Photography, Linux & More..

Brenizer's Method

2011-04-19T13:26:00.004+05:30

I came to know about this method a year back or so. This technique is developed by a wedding photographer named Ryan Brenizer when he was on his honeymoon ! ! The technique involves taking multiple pictures with a very shallow depth of field and then stitching them together using photoshop or autostitch.exe or similar tool.

I recently started trying this technique for portraits and below are 2 images that I tried so far.
First one is of my Twin niece which was taken in my home town.

Go here to view few more photos of the twins.

The second one is of my wife taken at K.Gudi jungle lodges.

I am not explaining this technique in detail here as there is already a good article by Richard Bui here

You can also visit Ryan's blog here

In the blog above, example images were taken using 85 mm f/1.4 lens which gives a very shallow depth of field. Since I don't have such expensive lens, I instead tried using Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens and results were satisfying enough.

Light Paiting, Stencils & More

2011-02-02T13:00:00.009+05:30

Light painting caught my attention some years back but I didn't not do much experiments with it for a long time. But recently it caught my attention again and this time I tried out different types /styles of light painting.

So What is Light Painting ?

According to Wikipedia light painting is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera.

In Simple terms to do light painting, you fix your digital camera onto a tripod, put it in bulb mode, press and hold the shutter release button and let some one move a source of light in front of the camera in whatever style/way they want in a relatively dark room/area.

Below are some of my earlier tries at light paintings ( very basic & simple though ).

To make a light painting we need following things.

1. A Digital camera with supoprt for Bulb mode ( check this out to know what is bulb mode ).
2. A tripod
3. Some light source like CFL bulbs, regular or LED torch etc.

Note: If you are not taking any ones assistance, then you need a remote for shutter release.

DIY photography page has an excellent article about "how to do" light painting which you can read here. So I wont go into the details of it.

Next, lets come to light painting with stencils. I was inspired by reading a article on how to do amazing light paintings with stencils at DIY page and I wanted do something similar myself. So I took the idea from that page and created a custom version of stencil box which looked something like this.

I created the box in such a way that I can add and remove stencil sheet from the box.

All set, In a dark room I started painting light with this stencils box with different stencils. Below are some samples.

After the initial warmups, I tried some more creative light paintings like the one's below.

So in the images how do I get the colors ? To do this, I stick a tracing paper to the back of stencil and paint the different areas with different colors as shown in the images below.

Below are the links to some of the interesting light paintings I came across.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigtab/5299299085/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kfinny/4137258588/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigtab/5299290579/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigtab/5268645787/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigtab/5053428871/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigtab/5066639678/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigtab/5042352757/

Its beatlenut season !

2009-11-08T09:05:00.028+05:30

This part of the year, Malnad region is busy in bealtenut/arecanut harvesting and people are busy working on it.

I had been to my home town recently and my parents were busy ( including me !) engaging in beatlenut processing. Came up with the idea of documenting the whole process in my own words :).

We make red colored beatlenut and this post only talks about one single way of processing. There are other different ways of processing and it changes from one area to the other.

Lot of manpower and effort is involved in this kind of processing. Its done mainly in Thirthahalli, Sringeri, Shimoga area of Malnad and its the most expensive one compared to other forms of beatlenut processed in areas like Sagar, South canara etc where its processed in many different ways.

My family has been doing beatlebut forming for few generations now and it was the main source of income, until me and my brother started earning few years back !

The whole processing ( the way we do ) takes lot of hardwork and effort. Will try to describe in brief all the steps involved in it.

The main harvesting season starts in October and it will go on till Jan end or early Feb every year. The steps involved in the processing are:

Plucking the arecanut bunches from the trees.
Removing the husk ( outer shell ) and cutting the arecanut in 2 pieces.
Cooking the arecanut in a red colored solution.
Drying the cooked beatlenuts in the sun for 5-6 days !
Once dried, separating different varieties from it.

First thing involved is taking the beatlenut from the trees. These trees grow upto a height of 80 ft and one tree will have 2 to 4 bunch of beatlenut, and these can not be taken at once.. as all the bunches do not ripe at the same time. So what we do is.. we will have the first round of plucking in Oct, once its done will give a gap of 20-25 days and start over again !

For this work, usually 4 persons are required, One guy who will climb the tree and take the bunches off, one guy who catches these on the ground!!!, one guy who will transport all these to the nearest motorable place in the farm and one women who will pick n collect the scattered arecanut seeds on the ground. First 2 work can be done only by skilled people and other 2 can be done by any one.

Below are some of the images from this initial work.

Now a group photo of the workers ! They are regulars in our home and come for work whenever we need.

Next step is to remove the outer shell from the core. For this work, house wives, children's come to our home in the evening.
Even people who go for work in the day time will come in the evening after 7 and they will remove the shell using a special knife will 10 or 11 in the night. Once done for evening, we will measure how much beatlenut they have removed and keep an account of it and pay them the money at the end of harvesting.
For this work many children's will come after the school, because they will earn their pocket money :) . More over this work doesn't require hard labor, its mostly like you sit on the knife table, chit chat with your friends while removing the husk :)

Once the outer husk is removed, the third step is cook this waw beatlenut in water and a red color solution. It has to be cooked for 2 to 3 hours in the solution. I don't know the exact ingredients of the red solution as we dont prepare it every year, its re-used again and again over the years ( even my dad is not sure when was that solution prepared ). :)

We start cooking it in a big metal drum at 6 in the morning and by 8:45 or 9 AM its cooked and by that time sun would have also come up.
Then we strain it from the drum and dry it in the
sun, spreading the beatlenut evenly on a mesh made out of bamboo !.
This has to be dried for atleast 5 to 6 days depending on how sunny /cloudy the days were.
Once all this is done, the final step is to separate the different variety from the lot. In our way of processing we get mainly 3 types and we call it Bette, Hasa and Idi ( Hard one, softone and single peice ). Once separated, these varieties are packed and sent to beatlebut mandies ( in shimoga and thirthalli ) and sold there.

Home made macro studio !

2009-10-11T14:10:00.003+05:30

I should have written this entry long back, coz I made a macro studio kind of 2 months ago.
Anyway here it goes.

Building this macro studio will hardly costs to Rs 100 or less. For me it was Rs 100 hundred as i had to buy almost everything ! BTW I am not writing here how to do it, there is already a good article about it in strobist. Follow this link to read it .

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-to-diy-10-macro-photo-studio.html

One of the good thing this box apart from controlling light is, I can use many background colors by just changing the background sheet. :)
One can make use of this for product photography.

Till now I have used only white and black background. Below are some of the images taken using home made macro studio.

Also tried some smoke photography ( see below images ), but it has not come that good, will be trying more some time and post those into my flickr page

Week End Bird Waching at TG Halli

2009-09-13T12:58:00.009+05:30

Last week end I had been for my first ever bird watching session at TG Halli back waters near Magadi Road, Baganlore. Was there with one of my friend and his neighbor who is regular bird watcher.

It was Saturday and we decided to go early morning as chances of encountering birds are more at that time. I left home at around 5:50 and was picked up by Nitesh at Vijayanagar bus stop. Along with Nitesh, Raju, his room mate and Sharma were there. I am meeting Sharma for the first time and its because of him we were going for bird watching. as he is been doing bird watching for a long time now :). Thanks to him for taking us there.

We reached there within 30 mins or so and Sharma straight away jumped into shooting with his Canon 400 mm lens ! but me and Nitesh took some time to get into it. We were shooting some landscape and since we had tripod I was taking some shots for creating HRD image. Once we were all done with that, we went behind Sharma for the actual bird watching. Got lot of tips from Sharma about bird watching and how to approach for taking a picture and how patient one has to be when it comes to bird photography. It was good learning for us. Sharma started bird watching around 2 years back and has gained lot of knowledge about birds. He could identify all the birds we saw on that day with their names and also gave us a brief description about them ! Even if I mug up those names its very hard to remember those names again !. I am poor at remembering those names you see ;)

With all the tips we got from Sharma, we started taking pictures, we waited, we crawled on the ground, we hide ourselves behind bushes .. uff now I know how difficult it is to take bird's pictures and how much patience one requires ! ! . Other difficulty I had was my lens, firstly it was 300 mm which means I have to go further close to birds to get a picture and my Sigma lens is too slow focusing ! it creeps a lot and motor makes lot of noise :(
With whatever I had, these are the few decent pics that I could manage to take.

Also took some pics of Dragon flies and bugs ! which came out well :)

From TG Halli back waters we headed straight to Machinabele Dam, it was not for bird watching but just for view of the dam as we had not seen the dam before. I managed to click some HDR images of the dam landscape !

One more landscape from the place

And finally we headed back to Bangalore via Ramangara, as Machinabele is around 10 Kms from Ramangar. We took a group photo near Ramanagar with the famous sholay rocks as the back drop ( Sholay was shot in Ramanagara ).

It was a nice trip with lot of learning and lot of new things too !

Wubi initramfs problem !

2009-03-18T13:53:00.003+05:30

Not so long back I came to know about the Wubi installer which started getting shipped with Ubuntu Live CD. I wanted to try it some time but never got a chance as I already have Ubuntu installation on a separate partition in my laptop.

Few weeks ago, I got a spare Desktop running Vista and tried the Wubi by installing Ubuntu within Windows partition by allocating 10GB for installation. The installation process was very user friendly and it went smooth and my Ubuntu was running fine for many days, until one day, when I booted onto Ubuntu it gave a strange error and gave me BusyBox initramfs prompt !!

Ooops, I was totally unaware of this and did some googling to find a solution for this, but got none! Yesterday I booted my machine onto the Vista, and saw that it was not shut down properly last time, then I shut it down properly and rebooted onto Ubuntu and to my surprise everything started working back as usual ! ! !

Blogging add-ons for firefox

2009-02-06T15:29:00.003+05:30

Recently I came across these 2 cool add-on's for firefox which helps one blog easily and gives more control over editing a blog.
I am using the one of these add-on's currently to write this blog.

1. ScribeFire

ScribeFire is a add-on which lets you compose/edit your blogs in a separate editor within firefox. Installation and configuration is quiet easy.
Install ScribFire from http://www.scribefire.com/ and restart the firefox.

a. Open Scribe window from firefox from Tools->ScribeFire or press F8.

b. Below is the snapshot of the main Scribe Editor window.

c. To setup you blog account, click on "Add" button under Blogs tag. Enter your blogs URL and click Next.

e. In the next window enter your blooger account username and passowrd and you are ready to go.

Its a full fledged editor. its easy to format text, insert picture, add video into the blog etc.

2. Zemanta - Improve the way you blog & write e-mails

Zemanta is another add-on for Firefox, which helps you add links, photos and hot topics easily into your blog as well as mail !. Zemanta watches for keywords in your text body and presents photos from sites like flickr, info from Wikipedia, headlines from around the world ! It support many blog applications like blogger, wordpress etc and Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are currently supported.

Install zemanta from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/policy/0/7571/39747

Latest in Open source ?

2009-02-04T18:41:00.006+05:30

In recent weeks lot of new things are happening in linux/opensource. Thought of briefing few of them here.

1. Ubuntu 8.10.

Ubuntu released there latest offering of popular linux distro Ubuntu 8.10 code named "intrepid"
I upgraded my Ubuntu install from 8.04 to this new version, I can see lot of minor feature addition/refinements.

Also, good news is that, the super fast next gen Ext4 filesystem is now
available in Ubuntu, currently getting shipped with Ubuntu 9.04 installer
which is still in Alpha.

Ext4 is designed to provide better performance and reliability over Ext3. Many
benchmarks test have shown that, Ubuntu boots up in less than 21 seconds with the new Ext4. That's impressive ! !

Find more details in here

2. KDE 4.2 is now out.

KDE 4.2 is finally GA'd. Released a week back, Jan 27th to be precise.

The new version comes with lot of refinements, new feature addition to existing
4.1. Some of the notable ones are refinements to plasma desktop interface, whole
lot of new plasma applets, new and improved workspace tools, addition of new
features to Kwin and so on.

Take a look at Visual Guide to the new KDE here

I have KDE 4.1 running in my Dell Inspiron and will upgrade it to 4.2 pretty
soon, I tried updating kde4.2 but with no success. I am running KDE on a ubuntu
8.10 ( No Kubuntu) and may be that needs some tweaks before I do upgrade.

Will post the detailed steps once I am done.

3. Intel released Moblin 2 Alpha for Netbooks.

Intel recently announced the release of their opensource OS for netbooks called Moblin.

Moblin is designed to to work on Atom-based Netbooks providing faster boot time. One can install this new OS even on normal PC /laptops.

I have downloaded the latest ISO from the Moblin website, but didnt get a chance to play with it yet ! !

Flower Show at lalbhag

2009-02-04T16:38:00.011+05:30

Lalbhag - one of the largest botanical gardens in Asia hosts Flower show twice a year, one during Independence day and other during Republic day.
The show will start one week prior and winds up on the Independence/republic day's.

This time, had been to Republic day flower show to clik some photos. I visited the show on a sunny Sunday morning ( 18th Jan). I never got up so early on a Sunday since ages ( it was 7:30 ) ! I dont even remember when I woke up so early on Sunday last time :), because my usual time is around 10 - 11 AM.

Anyways, reached Labhag at 9 AM finally and When I entered the Glass house ( where the actual flow show is held ), the crowd was ok ok.. people had just started coming in. But what surprised me was the number of people present there with DSLR's ! yeah.. I could see at least 20 to 30 guys ! and all were having latest cameras with 2 or more lens's + tripod etc etc ! ! pheww...!!

I had gone their with my Nikon D50 and Nikkor 50 mm lens and with no tripod.

Below are some pictures taken at Flower show. Sorry, I don't have much knowledge about Flower names and family !

Apart from flowers on display, there were lot of stalls selling all kinds of flowers seeds, roots and other stuffs related to horticulture.

Overall it was a nice experience and I came back with a bunch pf nice photos :)

A brief aboout Lalbhag:

It started as a Royal Pleasure park in the early 18th century and various Hoticulturalists have worked on it to make it one of the largest Botonical Gardens in Asia. Originally plants were imported from Afganistan, Iran, Mauritius to name a few. It was founded by Hyder Ali, father of Tipu Sultan.

Courtesy - http://www.lalbagh.org/history.htm

Flickr Commons

2008-12-16T17:23:00.009+05:30

I am regular user of Flickr from the time I was bitten by shutterbug few years back. I have been following many groups, reading & participating in a few group discussions now and then.

Recently while I was going thru the flickr blogs ( which I visit not so often ), came across this Flickr Commons Project and found it very interesting !

Flickr Commons enables people to view publicly available photo archives and share comments and information on that as told the the home page.

"The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments."

One can visit the home page here

While I was browsing thru the pages, got some really nice photos of Egypt taken during 1900's !
These images are from Brooklyn Museum lantern slide collection.

Above photo was taken way back in 1990's and below is a recent photo of Sphinx in my flickr stream.

A bit of the Sphinx has been restored and much more exposed.

One more interesting archive which I found was "Changing New York, 1935-1938" in the New York Public Library, which can be seen Here...

And some World War I Panoramas HERE

Gtalk voice chat using PSI !

2008-11-26T10:18:00.006+05:30

I am using Ubuntu from a quiet a long now and use it most of the time at home ( office I can not install OS of my choice ! ). Almost everything I need works fine in Ubuntu, whether its office tools or dev tools or graphics, the only shortcoming is I was not able to use gtalk voice chat with my pidgin IM Client !

Every time I wanted to talk to my friends online, i would use Skype or switch to Windows and login to gtalk ! !

Recently I found out ( from some blogs and Forums) that PSI has come up with libjingle support which can be used to make voice calls using your google account.

Yesterday I tried it with my Ubuntu 8.04 and it worked seamlessly.
And here is how to configure and build PSI-libjingle

First Install, following packages using apt.

1. libqca & qca-dev
2. libqca-tls
3. libspeex, libspeex-dev & speex

qca: is Qt Cryptographic Architecture which provides a straightforward and cross-platform crypto API, using Qt datatypes and conventions (ref: http://delta.affinix.com/qca/)

libqca-tls is the SSL Support for libqca

speex : is an open-source patent free audio compression format designed for speech.

Then download and build ortp, a OpenSource rtp library.

# wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/linphone/ortp/sources/ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
# tar zxvf ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
# cd ortp-0.7.1
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/
# make ; make install
# sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libortp.so.0 /usr/lib/libortp.so.0

Now download psi-libjingle

# wget http://www.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/files/blog/psi-jingle.20060122.tar.bz2
# bunzip2 psi-jingle.20060122.tar.bz2
# tar -xvf psi-jingle.20060122.tar
# cd psi-jingle.20060122

# ./configure --enable-jingle --with-qca-inc=/usr/include/QtCrypto/ \
--with-qca-lib=/usr/lib/ \
--with-ortp-lib=/usr/lib/ --with-ortp-inc=/usr/include/ \
--with-glib-inc=/opt/gnome/include/glib-2.0/ \
--with-glib-lib=/opt/gnome/lib/ \
--with-glibconfig-inc=/opt/gnome/lib/glib-2.0/include/ \
--with-speex-inc=/usr/include/speex/ --with-speex-lib=/usr//lib

Note: here most important is --enable-jingle otherwise, voice chat doesn't work!

# make ; make install

Once done, fire psi and configure your google account, start voice chatting !

One update to this :

Starting Ubuntu 10.04, Empathy became default IM client for Ubuntu desktop and Empathy support Gtalk voice out of the box !!!. So one need not worry about all the work around :)

Almost after 2 months !

2008-11-19T11:46:00.000+05:30

Here I am... updating my blog after almost 2 months..
got totally busy with so many useless things in life that, forgot I have a blog now.

Recently got chance to click some good pics with my Nikon D50 after so many days. My camera was idle for so many days ! !

Here are some of pics taken when i visited my hometown for Diwali .

Recently I got hold of a basic tripod and first thing I wanted to do was try out HDR ! Above are few snaps from the try, Used PhotoMatix to generate these.

When was at home this time, got a chance to look at my Niece's, my cousin's twins..they are just 4 months old now and they are very cute !

No - 1

and here is No - 2 !

My First Post !

2008-09-21T15:42:00.000+05:30

Here I am with my first blog ! Yeah, I signed into Blog spot almost a year ago and I am writing my first blog today ! ! Strange eh ??

Hope to write more blogs in the days to come...