Month: December 2003

Bodyscapes

Finally with willing and apt models I am able to start photographing the human form in the way I have envisaged for years…

Despite having seen countless pictures similar to what I would like to capture it is, as said by most photographers a very hard task. Out of the 40 odd pictures only 2 are presentable. Hopefully things will get to the point where more of the pictures / poses / compositions are display quality.

I am still struggling for exact words to describe this theme but I am pretty clear that this will not have conventional nudity, it will always be  implied 🙂

All the words descriptions seem a bit hollow or too crass. I am sticking with Bodyscapes for the time being.

End of the world

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly. – Richard Bach

A rather satisfactory end to a day which began in lousy manner. Early morning just as I was about to do that “little bit more” it started raining. Had to rush out in the cold to get the clothes in…

Then the electricity service line feeding out building decided it was time to burn itself – we were stuck without electricity. The MSEB men came saw and arrogantly announced the verdict “Get wire and we will see what can be done by evening” meaning more like “We don’t want to fix it today”.
 
I am never the one to promote any sort of violence but this time I was surely glad that the local Shiv Sena leader thought it was reason enough to go and beat up a few MSEB linesmen…

Thankfully the rain stopped,  electricity was restored by 2:30pm. People who did not have mission critical work played cricket with Aasim while I managed to click the picture above.

Plan on watching a mindless Hindi movie in a while

A better day…

1) Made myself as tired as I could with a loong walk

2) Stole some of Swati’s time and took her to a book expo – purchased Khuswant Singh’s translation of “Umrao Jaan”

dropped in for a while in the afternoon. A pity he is going back tomorrow.

Today for the first time I tried a paper print of my cam from an Image Lab – an 8“ x 6” cost me Rs12/- which is a bit on the expensive side but this lab is 5 min walking distance from the house and I get to see on-screen previews. I am really pleased with the print quality. It is frame-able and gift-able 🙂

Some days are just not mine…

1) Mount an nfs share from an older RH7.3 server – I can do it from RH9 and down client but  FC1 persists on blaming the  “Server said: Permission denied”.

2) Continue a Multisession CDR, again I could do it using K3B on Knoppix, Nero on WinXP but cdrecord(via K3B) on FC1 kept saying unknow error 🙁

And these are the most trivial of the things which kept bugging me through the day – Heck hopefully tommorow is a New day

Yeah, merry Christmas to everyone

Sunday source

Been a slowly progressing lazy Sunday, been sitting in the sun talking to Swati about distant dreams… lots of them from far very far in future.

Also been reading the Extending PHP chapter from Rasmus’s book. That is the single most useful resource on writing C extensions….

In many ways learning to code PHP extensions is  more about learning the meta language which is defined by the API macros than C itself. It reminds me of the days when I had begun adding snippets of Z80 machine code to my Spectrum Basic programs.

Swati now intends to get a Hindi flick to watch and most likely we men will fall asleep about 45min into it 😀

Cut to 3 and a half hours later

Finished watching KHNH – Did not sleep, in fact rather enjoyed the humour

BTW,  I am posting this using Deepest Sender the Mozilla based LJ Client. While I wouldn’t recommend it as your primary LJ client I find it rather feature rich.

Aasim wants us to go out for Dinner

White on White

Managed a colored white on white picture. A colored white on white is more difficult to take than a B/W white on white like the “Hint of Mint” shot. The picture on left was taken in sunlight, the only bright white light source I have, on a sheet of plain A4 copier paper, for several shots the white paper kept appearing as gray… Till I got the contrast right. A wee bit of contrast has been tweaked outside camera as well. Discovered that even GIMP 1.3.2 destroys the EXIF information much to my disappointment.

I am yet to see any results from the other two Nikon 5700… (hint hint 😉

My throat has finally decided that it was time to go on a full time strike and has also called in friends Fever and Body ache along, feeling really sore…

Insects!!

Finally a decent insect macro shot, this cam takes a bit of getting used to… but I was able to do this 1/30 sec shot without a tripod and pretty decent depth of field. I would have been more happy if I had taken precaution to frame the shot such that the tail of the grasshopper was not touching the top of the frame.

Also discovered that if I do a right click and Save As from Kuickshow it saves a compressed image and destroys the EXIF data as it does so…

In other things I am reading some poetry by Javed Akhter – since reading in devnaagrii is slow for me I am taking more time to enjoy the verses as well 🙂

Funny things happen if you add a second disk with a live Linux install to to your existing Red Hat install – the system gets confused with double LABEL=\ and starts hissing, spitting and boots into the wrong Linux install among other things 😉

The solution to this (thanks to ) is to edit the grub.conf and replace LABEL=\ with the real device name like \dev\hda1 and also do the same in the fstab file.

Petty people petty politics
Less said about it the better…

Pretty people pretty photos

Had an impromptu photo session with a friend of ours – Two photos have come up displayable BUT I don’t have permission to… … now now don’t let your imagination run awry they are both close-ups and not….