I'm a Dragon Quest fan, and anyone who's played a DQ game all the way through knows that feeling of finding a Metal Slime.  They also know that feeling when the Metal Slime flees.  And this brings my pictures of Slimes to 2 out 34 weeks or about 6% for 2011.  How can you resist that dopey smile?

Christina gets back-to-back weeks!  In reality I've been in a photography dry spell, but I really like how this hurried and impromptu shot of Christina turned out.  God bless the 7d's ability to shoot high ISO and Lightroom's ability to turn that noise into something silky smooth.

 Click here to go to the ActionSoft website for more info and to download MM HD!

Midnight Mansion HD was released earlier this week on the Mac OS X App store.  The first Episode (we had to split it into 2 episodes) is $5, and features 5 huge mansions (including 2 brand new mansions!).  The graphics have been completely redrawn by yours truly, and it looks better than ever.

If you haven't heard of MM HD, and have been craving some good classic platformer action-adventure gaming on the Mac, go get it now!  Even if you've played the original, you haven't seen it looks as polished as it does now!  For $5 there's literally dozens of hours of gameplay.

The App Store is a savage arena where Apps battle it out, and the only key to victory is word of mouth and enough good luck to get into the top 10.  So if you are interested, buy it!  If you like it, rate it!  You are doing a service and helping my good friend Vern pay the bills so he can keep making games.

If you haven't already, meet my wife.  I rarely shoot portraits, but when Christina needed a photo taken for her work's website, I was more than happy to pull out my nifty 50mm f/1.4 and give it a shot.  I'm extremely happy with how they turned out, especially this one.

The late afternoon light was perfect, and all I did in Lightroom was a little warming up of the white balance and boosting the contrast.  It helps that the model was so good looking also.

We got to dogsit our friends' dog the first week in August.  We were working late in our office, and I caught Khloe chilling out on the recliner.  She looked too good not to grab my camera and snap a few pics.

I returned to the scene of my Week 2 crime.  I had come up short for the week, and in the late July heat, I figured I'd take my camera to work and head down to the graffiti grotto at Lunch.  Much to my disappointment, the place was gated up so I couldn't actually go in. 

I did snap this shot of the outside of the building.  I made it moody with a grainy filter and desaturation.  Nothing to write home about, but hey, they can't all be winners.  Oh, and walking around at noon at 90 degree/70% humidity weather is not a great idea, pretty much ever.

The character above is the very meloncholy, often misunderstood Proto Man.  Kid of fitting for the first character in this series, since he was the first robot that Dr. Light built, and the "proto"-type against which his other creations were based.</nerd>

Something I'm going to try from now to the end of the year is draw 100 video game characters.  I'm trying to practice my speed sketching and games from the 8-16 bit era have a huge well of inspiration to draw from.  I'll keep each drawing to less than 30 minutes. 

How does she keep all that hair in her helmet?

And VG All-Star #002 is Samus Aran.  Back in 1988, playing Metroid for the first time, I remember the playground rumors (the playground is what we had before the Internet for sharing cheat codes and passwords) of a "JUSTIN BAILEY" code and that the "dude" from Samus was, in fact, a girl.  Fear of cootie-transferrence aside, Samus is still one of the badest-ass characters in Gaming history.

...is Love.  Or Raccoon Leaf.  Yeah, Raccoon Leaf.