just me then. Ok, but I like to think I have some kind of valid point about this.

2) While the event was certainly well laid out & certainly some considerable effort was put into securing some high profile guests, it was also pretty small compared to the MCM. While as a 1st event, I can see that they deliberately kept things low key in the hope of selling the event out, thankfully proved correct. But a Kapow organised event in a hall the size of the MCM would, frankly, be superb. Particularly if they can squeeze in as much goodness as they did with the event in the few hours that I was there on the Saturday.

Still, for a first attempt, I must admit that Kapow certainly impressed me and has masses of potential for the future, especially if next years event is as well organised, attended and booked as this years clearly was.

A short Flickr set of photos & a video from the event can be found at my Flickr site. Should anyone wish to use any of the photos, could you please contact me via the comments section before using them. Comments are moderated before posting, so any personal details or addresses will not be published on this site.

The MCM expo is bi-annual event held at the Excel arena in London. It is billed as an event for Movie, Comic and Anime fans but it should probably add cosplayers to that list too, given how a good half of the the people there were dressed up for the occasion.

It had a rather interesting atmosphere to it, not being too focused on one aspect or another and having that rather British feeling of being “cobbled” together and trying to fill as much of the exhibition hall with as many things as they could find. I’m sure that certainly wasn’t the case and the organizers spent many months trying to get as many people to exhibit and appear there as possible, but that wonderfully British feeling was still there. And I liked it.

The day itself was a bit of a blur and while at the time I wasn’t keen on staying there too long, I would go back there without too much hesitation. Probably not as a cosplayer though. Certainly whets my appetite for going to something like E3 in the States but not any time soon.

I would just like to say a big thanks to Tim Maughan over at his eponymous site for getting me in on a press pass. Didn’t perhaps get me anywhere “behind the scenes”, mainly cause there weren’t any, but it meant that I had a hassle free time getting in. Which given how many people were there and the line for the queue to get in, is definitely a good thing. I’m pretty sure a few of the pics in this set will appear over on his site in due course. And rightly so.

To view the full set yourself, please follow this link go to the Flickr set. Enjoy.

Some people, like myself, are often annoyed at the spell checker on Apple’s touchscreen products and the way that it often corrects itself to a word that is far removed from the one you wanted.

However, in this instance, it’s nice to get some clarification on whether or not there is a space between the words.

Thank you Steve, thank you so much…

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford reopened a few months ago after a year long refit. I had never visited before the refit and with me visiting family in the area,  I paid a visit not long after it reopened in November of last year and they were still clearly adding/putting exhibits in place.

It’s a very odd little place. While some museums have a very clear remit, for use of a better word, the Ashmolean feels a bit hotch-potch; a bit like the British Museum in London but not on such a massive scale. A funsized version of the British Museum, you might say.

What is there is very interesting though and well worth seeing. And for something that is a “funsized” version of the British Museum in London, it certainly manages to pack a lot in. And another wonderful thing is that photography is allowed pretty much anywhere, so you can spend a good few hours taking pictures alone, as I hope this picture set proves.

One thing I would say is that you eat before you go as the one restaurant there was was pretty packed when I visited. Very much worth a visit though.

The Ashmolean Museum, 26th November 2009 on Flickr

No, this isn’t an opinion piece about the merits of cross-stitching or whether to use cotton or nylon.

Stitching in this instance refers to photo-stitching, the art of combining several digital camera pictures to create one panoramic image. I’ve been fascinated with the idea since about 2002 when I first stumbled upon the website of Max Lyons, who apart from sounding like an alter ego of Homer Simpson creates some astonishing panoramas and stitched images, including one Gigapixel images. Which is a billion pixels. Quite.

Having read that and being a geek it meant two things; That it was very cool and that I had to try it out for myself.

Being fairly lazy and short of cash, I’d never got round to actually trying this until quite recently when I purchased a Canon 40D, which along with it came with a lovely disc of software, one piece of which was Canon’s own photo-stiching software. And rather excitedly I set about creating my first stiched image. And it was at this point I learnt this probably wasn’t going to be easy….

That photo above was stitched from 10 seperate images and has been colour adjusted quite heavily, which is why the original version is 18mb in size. And even though it looks good as a thumbnail, which is what that (slightly squashed) version is above, once you look at the original version, you start to see what makes this so difficult to do. In certain places, the trees clearly don’t “mix” properly, so what you end up a sort of haze effect; look towards the left of the image for a fairly good example. And the fact that the images were taken in burst mode and thus never had a chance to focus properly, a pretty important thing when trying to take these wide panoramas, meant that the whole thing looks slightly our of focus. Which in turn makes it harder for PhotoStitch to join them properly.

While that effort was fairly pleasing in the respect that I’d finally done a stitched image, I decided to scale back my efforts and go for something slightly easier. So here’s effort number two.

The problem with this one is mainly one of perspective. The wavebreaker on the left just doesn’t look right. And trying to correct this in G.I.M.P. just made it look like it was taken while I was going through the StarGate. Which I sadly wasn’t.

So, my first efforts in Stitching. Pleasing, if not rewarding. Like everything else, practice makes perfect and hopefully with my planned travels over the next 12 months I should have some lovely panoramas to show off by this time next year.