Daily Wage Labourer

After almost two years of posting photos on bytephoto.com, a recent photo I took made it to the weekly photo contest finals! Now I don't know if my photo is really good or it made it because the other entries this week weren't, but I'm excited nonetheless.

If you want to see the page with the finalists, click on the link below —

http://www.bytephoto.com/forums/t4160.html

Don't be looking around trying to find a way to vote, because you can't. Only registered members can vote there. That means there's no chance of me winning with regional/home state votes like it happens on some popular TV shows.


Update: Photo contest results are out!

and the winner is...
http://www.bytephoto.com/forums/t4187.html

Drive

I had my cam when I was out last Sunday so I joblessly filmed some stuff. Few days back, I edited together the various clips and voila! you got yourself a music video!



Of course, my cam is meant for taking pictures, not filming videos (it can't even zoom while recording), so the video quality is really crappy. It's all dark and blurry, but the end result is kinda cool. You won't believe it, but the whole thing was shot in just 30 minutes or less! If by any chance you want to see it, ask me.


Edit: The video is now available for download!!

Brought the filesize down from 137MB to a mere 8MB so that my nanoaudience can have a look at it. Now hopefully someone will download it and leave comments (hint, hint).

Oh if the video doesn't play, you probably need the XviD codec.

Ciencia '06

"This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!"

So that's the poster I came up with for the technical fest we're having at college (for the first time) on 22 and 23 March. The mail with the poster specifications said "should be simple and decent", so that's why the poster is... uh, simple and decent. There's higher definition in the original image, which is 6000x4500 pixels. You won't believe what a major pain it was working with such a huge image. As the number of layers increased, Paint Shop Pro took around 20 minutes just to make a save! So I would click save, go have a wash, maybe eat something or bother someone on the phone and then get back hoping it was done. If I decide to do this again next year, I definitely need more RAM... and I need to get comfy with Photoshop.

A big thanks to Karthik — the face and the neurons are all drawings by him. Without that, the poster would have looked mediocre. And for those of you who wanted to know how I got the CVR logo, I took a photo of the course file and then edited it to make the background transparent.

The final printed version has changes that were made without my permission. Now that I don't appreciate. You'll probably see the final version in your college anyway, but for the others I have a picture here (don't expect much, the pic was taken with a cellphone). Don't know what difference it makes re-arranging the text like that... besides now it looks all cluttered at the bottom. And I guess Mr. X couldn't re-create the spacing in the text, so he conveniently used a different font. He also decided to exagerrate the border. Thankfully the poster isn't anything extraordinary or I would have been really pissed.

In other news, I joined AIESEC. Thoroughly enjoyed the 2-day training session we had last week. Karthik updated his blog after ages, so head over there and tell him about how you forgot he was even alive. Oh and my counter crossed the 1000 mark! Yay!

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.