About This Site

This site is new (February 18, 2005) and in the early stages of development. If you don´t like something about this site, please contact me and let me know. If you like something, please let me know that as well. Your feedback is important. Please let me know your thoughts.

How It All Started
A few years ago my children wanted me to take them and their friends to an Anime convention. I gather that I wasn't the first parent approached, but it turned out I was the last parent approached.

The decision to chaperone my children and their friends was made over the course of a couple of days. I asked around at work and found a co-worker who had quite a bit of experience with Anime conventions, as he worked on the Katsucon convention. He assured me that the people who attend Anime conventions are great people, and even if Anime wasn't my thing, I´d still have a good time. He was right.

Everyone wants to know if I like Anime, and if so, what do I like. Over the past three or so years I´ve seen a fair amount of Anime, a lot of it on "Anime Unleashed" on TechTV, now G4TechTV. I´ve found that my favorite series is one I haven´t seen on "Anime Unleashed" - Chobits. Yes, there are other series I´ve enjoyed, but Chobits is my favorite.

Like many dads, I was also tasked with taking pictures of all the wonderful costumes worn a the Anime conventions so that my daughters would have examples of great costumes and ideas for their own creations. The first time I took pictures at an Anime convention, I used my 35mm SLR and shot film. Big mistake. There are many wonderful costumes at the typical Anime convention, and one can go through many rolls of film - an expensive endeavor.

Digital photography provides good images (particularly at 8 megapixels or higher) and the ability to take many, many pictures on reusable memory cards. Some aspects of digital photography are a little different from film photography, but a lot is the same. I still like film, but I shoot primarily digital these days.

At Katsucon 10 in February, 2004, I took a over 500 digital pictures. At Otakon 2004 I took over 1,500 pictures. The Friday morning of Otakon 2004 I received many requests as to if the pictures would be posted to the web, the web address, where they would be posted, etc. I was unprepared for the volume of the requests, and scribbling my email address on scraps of paper was time consuming and error-prone, so I went to a nearby copy store and had some cards made up.

Knowing I had limited storage space and bandwidth, I decided that the only pictures I would post on my website were those for which I had received written or email permission to post the picture from the picture´s subject. Thus, the pictures posted in the "Otakon 2004" section of this site are those for which I´ve been in contact with the person (or persons) pictured and received their permission to post the picture.

This year (2005) for Katsucon I have my own domain name, DIGITALCOSPLAY.COM^TM, a significant amount of server storage, and a significant amount of server bandwidth. If I´ve guestimated reasonably well, I should be able to post all the pictures I take at Katsucon 11 with server storage and badwidth to spare.

The goal is to update this site each night of Katsucon (Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night) with the pictures taken that day. Will it work? Dunno. Wednesday night I finished writing the image manipulation software (written in Python, a programming language I just started learning in January), so I´ve only performed limited testing of the software. Many things could go wrong - or right. Only time will tell.

John