I want to live in a computer game...

I went out to the cemetery and snapped roughly 100 pictures. Out of those 100, there might have been a maximum of 5 that were good. Of course, the place I chose for my pictures doesn't look nearly as goodas it does "for real", but then again, things rarely do. Also, I think I might gone out one or two hours too late, because it was going on dusk, and you can't really take landscape shots with a flash, so that burned me a little.

I shot some, what I consider, a little bit division bell-esque (Imagine the cover for Pink Floyd's album "The Division Bell") shots of a big copper sculpture housing the two bells for the church.

Going on these sessions, I hope, will help me become a better photographer. Photography is something I've wanted to be good at since I was a little kid and played with my dad's olympus SLR, which is probably 10-15 years older than I am. It had one set 50mm lens, and another zoom lens, that I have no idea about the specifications of. (Wow, nice sentence there...). It weighed alot, since all the optics were glass, and the camera case itself was metal. It also had this wonderful mechanical click sound when you pressed the button. A real heavy-duty sound and reverberating feel almost, so that you KNEW you had snapped a picture. And ofcourse the manual film feed.

I remember wanting a pentax SLR called something like Z-20 or C-20 when I got old enough to earn my own money, but it never came down to me buying it. I had these leaflets with information about that one, and a minolta m-300 or m-500 or some such, all costing around 4-5000SEK. that was in the beginning of the 90ies I think. It could have been earlier. I'd used to dream about the kind of picures I would take, and how the camera would feel in my hand, and how professional I'd look with the camera I my hand, bu it was not to be.

I think the fact that I didn't buy a camera then, is holding me back a bit now. And urging me on at the same time. I obviously want a new camera, but sense and economy tells me that it's not going to happen. And it's not like the economy that tells me I'll probably never own a ferrari either. I mean I could actually afford this camera, I just choose to do other stuff, like pay for food, with my money. I could never, bar an amazing event, actually, if I scraped all my money together, afford a ferrari.
But who knows. In a couple of years time, maybe I deem myself to have become an excellent photographer, and I really can easily afford a dSLR, then I might just get one. But the immediate future looks dark.

I just wish I had more opportunity to take pictures of people. And not just party pictures, but more portraits, or atleast shots that are acually set up. I believe I might be good at that.

One place I believe I could spend all my remaining days taking pictures of, and living happily in, is Riven (hence the title). Riven, for those of you who don't know it, is a game released by Cyan entertainment in something like 1999 or 2000, and it's the sequel to the well know game Myst.
Riven was larger, more well rendered, has nice ambient sounds and visual effects, and most all of it took place in the scorching sun. Myst was constantly over cast, and while bright enough, was never sunny. At one point, i even think it rained. However, the world of Riven is a sun baked landscape with ages wood and metal details that are so well rendered I could almost reach out and touch the texture.
There's one place, on the second island you get to, just up to the right, that has these sumps of what must have been gigantic trees. These stumps are like 1-2 meters in diameter, and they've been sawn off, and you can see the age rings and everything perfectly. The ambient sound has grasshoppers chirping in the background, and the occasional winsounds of small insects. It's so wonderful, and so real, that I sometimes just run the game, and sit there watching the environments. Knowing that if I wanted to experience something like this in real life, now only would it be virtually impossible to find, but I'd certainly have to travel far and wide in search for it. Since Riven is a first person game, but not realtime rendered, Cyan has done a great job at framing shots for us, but I belive that if i were given free roam of the world, I could snap a few wonderful ones myself.

I have this big coffeé table book called "From Myst To Riven", that's about the making of the game, the artwork, the company, and the people behind it, and it's also completely fascinating. Sadly, I hear that Myst 5 will be the conclusion of the series, even tho I haven't been able to play the other games, save for Myst and Riven that mych, but now, for the final chapter, it's Cyan who's doing all the creative stuff, and implementing it aswell. Myst 3 and 4, they tell me, were written by other companies, based on storylines given to them by Cyan. Kind of liek what Nihilistic is (or was) doing for Blizzard with StarCraft - Ghost.
For you non-gamers out there, it's like having a book ghostwritten. Well, almost anyway.

Anyway.
I'm rambling really, but I guess it's just been one of those days. I watched parts of Adam Sandler's "The Wedding Singer" just as I was getting back from my photographic tour. It's a good movie, but not as good as "Happy Gilmore".
Maybe I should be getting back to learning how to do threads and sockets in c++ (ohh, and then ssl too, wish me luck)

Ohh, and I changed my timezone to CET now, so that the post times will properly reflect when I'm writing this stuff. Most of it seemed to originate form the middle of the night, so I saw it fit to change it.

If you want to see any of my pictures, drop me a line (via a comment or whatever, open to everybody). Or I might join hello, I haven't decided yet, Picasa2 rules!