Posts Tagged: Photography

Flying and Photography

On July 17, 2010 by AJ With 2 Comments - Humour, Photography, Randomness, Thoughts
Clouds above Pacific. The picture also shows a...
Image via Wikipedia

(This was meant for posting on the 10th of July. Somehow I never got around to posting it till today)

Sitting at the windows seat of an aeroplane after years has been a fun experience since I normally choose the aisle seat or fly in the dark when not much is visible outside.

But flying in daytime, sitting at the window has been a gorgeous treat. A literal visual feast for the eyes.

White clouds all around me, patches of blue sky above and the sun making occasional appearances through the cloud had me constantly wishing for my camera. Not that it would make any difference since it is literally impossible to take half a decent pic from a commercial aeroplane.

Anyway, that got me thinking – perhaps go in an open aircraft/glider (do they even exist? Is it even possible?) and get some photography done. But it would probably be shit expensive. Ah well one can dream can he not.

Anyway, I digress. So watching the clouds fly by made me want to see how they behave when they get near the plane’s turbines and when the exit (probably the geek in me thinking) and I thought it would be so cool to have two aircrafts flying at slightly different altitudes and photograph the effect of the turbines of the lower craft (you know, you can’t really make out the effect from inside the aeroplane because there is no point of reference) and of course photograph the scenery as is, flying on a floor of clouds, walled by clouds under a cloudy roof.. BEAutiful.. :)

All these musings made my childhood dream of flying planes resurface making me feel so terribly underachieving in life. Ah, I digress again so I’ll stop here.

(written on my phone a few thousand feet above the ground while blasting through empty space (thank god for that. Wouldn’t want the space to be non-empty ;) ) in a pressurised metal tube)

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Book Review – The Art of Black and White Photography By Torsten Andress Hoffman

On August 7, 2008 by Anant With 3 Comments - Books, Gadgets, Photography, Reviews

When I saw this book up for review, I jumped at the chance immediately. Having a deep interest in Photography, with the new camera, I now have complete control over my photos and their look.

I have always considered Black and white photography the real art form of photography. The  representation of the image that can be represented just by the two colors is simply amazing. It also focuses the viewer to pay attention to the details and the subject rather than the colors which in some cases I have found to be a distraction.

In a sense, for me, Black and White photographs speak more than color photographs. Not to take anything away from color photos for they have their own place (and I take a lot more of them too), I personally favor B&W photos. Below is a review of a very good book dedicated to Black and White Photographs: The Art of Black and White Photography

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Book Review: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers

On August 1, 2008 by Anant With 4 Comments - Books, Computers, Reviews, Technology

Vacuum tubes in the ENIACRemember your high school computer theory class? References to the “ancient” (in computer innovation time) machines which utilized vacuum tubes, drum memories, ferrite rings? Remember ENIAC, UNIVAC, EDVAC etc? If these terms bring back nostalgic memories of your high school computer course and the thoughts imagining what these machines looked like, then Core Memory is the book to refer.

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Barcamp Bangalore 4 – Day 1

On July 28, 2007 by Anant With 3 Comments - Blogging, Desicritics, Internet, Yours Truly

I attended my first BarCamp today held in Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
It was scheduled to start at 9 AM but I overslept and reached there only by 10. But as IST (Indian Stretchable time) goes, I wasn’t late and the registrations and the introduction session was still going on. So I did not miss much :D

I wanted to be a part mainly of the Bloggers collective and the Photo(graphers) Collective, hoping to learn, mostly in the latter and more to give a talk in the former. The bloggers collective started of fairly decently but was delayed as people trickled in fairly slowly and almost everyone had a problem getting the WiFi to work on their laptops.

But once that was done, the first talk on Podcasting took place. I was not interested much in that so I went around helping people configure their laptops to connect to the WLan.

The next talk by Kishore Krishna (aka Kpowerinfinity) was on Widgets but due to some conflicts, it was delayed. So my talk on Blogging Platforms and setting up your own blog was advanced and his postponed to after mine.

My talk started on a fairly positive note with lot of discussion and interaction but once I got on to the setting up a self hosted blog using wordpress, people lost track. The topic got far too technical for most of them so I decided to stop and instead move that to a demo after the talk for those who were interested by making it more basic and easy to follow(the demo did not happen eventually)

After my talk, I moved out from the bloggers collective to check out the other collective. I entered the Internet collective where a talk on MS Silverlight was just about to start. Not much interest there so I moved on to the Startups collective. That was in the fag end with the speak just starting to take questions so I left there too and went back to the bloggers collective. Kishore’s talk was just about over when I reached there and soon we all went for lunch.

Immediately after lunch, the bloggers collective seemed to have disappeared with only a few visible from the earlier 40-50. So I held a discussion on micro-blogging (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku) with a few of the interested attendees. After that, I discussed the various blogging platforms and what would be a good choice for a non-techie beginner blogger and set up an Livejournal account for her.

That was the end of all blogging topics as the photography collective was having it’s first (and only meet for the day) where a lot of discussion went on and Amoghavarsha and Jace and few others. Learnt lots of basic tips and got a lot of information.

There was a band jam happening later in the evening but having tired myself out earlier, I decided to skip that. Day two of the un-conference is tomorrow. Watch for a report about it tomorrow.

Oh and I got a chance to meet Aaman and Deepti Lamba, the chief editors of Desicritics. That was really great. We discussed the upcoming changes to DC, the current happenings and how it is really growing as a community. That was really great.

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