My First E-book / Book
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Category Archives: Education
A Slow-motion Music Video on a Digicam
Evenings with Arnie is a music video where I follow my nephew Arnav during his playtime on one fine overcast Summer evening at our home in Bangalore city. This is as simple as I can get with the description of this video 
.
Now I’ll get to things that are simple, but are often thought to be complicated – producing low-budget/no-budget videos and short-films!
Very mention of a video project brings into mind the visuals of a huge production crew. I have never been part of those big projects, but I have single-handedly executed quite a few multimedia and video projects on my own. It is difficult but achievable to handle a video project on your own or with a small crew.
It has been nearly two years since I made my first short-film with a 2-member crew. When I first started producing multimedia projects, I embarked on journey to find low-cost cameras, software and accessories that will aid independent film-makers and multimedia journalists like me. Initially, I found Soundslides on which one could produce beautifully crafted audio slide-shows. My project Fistful of Dreams was produced on Soundslides. Later, my continued search had led me to Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 15, a video-editing software from AVID that had the capability to edit directly the raw video footage from my Canon EOS 5D Mark2 Digital SLR camera. Since, then I have produced quite a few multimedia and video projects on Pinnacle for my clients and also as independent projects.
In my previous posts, I had written on how I have discovered compact cameras and mobile phone cameras as best alternatives to my bulky Digital SLR camera for personal, travel and street photography projects. My current toy is a Canon PowerShot s100 compact digital camera. Earlier, I had written and shared a series of images produced on it. But, s100 can do lot more than still photography. s100 lets one record Full HD videos (1080p). But, its best feature is the ability to create slow-motion videos (but, at a lower resolution). I instantly fell in love with the slow-motion footage that I was capturing on it.
This entire music video was filmed handheld on a Canon PowerShot s100. The super slow-motion setting of this tiny camera gave me access to 240 frames/second speed for capturing motion, but at a lower resolution of 320p. The resulting video files had frame-rates of 30 fps.
Post production of this music video was performed on Pinnacle studio. The background score is a free soundtrack provided by the Scorefitter tool present in Pinnacle Studio, and the soundtrack is called Great Divide. Pinnacle Studio in its repository has the ‘Magic Bullet’ plugin which gives your videos the look and feel of popular films and TV shows. This video’s look and feel has been enhanced to popular music video styles using the Magic Bullet plugin.
Over all, I like the surreal look that slow-motion videos create. s100 does a decent job in capturing slow motion. The only drawback of s100 is that it shoots slow motion videos at lower resolutions and not at HD quality. But, as technology evolves further, it will hardly be a matter of time when low-cost digital cameras with HD slow-motion videos will be a reality. And no prizes for guessing if I’ll buy such a camera!
Photo Books and Weddings
There is one question that is very relevant to present day photography – Do people still print the images from their digital camera?
Industry might pull out charts, graphs and all sorts of figures to show sales of photographic prints to a consumer market. The Art World might speak about an increasing trend of people buying Fine-art collectible prints. But, do we see people around our immediate surroundings making prints out of their digital images? Forget others, let us ask ourselves how many prints have we made out of the images shot using our own cameras? Compare these numbers with the total number of images we open, edit and upload on photo-sharing websites and social networks, and what do we see?
I see an imbalance. At least in my case, I have made fewer photo prints of personal images. And I have made archival quality prints only when clients wanted to buy them, or for display in print exhibitions. These days even exhibitions have digital screenings and slide-shows.
Things have changed a lot from the time I was at school. Back then, I used to have a suitcase full of Photo-albums with images preserved in sleeves. Image sharing (showing-off) then meant displaying the physical album to visitors at home. Today, image-sharing has undergone a paradigm shift and it simply means pressing a ‘share button’ on the web which would push your digital album to all your friends at the same time. Image-sharing and Visual Communication have found newer mediums apart from print. This does not mean print-making is obsolete. It is just that the purpose of print-making is no longer the necessity of image sharing.
What then is the purpose of making photo prints?
I cannot possibly pin-point one reason. It could mean different things to different people. For some it is still the joy of traditional process of making photographic prints. But, in most businesses even print making is mechanized. Also, they say that there is an increase in the sales of digital photo frames!
Hence, it would interesting to know what determines an individual to go for photo prints. It could be an individualistic reason to go for a print. But, there surely is some joy in holding on to a tangible photograph in your hand than just seeing it on a tablet PC. I still get excited every-time I hold a photograph in my hand, even if the photograph is from a photo-booth at a mall.
One important observation is that it is a small percentage of digital images that we print when compared to the total amount of digital images we have in our memory(cards). So there is some specialty that people attribute to certain images which could be just one of the driving factors to go for a print. It could be that an occasion, an event, a place or a person that was photographed means something special to somebody. It could be anything…
Today, the medium of a print has gone beyond traditional photo-papers to coffee-mugs, posters, postcards, calendars, T-shirts, photo-books, and so on. This is an ever-expanding list of items. I once received a non-photographic gift but it was inside a gift-wrap on which were printed images from the special times I shared with someone.
Photo-books seem to have emerged as a nice alternative to traditional photo albums. As an independent photojournalist & documentary photographer, I prefer to distribute my photo stories through photo books. My project, “Fistful of Dreams ” is available as a Photo-Book and as well as an eBook.
Photo-Books (also commonly called as Coffee Table Books) have improved a great deal in quality in the recent years. There are many players in this business that tap on to the Print-on-demand market. For Fistful of Dreams I used US-based Blurb.com . Apart from creating photo-books for personal projects, I create photo-books for my clients too.
Since the day I went independent as a visual story-teller, a large part of my non-editorial clients have been from the weddings (apart from a spurt in the number of clients wanting multimedia projects). Today, wedding photography in India is seeing renewed interest and recognition. Especially contemporary wedding photography that involves documentary/photojournalism style of photography has garnered interest from young couples. I have been shooting weddings for clients by donning the hat of an embedded documentary photographer. And it feels good to have been recognized in the mainstream media for it.
For most of the weddings projects that I document, the clients are usually in India and Blurb is not a feasible option to make photo-books for them. The reasons for this are the over-head shipping costs to India and the long turn-around time (usually two weeks) for Blurb to process the order and ship a book to India. Hence, I had been looking for an alternative photo-book player in India.
Recently, I tried the India based Canvera, for creating photo books. I tested it by creating a 6×9 landscape Photo-book with a custom cover and I used their Free-life Art paper to make the pages. I was impressed by the quality of the Photo Book that I received. Also, since it is located in India the turn-around time (couple of days) at which my order was processed was fast. I think I will be use Canvera as one of the options for making photo-books for my clients in India. What I have shared above is a slide-show giving an overview of the design of the first photo-book I made using Canvera. I have used images from my own engagement for this sample book.
P.S: The end result is that my fiancée is impressed!
Mobile phone snapshot of my Photo Book's cover page as I opened the shipment.
(Note: If you like my work, then please do share the link to this website with others. Also, if you’d like to support me in my projects, then feel free to do it via Flattr , a social micro-payment system. Alternately, you can even buy my Books/E-books. Or maybe even buy a fine-art print.)
Also posted in Weddings
Tagged blurb, canvera, coffee table book, india wedding photographer, photo book, photo book maker india, photography book, wedding album, wedding photo book
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Revamped My Photography Website Using Photocrati
Screenshot of my new homepage revamped using Photocrati WordPress Theme
Regular visitors to my website would notice a change in the look and feel of entire site. This is because I completely revamped my WordPress powered site. A huge change was switching the WordPress theme. Earlier, I had used a customized, older version of free theme, F8 - created by Graph Paper Press. Now, I’ve switched to a paid and premium theme - Photocrati WordPress theme.
Below, I share the reasons behind the switch and some of the notable features introduced on this site using various WordPress plugins along with the Photocrati theme. Hope this information be of help to other independent photographers and artists who maintain their own websites.
One thing I must mention, this isn’t the final look. The site continues to evolve.
Keeping up with the change
Nothing is permanent! Change is the only constant… clichéd but true. And especially in technology changes are rapid. When I started my online presence years back, it was on Blogger. Later, I switched to this WordPress powered site and migrated all the content here. I made the shift because WordPress offered better blogging tools, and went beyond the conventional blog look with its rich themes. My site began to look like a Portfolio+Blog site.
That was the beginning of my journey on WordPress. I selected F8 free WordPress theme created by Graph Paper Press and began creating content on my site. Over the years I did a lot of tweaking to it. But, WordPress evolved a great deal since then and my theme was obsolete to use the latest features of WordPress. Either I needed to upgrade F8 or get a new theme. F8 is free, so it had its limitations. This is where I started thinking of investing in a paid theme.
Focus on real task: Photography
Lot of my time was getting used up in tweaking the code of the theme to customize it. I was looking for a better (and faster) way to customize the theme such that more of my time could be devoted in creating the actual content that went into my website – photography, multimedia, blogging and so on. The theme I had to buy needed to have an User Interface which could help me save time.
Gallery Management
There wasn’t any uniformity with the galleries that I used in my posts. Galleries ranged from SimpleViewer galleries to Soundslides projects. My existing theme did not have its own gallery management feature. This was a vital need to maintain coherence in my blogs.
Experiments with E-Commerce
Last year, I went completely independent and freelance with my work. So, there were newer avenues and business models that I needed to embrace for continuing Visual Story-telling as a profession. During this period, I self-published my first book, and subsequently an E-book for tablets. Learnings from this exercise is that the future of independent photography needs channels where you can directly share your stories to your audience without necessarily depending on media houses and old business models. The new channels should allow the photographer to earn a livelihood by directly reaching the audience without inter-mediation. So, I needed a theme where I can build strong E-Commerce platform for future. Would need to offer the audience various ways of owning copies of my work : books, e-books, prints, and other derivatives of my works.
Drop Down Menu Navigation
Drop-down menus have helped better navigation in websites. It has also allowed archived content to have better readership. New WordPress platform supported custom drop-down menus but my old theme could not make use of this new feature. The updated version of the free theme claimed to support the Drop-down menu system. But, on testing it, I found it to be cumbersome.
Widgets
The free theme I was using had one major draw back – all the widgets appeared below the posts. So my web pages were bottom heavy! Very bad design. Readers of my blog failed to see these widgets. I didn’t have the time to dig through php, HTML and css to rework the entire layout. I needed a theme where widgets could be placed on either left or right side of the web pages. So, this requirement ruled out my old theme straight away. It indeed was a time for some good-bye!
I found Photocrati for 89 USD
After months of research I narrowed down on handful of premium WordPress themes. They all had their Pros and Cons. Cost was big deciding factor in the end. Majority of them were way too expensive. Graph Paper Press had many premium themes but I found it to be slightly over my budget. One of the themes that fit in my budget was Photocrati. It has a good internal gallery management system. It gave an easy UI to customize the look and feel of the website. I didn’t need to get down to changing CSS , HTML or PHP codes for majority of customization needs. It made use of the latest WordPress features including drop-down custom menus. Also, for the fee that I paid I was guaranteed tech support and updates for an entire year. And the latest version of Photocrati provides E-Commerce support by making use of PayPal. E-Commerce of Photocrati needs to evolve. It still is a long way before this theme has an end-to-end E-Commerce system. But, it indeed has given me a starting point for direct selling. At time of writing this blog I still need to implement this feature.
SEO
There have been many instances where a publication, NGO or some other client located me via search engines. I am not alone and there billions of independent photographers, journalists, artists and small businesses for whom being found on Google or any other search engine is a game changer in earning a livelihood. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is vital for the websites to be found. My website design was miserable when it came to SEO. To streamline it, I have added a WordPress plugin called All in One SEO Pack. The free version of this plugin does most of the tweaks that one would need while starting of with a SEO plan for their website. It seems to be working as this website is receiving many hits from search engines. Also, the rankings of my website on search engine for my target keywords have improved after installation of this plugin.
But do remember one thing. SEO along can’t do the trick. It needs to have a website with strong content. So, do not sit back with just SEO plugin on your site. Keep the good work going.
Contact Form
Spam mails are a nightmare for website owners. Earlier, I had publicly listed my email on the website. There was considerable amount of SPAM email I was receiving due to this. Hence, I decided to implement a Contact form and hide my email-Id. Visitors to my website could now directly contact me using the Contact Form provided on the site. There are many Contact Form plugins available for WordPress, but I have used the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin. The Contact form still needs to be made stronger by adding CAPTCHA or text verification plugins.
Related Posts Plugin
Every time a visitor to the website reads a post till the last word it means he/she is interested in a particular subject. Why not offer them archived posts which may be related to their subject of interest? This not only provides visitors with more content, but it also allows readership to your archived content by bringing them back to life. Earlier, I never had a such feature except for a widget that showed last five posts. Hence, another addition to this website has been a Related Posts Plugin. There are many such plugins in the WordPress repository. But, for a photography website, it would be ideal to have a plugin that can show thumbnails of images from the related posts. I found the answer in nrelate Related Content WordPress Plugin.
What you see below this post is the implementation of this plugin. (Temporarily the related posts plugin has been disabled)
Also posted in Personal
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The story behind my Embedded Eyes
Indian migrant Guddu Gupta at his shared accommodation in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Guddu hails from Ghorakpur town of India and works as a salesman in Cambodia. November 2008.
(This is the article that I wrote for “Un(T)ravel,” the April-July 2011 edition of Offbeat, The Alternative’s quarterly ezine celebrating alternative living. The Un(T)ravel edition of Offbeat can be viewed here.)
There is a calling in everyone’s life, and you ought to answer it – I personally believe that. I answered mine when I was creating software products inside an IT giant’s plush office in Bangalore. I wanted to change the world through my camera. Will I succeed in my mission?, is a question that can be answered in retrospective. But I believe that our world is changing every second, and what we say, see or do is a catalyst in shaping our planet’s future. Therefore photography is a catalyst for change too.
So, I set about travelling with a camera as a photojournalist. I soon realised that the camera had been democratized in my era and everyone who was travelling had a camera in their hands. It was good to see so many catalysts.
I recollect an incident in the year 2008 when I was at Siem Reap, Cambodia, on a fellowship. As part of a documentary photography workshop held during the Angkor Photography Festival, I was documenting the lives of Indian migrants living and working across Siem Reap. Most of them were men from Gorakhpur making a living as travelling salesmen. Their families lived back in India.
I was taken by my source to an area where many of them lived as a group in rented rooms. They were glad to receive a visiting Indian. The hospitality however changed the moment I told them that I was documenting the lesser known portions of the Indian diaspora. One of them told me something in Hindi that roughly translated to, “Sir, you are from the media. And media shows only negative things about us. Your stories will finally appear according to the whims and fancies of the newspaper. We are sorry but we don’t want to be photographed.” I was taken aback but I obliged. We sat there for the rest of the afternoon drinking cola and discussing life and longing.
It was a watershed moment for me. The problem was not with my identity of being a photographer, but it was with my identity of being part of the mainstream media, a catalyst I had till then believed would bring positive influence to a changing world. It was no longer trusted by the oppressed. The media landscape had changed. Fresh journalists were often indoctrinated with the idea of ‘making the important sound interesting’. But, most of the time it turned out to be ‘making the silly sound as it were really important’.
Absolute truth (it never was) has become a battle between perspectives. And all too often, the perspective of the protagonists seems to be getting lost somewhere. As a visual story-teller I am committed to giving a voice to these perspectives. How do I do that? I found an answer in embedded journalism.
Embedded journalism is often thought of as a way to present wartime stories from the perspective of the government by embedding journalists in army units. But if used intelligently, it can do wonders to this world. One should look at the works of late Tim Hetherington (he was recently killed in Libya) – he brought out perspectives of soldiers fighting the battle till the last mile. These are voices lost in every war; all that we hear otherwise is a military spokesperson addressing the media at a press conference.
If you are a photographer visiting new places, I ask you to engage with the people you photograph. Communities, places and festivals in the developing world hold a lot more value than just being ‘exotic’ subjects. Photographers of the past, the tourism industry and colonial agendas have done harm by capturing stories with the aim of only making things sound attractive. Unfortunately this tradition is being followed by present day photographers without understanding its adverse effects.
Since 2008, I have been a part of the lives of people I document. And it has been an enriching experience. For the last one year, I have followed the life of a 5-year-old dark-skinned girl from the day she was adopted by a family comprising a single woman and another adopted daughter. I have spent little time shooting, and more time understanding their lives. I have spent time playing hide and seek, teaching “2+2=4”, wiping tears, laughing at jokes, listening to rhymes, getting breakfast, cutting apples and listening to serious discussions in the last one year. This has helped me become a better messenger of their story that I tell through my camera. I hope this can be a catalyst in the change that I hope for.
This article first appeared in Un(T)ravel, the April-July 2011 edition of Offbeat, The Alternative’s quarterly ezine celebrating alternative living. The Un(T)ravel edition can be viewed here.
(Note: If you like my work, then please do share the link to this website with others. Also, if you’d like to support me in my projects, then feel free to click the ‘flattr’ button at the bottom of the post. Flattr is a social micro-payment system. )
Also posted in Blog, Photojournalism
Tagged angkor photography festival, cambodia, documentary, embedded journalism, ezine, india, journal, media, offbeat, photography, photojournalism, siem reap, the alternative, Un(T)ravel
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Where do you see yourself 5 years from now
A little over five years after beginning my pursuit for happiness. At Regal Cinema, Colaba, Mumbai. October 2011.
I take a moment and look back into my last years at engineering college. During those days, Campus placements/recruitment was the hot topic among my friends. We were to soon graduate from one of the finest colleges in the country (R.V.C.E), and it was inevitable that most of us had a job in our hand even before we graduated. So the questions was not whether one would get a job. Instead, it was whether one would get a job in the sought after IT company.
And in this quest for the dream job, we would go through an ordeal of written tests, group discussions and personal interviews. The most common question during the interviews would be “Where do you see yourself five years from now?” I wonder why that was so important to have a definite answer to that question. I don’t even remember what my answer to that question was. And I guess the panelists who interviewed me wouldn’t remember it either.
Many people answered with clarity of their future positions in the IT industry. Team leader, Project Manager, Software Architect, etc were some of those answers. I don’t know if that was really their thought or an answer to impress the panelist to get a job. After graduation, almost everybody faces this question in nearly every job interview they face. When it comes to this question, there is very little room for innovation among panelists. But, one question asked to me was slightly modified, and it did question one important aspect about my work.
“Do you see yourself shooting at the age of eighty years?” asked Krishnaprasad (called KP among media circles), the former editor of Vijay Times (now defunct English daily), when I was showing to him my portfolio for a photographer job. “Yes,” I replied honestly. This was nearly five years back.
The point that KP tried to investigate was, if I was passionate enough to spend a lifetime doing photography. And this emphasis for passion is important in my honest opinion. One has to be passionate about the work he/she does. A smart-phone advertisement says “Do what you Love. Love what you do.” This is true. I wasn’t in love with my first job as a software professional. There was something else calling me out.
It has been little more than five years since Friday, 13th October 2006. It was my last day at a software company. I left the job to lead the life of a photographer. By the way, I didn’t even have a professional camera then.
In the last five years, I have held jobs as a photographer in newspapers, got few scholarships and fellowships to travel abroad and study photojournalism, won couple of awards for photography and film-making, made a documentary on a subject that I was passionate about, published a book, left the job of a chief Photographer at a publication to go completely independent with my work, fell in love, broke my heart many times, laughed, cried, laughed again, finally met the woman I’d spend my life with, and eventually fell in love with her. As this year comes to an end, I will soon be getting engaged to her.
Five years back if somebody asked me the question on where I saw myself 5 years later, I wouldn’t have answered with the exact above details. I wouldn’t know how the five years would unfold. Nobody would know about their next five years in detail. And I think life would’ve been boring if we knew exactly how our future would be.
But, one thing I was always sure of five years back. I saw myself doing things I loved, things that I had my heart in, and things I was passionate about. I saw myself make decisions that I believed in, irrespective of their outcomes, and have no regrets. I saw myself listening to my heart and pursuing my dreams. That’s what I have done in the last five years.
Where do I see myself five years from now?
Five years from now, I still see myself continuing to do things that I love. Life, I love you.
(Note: If you like my work, then please do share the link to this website with others. Also, if you’d like to support me in my projects, then feel free to click the ‘flattr’ button at the bottom of the post. Flattr is a social micro-payment system. )
Also posted in Blog, Personal
Tagged career, dreams, journal, krishnaprasad, life, love, mumbai, passion, photographer, rvce
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