Phew! just stepped in, looks like summer is going to be HOT! it is not yet March and the temperature outside is 35°C
Thankfully home and office are surrounded by tall trees from all the sides – however I am dreading summer more this time due to the power cuts we will have to endure.
For many people love is a lot like this picture here. The thought behind it is very good but it is just not as beautiful and perfect as you imagined it would be. Somewhere the execution of the brilliant idea is flawed, you can blame it on deficient equipment – no pun indented – or whatever.
Is the picture so bad? I would say it serves its purpose as long as the person for whom it was made feels that it is beautiful and realises that this is something unique only she is getting, plus there is always a chance that you can make it better with more efforts.
However if you are not the adventurous kind you can play safe opt for the conventional kitsch kind of presentation, which will get you errr… ummm… the mediocre in return
Hope everyone is enjoying the Valentines Day 😉
On the more material front: We are adding a makeup table in the room adjacent to the studio – it will not be much but will serve the purpose, got very bright shades of nail polishes and lipsticks yesterday. Mirror will be added soon.
Finally took time out for the so called annual check-up, read that as was skipped the last year and before. I had my Cardiac Stress Test done by a very pretty lady doc, so pretty that my resting heart rate was 140 per min to which she very soothingly said no need to be so tense!!
Unfortunately I was alone and double that with the fact that she does not wish to become subject of my photography skill.
So the bottom line is that my heart thanks to God and almost regular walks is apparently healthy, since the familial history is very strong I have decided that I might as get Thallium Scan done. Lipid Profile is very near the upper limits of normal lower limits of abnormal, but still OK
Yeah some guys have all the luck 😉
However it looks like Swati’s diabetes is creeping up on her, her serum triglycerides are haywire, still nothing to be alarmed of just need to keep a close watch.
After successfully initiating the process for starting of CBSE curriculum at Aasim’s school we now want to get them over to using OSS for students and their office.
To get them going at the office level we have a simple plan – the school library does everything manually, so we donate a computer installed with an OS Library Management software and teach the librarian to use it. Since the librarian is not very computer savvy she has no preconceived notions about how things should work.
The difficult part is what to tell the students, motivating the younger ones to use OSS. I am having a hard time trying to come up with proper analogies for piracy and open source without involving the complex almost incomprehensible issue of intellectual property… Stuff like you get a present and someone steals it does not cut because in software piracy the pirate is not stealing your software – just making a copy of it!
After a great deal of thinking the best I have been able to come up with is analogy of allowing someone to cheat from your paper in exams, this hopefully children will understand as cheating in exams is bound to be understood by them.
The next question was so how does OSS fit into the analogy – In the OSS school there are no exams!! Everyone shares their knowledge with each other and to each ones capability.
I know that there are still few loop holes in the analogy – so if anyone has a better idea do write in….
Fact: Most women are beautiful.
Fact: Most women do not acknowledge this to themselves.
Result: A very common refrain among all my (amateur?) photographer friends that finding people/women to pose is difficult. That is unless you are a very handsome fellow wherein being a damn good photographer does not matter 😉
Why do all of us have to be slaves to the western concept of beauty?
Indian women are genetically built differently and naturally tend to be more curvaceous, rather to put bluntly hip heavy! Only a small percentage will have stats which fit the correct golden ratio in every manner.
I, an ugly looking runt, experienced success very early but only after I stopped searching for models and started looking at subjects. I saw women as beautiful and made them feel confident enough to consider themselves beautiful, though this is the first time I have been able to put this in words
None of my subjects are professional models or conventionally beautiful (read: someone who would attract wolf whistles as she walks down the street), or now for that matter very young, all of them are 30 years or older.
A more specific example is the gorgeous woman you see here – Nivedita. She is 34, mother of a 10 year old boy, a school teacher, dark skinned. In short you most likely would not look at her twice if you met her and this is not being derogatory to her in any way.
Her pictures however tell another story. In fact some women have confided that this ability to turn on/off the attractiveness is a great asset and I can well imagine
Professional portrait photographers will agree to this – You will be always better off talking to your subject and getting to know her before you being your photo session – Once again every woman unless she has really abused her body into clinical obesity is beautiful and it is up to you as the photographer to demonstrate that – learn to be an empath and soon you will be taking great portraits.
Of course in my case having Swati around helps a lot in many ways and I can rightfully (dear?!) boast that she has been my first successful convert. This was about 14 years ago, when I first took her pictures which we to be sent to prospective grooms, well then that is an entirely different story for some other day…
Oh! In case you have not yet clicked this album has 14 pictures of Nivedita from last Sunday’s shoot and for the technically inclined 3 of them have links to corresponding pictures of the setup used
When it comes to money we are very very middle class about it….. and one of the advices from my CA which I definitely don’t follow is to spend money to save taxes. the logic is simple
Money Spent = 100% thus savings = 0%
Tax given = 30% thus savings = 70%
Even a 5 year old will tell you that 70 is more than 0 🙂
Yes – We do follow the cash flow and expenditure planning so that maximum benefits can be derived by timing the expenditure properly.
Am getting bored…. well really bored is a relative term, after a Superb Sunday getting back to the daily drudgery is pulling me down.
Yesterday I woke up late (by our usual standards) and as soon as Aasim left for his tabla class got into the studio and started the setup for some table top photography – the aim was to take a picture very similar to my earlier Garlic but on a white background. A couple of things immediately became clear – Mirror would not work with a white background, I had to be careful about the light fall off effect to prevent the white from turning excessive grey, the contrast had to be much lower and white needs more negative space to look better…
After Garlic I tried some pictures of Roses which turned out all cliched except one – will put that up later.
Once Aasim was back he wanted me to continue with his logo lessons – I finally told him that he could use shorthand notation and he was thrilled with it 🙂
Lunch was a nice mutton curry with zeera rice and rotis lovingly, efficiently and expertly cooked up by Swati (yeah, the maid bunked) in 50 min flat.
Around 2:30 in the afternoon Vivek called up saying that he was coming over in an hour with a friend who would be willing to be the studio subject (I somehow am now not liking the word “model” for the women I photograph) and that he wanted to try out the lights which I had recently acquired and it was implied that I could use his D70.
From 3:30 to 6:00 we tried three different setups. butterfly lighting, modified butterfly lighting and something of a cross between kicker lights and rim lighting. Nivedita, to say the least is an unconventionally beautiful woman….
The experience for me with no puns intended was “Enlightening”
Hmmm… now that I just re-read the above – I do have a reason to want One more Sunday 🙂
P.S. Verdict on lights useless lights fit only for a useless camera like mine
There are several projects big and small which I have been wanting to to put on line or start in some form or other but they are all in the genre of things which are always put off for another day.
Since past few weeks I have implemented a practice of one of our programmer presenting mini seminar every Saturday afternoon. These are short 30 min presentation on stuff we find interesting – nothing earth-shattering or revolutionary but we have had presentations on
#1 QWAD application framework
#2 XSS attacks and how to guard against them
#3 Design Patterns which we commonly use in our applications
I want to put these on line – someone just might find them useful
I also want to expand on my WordPress blog which I essentially use currently as the Coppermine Dev Blog to include all the cute tips and tricks that we either invent or improvise for our use and then forget – like how to convert a PNG to JPEG while preserving the Alpha channel using PHP, Dynamic text replacement with font face, font size, and colour controls, the latest modification of PHPlib Auth class….
I want to start a community for Indian Photographers called Chappan Saath – I wonder if any of you photographers have heard that phrase 🙂
Hmmm… I have even run out of time to write more in this BUT on the other hand both the quasi new year resolutions of write more here and keeping the house de-cluttered are working pretty well
There is still hope!
VisitorVile has to be the most entertaining website traffic (read realtime) and web server log analyser around. To quote from the website
“VisitorVille does not represent website visitors simply as numbers or graphs, but as real people in a real environment. You can watch your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city.”
I particularly like the cute buses with logos like Google and Ask Jeeves representing respective bots…
Pity it is M$Windows only and has absolutely no trial version for your own website 🙁
Yeah,I know real men just use tail -f
I had spoken, rather written, too soon on Friday when I wrote sun is shining. It rained the entire of Saturday and Sunday and part of yesterday, how ever true to the Yahoo Weather forecast the day today is sunny 🙂
The rains, besides my mood, put a damper on the cotton and mango crop of the region with losses running into 100’s of crores of Rupees. Winter rain is not unusual in Nagpur but it happens in late November or December. Records tell that this much rain has not fallen in Jan since 1911.
Sunday was spent trying to entertain Aasim – somewhere in the midst we managed to simplify the entire philosophy of good and success to “Truth and Perseverance” and that for evil and failure to “Lies and Greed”
Reference to context – LOTR