Which File Extension Are You?

Sorry about the lack of updates. Been occupied with a lot of stuff that I won't bore you with just yet. There will be a post or two dedicated to the things I've been doing, so you'll just have to wait for that.

Now in the mean time, have a look at some of my pics. Why? Because one of my friends was under the impression that photography is all about point-and-click. If it was so simple, we'd have millions of ace photographers now wouldn't we? Sure cameras these days do almost everything for you, but to get creative shots you still have to go manual. Not only that, after you take the shot you often have to do quite a bit of processing to make the image 'pop'. Atleast that's the case in my camera (Kodak DX6490, no longer in production).

I thought I'd show you some before/after shots of mine - you can see how the original photo looked like when it came out of the cam (flat), and then how I made it 'pop' after tweaking it in my digital darkroom.



Now don't think that all my photos are post-processed, many come out just great out of the cam. Those I happily resize, add a border and upload to my gallery. Examples are '10:27pm', 'Red Light Experiment', 'Tiny Branch', 'Roll' and 'Upside Down', to name a few.

For those of you who skipped the above paragraphs because it was too boring, this is for you:

Take the Which File Extension Are You? quiz. It's quite fun (if you're absolutely bored). My extension is .jpg, which is pretty apt, no? This is the description I got -- "You are very colourful. Sometimes you forget things, or distort the truth. You like working with pictures more than words."

Which file extension are you?

A341

Made a new wallpaper after quite a while. If you like it, leave a comment. If you don't, don't bother leaving any. Karthik, I know you're going to ask for a wide version (it's your laptop after all), so I already made one here.

You'll see two new pictures on my photo gallery now, there'll be two more next week, and another two the week after that. So you might want to check my gallery often. You just love my images now don't you?

Ano Novo Feliz!

Uh, that's supposedly Happy New Year in Portuguese. If it's not, you can blame Babel Fish. Anyway, here's wishing all of you a great year ahead in 2006!

Hope you had fun during the holidays. I did. No wait, I didn't actually have any holidays since both Christmas and New Year fell on a Sunday. But I still had fun. We had the Fresher's Day for our juniors on 30th and during the week we conducted several events for them, so that was a really busy, hectic and fun week. I can never forget the Banana Eating round we had as the last round of The Ultimate Challenge (that was the event I was involved in). And I still can't believe the team (of three) that won ate a total of 25 bananas in one and a half minutes! I wish I had an appetite like that.

We have a lot of talented junies this year. Unfortunately, there aren't (m)any with a well rounded personality. The Mr. and Ms. Fresher contest was a HUGE disappointment... especially the final question round. Here's a question that one of the 'finalists' was asked, and his answer —

[ Q ]: You're going to a GRE exam and you witness an accident. What do you do?

[ A ]: Have you guys seen Aparichitudu? If I don't save the life of that person then Aparichitudu is going to kill me. In that film you see that he still exists, so I have a fear of him. So I just go and help that person. I can write GRE next year. But if I save his life, it'll be a great thing for him.

The answer we expected to get was "I'll call an ambulance and go write my GRE exam". And here, this guy wants to help that person because he fears some fictional character in a movie. Oh and there's more to what he said... it's just too senseless to put over here.

I haven't made any new wallpapers or anything. And I'm bored talking about movies I've watched recently. So I thought I'd point you to some fun posts I've read the past few days —

Verbal Dysentry on Rex's blog

One of Those Journeys... on Rupak's blog

That should keep you occupied until I come up with something to show... ok it won't keep you occupied that long, but it'll have to do.

Days Go By... Really Fast!

Didn't realise it's the 10th already! I have one last holiday tommorrow, then it's back to college. Been a while since I posted... I was in Chennai for a few days. Yes, I braved Chennai weather once again and came back with cheek loads of heat/sweat pimples (what are those things actually called?). Anyway, it was definitely worth it since I got to meet some cousins I hadn't seen in a really long time (and one I hadn't seen before). We took loads of pictures - since we all came with cameras, the entire collection filled up two and a half CDs (and that's excluding the videos)!

Oh and I finally got to show my Dark Machine video to a couple of people there — everybody liked it (at least they pretended to)... although the more I see it, the more crappy it looks.

As usual, I've seen a lot of movies lately — Saw 2 (totally awesome), Doom (dumb), Cellular (very good) and Salaam Namaste (good). Salaam Namaste, like all Hindi movies was long, but was entertaining throughout. And it didn't have dumb songs like the ones in some of the recent movies like Ek Ajnabee (translation: One Stranger). One song from that movie is incredibly dumb... it goes like this —

Mama told me
Don't be talking to a stranger
Don't be talking to a stranger
Stranger is danger

I've also been testing some of the Ninth Gate levels... who knows? You might actually see that project released in your lifetime. Now I hope you're not expecting another Wallpaper of the Update... you can't expect me to be THAT creative.

Dark Machine

Made this little animated clip over a span of a few days. Almost all of it was filmed after midnight in my room, and I used the stop motion animation technique - basically I shoot a single frame, move the objects (in this case, a bunch of really old toys I had) in the scene a little, and shoot again. When you play it back, the objects appear to be moving by themselves. Of course, I was too lazy to film at a high frame rate, so my video is a little jerky. Well, this itself involved taking about 500 shots (not all were used) and that was pain enough.



Video was finished on 25 November, runs a little under 2 minutes. Inspired by Tool's "Sober" video and some of Pablo's stuff. It's too big to upload anywhere, so you'll have to ask me if you want to see it. Not that you're so interested anyway.

Oops almost forgot... check out the Wallpaper of the Update - "Blur".

Feel Good Inc.

Oh yes! I'm done with semester exams and I'm jobless until 12 December. No point writing about how I did my exams... marks are never proportional to how you write them anyway. Wanted to write a post here yesterday itself, but the day went by so fast it was way past midnight before I knew it!

I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire yesterday. For all the hype it was an average movie at best. Didn't make much sense to me at all... maybe it's because I haven't read the books. After I came back home in the evening I saw Kaal on Sony. Now that's another dumb movie. But I definitely enjoyed it more than HP. Was funny watching all of them trying to act cool... actually just watching them trying to act itself was funny. And it isn't supposed to be funny movie. So that makes it more funny I guess. I saw Scary Movie 3 fully sometime back. Now that's a movie that's supposed to be funny and IS funny. Confused?

Haven't been doing much of anything else lately. Used the bluetooth dongle yesterday after a long time. Only time I used it before was when Karthik was here (earlier this month). And all I can remember is us fragging each other on Quake 3 Arena and Doom. Actually it was more of me fragging him, but you get the point.

Ah I'm just talking nonsense. Just go look at the Wallpaper of the Update - "Pill". There's no thumbnail because I'm too lazy. And no, there's no blood.

Movies, Doom and Sets

After a long time, I got to get up late on a weekend... couldn't do that the past few weeks because of the paper presentation, a party and some stupid extra classes at college (don't know why I attended them). It was almost lunch time, so I went out with a couple of friends for lunch at Ohri's. Man that place is cool! If I had my cam and the place was empty, I would have probably filled up a good chunk of my 512MB card.

I watched Wes Craven's Red Eye today — good movie. I'm too lazy to tell you what it's about, but I'll tell you that the story isn't anything original... it's a little predictable too. However, it was well made and well paced, so I was entertained. Speaking of movies, I also watched The Intrepreter recently. I expected it to be good, but it turned out to be an average movie.

Ismaele released the first episode of his Italian DooM project, The Lost Colony a week ago. The WAD is a compilation of 8 maps by the all-Italian team of Toranaga, Buzzbomber and Ismaele himself. I just played through them briefly today and it was a lot of fun. Buzzbomber's maps have a clean, well-planned design. Ismaele's maps are also very detailed (and hard too), however it does get slightly room-door-room-ish at times. I also don't think the death traps were such a good idea. Toranaga's maps have lots of ammo, but they could use a little more detail. Can't comment about the gameplay in these maps since I didn't play them properly. Anyway overall, it's worth downloading and playing, so go get it if you haven't already.

There's a new photo up on my gallery, and there'll be another one uploaded in a day or two where I experiment some more with lighting. This time I got some strong orangish-red lighting by tying a light pink cloth over a torch. Was very tricky getting that soft diffused light, so I'm happy with the result. Now I know (or at least I think) you'll want to see the set I used for the shot, so here it is (more convenient this way instead of sending out individual mails isn't it?) —