Pediatrician and a Forensic Expert. A passionate PHP geek. Currently CTO, SANIsoft. Also a photographer, bird watcher, nature lover and a FOSS enthusiast.
After Aasim being gifted a few tropical freshwater fishes by a friend we decided that this would be a good opportunity to teach him how to care for an aquarium and revive a hobby which I indulged in when I was in school.
So we went to buy him a larger tank – In the shop I was immediately smitten by the beauty of the tropical marine aquarium and it was a surprise that the prices for the same have come down to affordable levels – however behind the veneer of beauty lies the harsh fact that tropical marine fishes are not bred but rather caught from the wild and most often using the unscrupulous method of cyanide poisoning…. which not only kills a large number of fishes but destroys the complete eco-sphere of the place where they are hunted. The fact that prices are affordable means that the hunting is now more extensive 🙁
Have planned that about two months down the line we will invest in a huge freshwater tank – am yet undecided on the theme or kind of fishes – the choice is between the large Chichlids or the teeny weeny Tetras
Yesterday we also went for a birdwatch walk – this time near a small lake about 5 mins drive from where we live – the portion where we went was not known to me previously and we were regaled by lots of water bird spot-tings – Swati might post a complete list. Sorry no pictures… yet… but soon.. very soon…
My hobbies till now have mostly followed a common life cycle – The seeds of its birth are sown by a combination of boredom and an itch to scratch, from there it usually rapidly grows to become almost an obsession which ultimately metamorphoses in to profession of sorts at this point the hobby, passion and obsession part invariably withers away and ultimately dies. All that remains is a corpse that is just a job to be done. I know that there are a lot of people who would say you need to love your job and thats the happiest part and blah – believe me, I have been there and done that several times. The withering away usually starts with small compromises that you make to get the job done in the given set of parameters, as soon the freedom is lost death is inevitable.
Right now I am resisting the same seduction for photography – there are several enticing assignments which will let me do a whole lot of great photography and right now it is the kind of photography that I like but I have firmly decided that I am not going to take them up. For once I can afford to refuse – I like that freedom a lot 🙂
The CVS manual talks about keeping a checked out copy with every commit in another directory – most common for us being the webroot. However I could not find on the web how to do the same when you are using CVS over SSH (and only SSH)
It took us a while to realise that $USER would work and yes the caveat is that all valid $USER@localhost should be able to login without having to provide a password, but I am sure everyone know how to generate ssh keys.
Nagpur Chapter of BNHS was kicked off by people who, till now, have been members but never got together. After the first meet on 2nd March, the first event was very quickly planned – A bird watching trail walk for today morning 7am at VNIT campus. Once again the blessing of being in a small town came forth, VNIT happens to be exactly 5 min walk from our house and you can spot birds starting from sunbirds right up to peacocks and almost every known size in between.
More people than expected, read as – in two digits, turned up and the walk was a complete success for me, I saw a bird, previously unrecognised by me – “yellow eyed babbler”. We have also started a Yahoo group for keeping the members in touch, may be Swati will post a more detailed account somewhere.
Photography for a few days is likely to take a backseat 🙂
Lots of other small changes have taken place around the house about which I have not written in this journal earlier over past couple of months – We have a new sofa, a new dining table, fed up with incessant, serial destruction of our rose crops by monkeys we have ripped out all the rose plants and completely re-designed the garden. We are very pleased with the cumulative effect of all these changes.
No more new Bodyscapes on my site for next few months, simple reason being that 95% of my other pictures are being ignored – pretty much what I wanted to begin with but now is the time for change of plans!
However that does not mean that I am not shooting any of those – with model scarcity for Bodyscapes greater that that of electricity I will continue whenever I have an opportunity, so my faithful fans can expect them to be there some day 🙂
Despite the fact the my 5700 is a poor performer in several situations I guess it will be the Cam which gets carried around the most for candid photography, it is a pain to lug around the massive D70 as I discovered while in Mumbai but again this not going to prevent me from getting a DSLR , I just have to get a fix on the set of lenses that I want to have. I do not want to do what most people are recommending – buy the body with normal lens and then keep adding lenses. I want to have a long zoom and a macro right away.
“Since then, there had been no whisper of disloyalty and so notorious had become the care with which the First Minister was guarded, to say nothing of the terrifying woman–called ‘The Tiger Woman’ by many–who watched over him, that it was no longer necessary for Dors to accompany him everywhere. Her invisible presence was an adequate shield” – Written about R. Dors Venabeli by Issac Asimov in Forward the Foundation
Just the two of us engulfed in the warm Island of golden glow emanating from a solitary electric lamp. The rest is just an ocean of darkness. An occasional invisible clouds moves aside to let a shimmer of star light pass through, I am re-reading “Forward the Foundation” she is re-reading “The Last Leaf”
How romantic you would say, but NO!! it is not when you are sitting there not by choice but by compulsion of a 7 hour power cut and all the back-up power you have garnered for the worst possible situations is exhausted. Not to mention the mosquitoes eating you alive!
Two consecutive mishaps at the major power stations and the entire region has been crippled. The situation is not expected to improve for at least 10 more days…
Looks like we will have to be entirely self dependent for all our power needs. Gives burning money an entire new meaning 🙁
Finally after some pondering over how best to concisely and accurately present my impressions on the New School 2005 seminar series I decided that it is best that I divided the post by people rather than days and then add some more comments. I realise, whatever I write will not be able to do real justice to the vast amount of knowledge that I gained in those four days, still I am vain enough to try.
First the cribs: The organizers were a bit sloppy, given the fact that this was held at a 5 star hotel and most of the on venue things were already taken care of they could have very well taken care that the AV systems and other equipment were setup properly and well in advance. Also they could have had better communication with the speakers and what would be the content of their talk – other than that things went very smoothly
Joyce Tenneson : Subtle sensuous spirituality This is the person I was most impressed with – in fact I gave her the epitaph of “Goddess of photography”. After having authored 10 books you cannot expect anything less. She presented using 35mm transparency slides and was the only one who did so, a practiced presenter, her style was simple and honest. What amazed me most was her confession that her studio setup is almost never more than 2 lights set at an angle of 45 degrees and when outdoors she just uses a clip-able backdrop and a reflector.
Jay Maisel : Visual Vitality “To be a good photographer it is a good start if you have your camera with you!” Indeed Jay always had his camera with him, he even took pictures of the audience he was presenting to!
“Make your mind do visual push-ups” was his advice. He showed how after you have mastered light, color and point of view it is actually the gesture which the photograph makes to the viewer which is most important. His pictures have highly saturated contrasting colors which he told he fell in love with when he started using Kodachrome film and thats what he strives for even in digital.
David Zimmerman : Ingenious Imagery This was the day when the master of spill and liquid photography revealed it all. David was the most honest of all the presenters – I am sure everyone has seen those Coke and Pepsi ads with splashes of ice streams of fluids – he showed how he did it… Most of the props like glasses and bottles are 300% bigger, the Pepsi/Coke is diluted to give the transparency, if the splash is required to be of a specific shape then it is crafted out of resin and then fluid splashed on them. The result even when demystified is nothing short of magic.
In the second part of his presentation he talked about his affair with aerial photography and how he is building his own airplane in his garage. He ended his slot with an almost spiritual presentation about his trip along the path of the Ganges river.
Intermingled among all this were tips about how to make money, how agents and art galleries work and how *you* are your only real competition.
Max Vadukul : Maniac Materialism His pictures are crazy, he said beauty is boring and almost everyone is photograph-able. He showed ample examples to prove his point but the best part was a 3 hour photo shoot he held as a demo, he kept everything very simple, lit the set with just one single large Octa. The magic came from the way he directed the girls and the way he cropped the final results. The first thing he told the models was to stop posing and start having fun – he would keep adding small increments of instructions as the girls kept moving and finally trip the shutter when you least expected it.
He also extolled the youngsters to not give up on their dreams, stay away from alcohol, drugs and unprotected sex.
Sanjay Kothari : Crass Commercialization This man was the biggest disappointment, he was unprepared and very reluctant to share knowledge. He took upon a project to demonstrate which everyone knew could not be completed in the given time – audience did mange to coax things out of him but less said the better about that…
Some other mentionable tidbits – I talked with a lot of youngsters about what they want from Photography – money was the most recurring answer – sadly. There were, again sadly, more girls smoking than boys. Chivalry is nearly dead in metros and letting a lady get ahead in line took most by surprise.
I got autographs on prints of all the above photographers
Last but not the least, I won an Eye-One Monitor Color Calibration tool in a raffle they had 🙂
Got back to Nagpur today morning after a slightly delayed flight and almost immediately to work – thankfully there is not tons of work to be done nor did anything go wrong, however there is not time enough to do justice to the New School 2005 workshop, I will make a separate post about it soon. In very short the workshop was worth many times the money I had to pay for it.
The trip was also worth it – Contrary to what was previously planned about spending the 17th on shopping for camera related goodies, the pros – Vivek and Atul Kapley – announced that they had some work and would be busy most of the day. I was left with a daunting task of not getting bored or rather make constructive use of my time as well. Not to be out done I figured out, using cabs and local trains, the way to VT station from Juhu. My first stop after getting down was PlanetM where I picked up loads of old Hindi film music, all the Mohd Rafi and Guru/Geeta Dutt stuff and an almost complete Carpenters collection.
That done I started walking towards Fountain and in the way picked up some coffee table Photography books, lots of software for Aasim, a couple of PHP 5 books of which I had only an e-copy.
By the time I was finally done it was 5pm and I was too tired to endure the rush in local train plus I had too much stuff with me so I decided to splurge on a cab and had a most amusing Hyderabadi driver, he spoke the typical in Hyderabadi Urdu. He soon started quoting the likes of Bahadur Shah Zafar and Momin, which he succinctly interspersed, with the choicest and most innovative expletives hurled at the other drivers. I almost doubled up with laughter hearing some of them 😉
The next day onwards we were at the seminar, which as I wrote before will be a separate post…
Tonight, I am leaving for Mumbai, where I will be attending the New School 2005, a 4 day event on photography organised by Photographers’ Guild Of India. It is supposed to be a combination of seminars and hands-on workshop. I am very excited by the speaker line up which includes:
* David Zimmerman
* Gregory Heisler
* Max Vadukul
* Joyce Tenneson
* Jay Maisel
* Sanjay Kothari
Of the above, I am particularly keen on Joyce Tenneson’s Macro photography and Sanjay Kothari’s Photoshop skills
I am going along with Vivek and another of his photographer friend. We are going a day early and plan to spend some time shopping around for camera related goodies.
I will be taking notes and hopefully it will make a nice long entry when I return.
