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Category Archives: Personal
A Week with Point-and-Shoot Camera : Canon PowerShot s100
In one of my earlier posts, I had mentioned how I had inclined to Mobile Phone cameras for personal photography. Over a period of time these tiny devices have undergone as many advancements as the beast – Digital SLR camera – has undergone. Technology has been a great leveler in the field of photography. Today, the camera and the craft have both been democratized. Entry level barriers to owning a D-SLR camera don’t really exist anymore. There seems to be a D-SLR camera available to suit everyone’s budget. I constantly get queries like ‘suggest me a good D-SLR please’. In the D-SLR euphoria that has gripped everyone, it is easy to forget that compact digital cameras or commonly known as Point-and-Shoot Digicams, have also undergone advancements like the mobile Phone Cameras.
I always ask people to give a thought to investing on a good Point-and-Shoot camera instead of going for an entry-level D-SLR. Sometimes, Point-and-Shoot fits the need of the buyer. Especially, if one wants to do a lot of travel or street photography, then these lightweight cameras can be of great advantage.
I have stopped carrying my Canon EOS 5D Mark2 on travels unless there is a professional assignment in it. My personal trips are a break from regular work. I prefer to travel light-weight with as little luggage as possible. I am a sucker for stories and stories-telling images. It is an instinct to reach out for a camera and photograph a frame that tells a story to me. Till recently, mobile phone cameras had been a companion during my journeys. But, then I decided to invest on more horse power in tiny cameras. I bought a Canon PowerShot s100 Point-and-Shoot digital camera.
I think the popular term Point-and-shoot is kind of misnomer today. Canon s100 and a lot of other compact cameras of the day have most of the features of Digital SLR cameras. Complete manual controls, wider apertures, faster shooting speeds, HD video, on-camera filters, RAW mode, and so on, are packed into s100 and cameras in its league. It must be noted that I bought s100 almost a year after its official release. In other words, a lot of newer compact cameras have more advanced features than s100. Exciting feature missing in s100 but available in newer compact cameras is the feature of inter-changeable lenses. But, with a zoom lens from 24mm to 120mm focal lengths (35mm camera equivalent) s100 suited most of my requirements for travel and street photography.
So, I decided to put it to field test. I gifted this to myself in advance as my 30th birthday present. It was the last week of my twenties and circumstances led me to travel to Mumbai city as a last-minute plan and spend the week there with my fiancée. So, in her company I welcomed my thirties. And off-course I also bid farewell to an eventful decade of my life – my dear twenties. No regrets from it. I cherish every moment of it.
My s100 traveled along with me to Mumbai and back, as I documented the situations that spoke to me during the last week of my twenties. I have present here some of the images I made during the trip on this camera. This in no way is any definitive or comprehensive visual guide to Mumbai city. The city is vast and has countless stories to tell and places to visit. This is a snapshot of my life in relation to the people and places I visited over a week.
Goodbye twenties. Hello thirties!
Dear life, bring on the roller coaster. I am ready for another uncertain ride.
(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 Flattr me. Flattr is a social micro-payment system. Alternately, you can even buy my Books/E-books. Or maybe even buy a fine-art print.)
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 Education
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Mobile Phone Memories
Eyes of my lover. A mobile phone photograph. Christmas Eve. Mumbai, December 2011.
It was some ten to fifteen years ago, that I saw a mobile phone for the first time in my life. My dad had made his prized purchase – a huge handset (unsure if it was a Nokia or a Panasonic device) with a prepaid mobile phone connection. It not only had the ability of making and receiving phone calls, but it could also be used to send and receive text messages! It kind of made Pagers obsolete overnight. (But, I still thought pagers were cool)
Strange times they were. Mobile phone call rates in India were too expensive. I recollect that it was 8 Indian Rupees (INR) per minute for outgoing calls, and 4 INR for incoming calls (Yes, incoming calls weren’t free then!). Any caller who dialed dad’s phone number by mistake would face his wrath for sure!
Things changed drastically over the next twenty years. We are in the era of touch screens where my Blackberry curve 3G phone with a QWERTY keypad looks terribly outdated. But, the Blackberry Messenger in it, serves the purpose of keeping in touch with loved ones(Note: I can keep in touch, but I can’t really touch).
But, one of the important innovations that took place in mobile telephony was the addition of cameras to mobile devices. In the history of photography this was a landmark moment that led to greater democratization of the craft. Entry level barriers to owning a camera and practicing the craft, were brought down. Everybody who had access to a mobile phone could now visually capture a slice out of their daily life and from their surroundings.
Not only did this technological innovation bring down the costs of owning a camera, but it also meant that cameras shrunk in size. Instead of carrying bulky camera bodies, one could have a camera that fits the size of the palm of their hands. Today, at any given street there will be a camera in the pocket of every individual passing there. Wow! everyone can tell a story from their perspective.
Over the last years, I have traveled far and near to take time off from work. And I have intentionally left my bulky cameras behind. The idea was to unwind and soak in to surroundings, to learn new things, meet new people, and devote time to family and friends. But, the ‘hunter’ in me couldn’t be left at home.
I am a sucker for story-telling images. The more personal and intimate it gets, the better it is for me. I get a high out of daily life. With such an insane mind, could I stop from making images that I found a strong connection with? No way!
My mobile phones were my finest companions during all my travels. Earlier it used to be a Nokia 5800 MusicXpress. Then came the Blackberry curve 3G. They didn’t have great cameras when compared of many other phones of the day. The images from them seemed to be blurry and most of the time they appeared to be out of focus. Maybe that’s life – a lot of things in life are unclear and lack focus…
Together the two mobile phones became a tool for creating a personal visual journal. A large part of this journal is scattered across the web and in tiny memory cards. This journal doesn’t stop. It continues almost every other day as life gives plenty of moments that soak in. As per the world of jargon in photography, you can call it an ongoing personal project! Now and then, a leaf out of this journal surfaces on my Facebook album.
As the new year dawns, I look back into the bygone years through my mobile phone memories. They remind me of all the good times I’ve had, the people I’ve lost, and the people I’ve found. It seems like a jigsaw puzzle where I am putting together the pieces to see where I was, where I am now, and to where I’ve longed to go to.
Here, I’ve tried to collect and share some of the images from my mobile phone journal. Some are abstract, while some are what they seemed to be. Some of them have little captions and some have none.
Wishing everybody a very happy new year. Let the year 2012 be filled with joy and prosperity.
P.S: Plan to create a mosaic/collage out of some of these mobile phone memories and make prints on fine-art paper. stay tuned for updates on it.
(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. Alternately, you can even buy my Books/E-books. Or maybe even buy a fine-art print.)
Also posted in Blog
Tagged blackberry camera, blackberry photographs, capturing intimacy, cellphone photographer, cellphone photography, citizen journalism, mobile journalism, mobile phone camera, mobile phone journalism, mobile phone memories, mobile phone photographer, mobile phone photography, mobile phone photojournalism, mobile photographer, mobile photography, nokia 5800 music xpress camera, personal photography project, street photography, visual story-telling
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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, Education
Tagged career, dreams, journal, krishnaprasad, life, love, mumbai, passion, photographer, rvce
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Nostalgia: Internet, photography, Writing & Geocities
From left: My friends, Santosh, Karthik, Vipul, and I, during the trek along railway tracks near Sakleshpur, Karnataka. 2003.
My journey as a photographer and as a writer, is closely interlinked to my journey over the internet. I must confess that writing was my first love, and then came photography. Somewhere down the line, I stumbled upon internet and it became the connecting link between my photography and my writing. It became the destination for all my creative pursuits. Never did I realize then, that I was witnessing the process of democratization of information business.
One of the first things, that my contemporaries probably did while discovering internet, was to create a yahoo email-ID. It has been close to a decade since the day I first sent an email. I don’t remember to whom I had written the email, but I do remember that I had sent it from a yahoo.com email account. The yahoo ID became a key to many activities on the World Wide Web as the Web evolved. It became a way to connect with strangers on browser-based chatrooms where you greeted by people by typing “A/S/L“. It then became a way to stay in touch with all your friends. And one of the most important things it did for me, was to have my first ever webpage.
Yahoo GeoCities was a popular free web hosting service for more than a decade. With a Yahoo ID, one got the facility to create their homepages free. It was a rage and I got hooked onto it. My first ever webpage was hosted on Yahoo GeoCities, and it had the URL www.geocities.com/nix_ant . With that address I had marked my tiny signature on the World Wide Web. I had set up a travelogue and a photo-gallery on my homepage.
I was still in college then, and I loved to take-off on small journeys to new destinations. I recorded these journeys into travelogues, and it was then that I really discovered photography. The ability of photographs to substitute text intrigued me. This is where I discovered the power of images to tell stories by themselves. This was the initiation years of Visual story-telling in me. I have never looked back since then.
I started my homepage with a promise that it will become the space for me to chronicle all my travels. It began with a bang with one of my first adventures of trekking along the railway tracks in the western ghats in Karnataka. This rail-route trek near Sakleshpur became dramatic with us getting lost in the middle of nowhere and then finding our way out. It became a legend in our close circles. And my homepage became the resource on the web for people to read and share it across. Sadly, my first homepage didn’t go beyond it.
I became occupied with campus life and academics. I got drawn towards many other creative pursuits to keep me alive and not get sucked into the traps of conventional educational system. I drifted away from maintaining my website. Later, the newer innovations of the web, like social networking platforms and blogs caught my attention. Perhaps, Yahoo GeoCities failed to notice the changes happening on the internet, and it fell behind in the race. One fine day Yahoo announced that announced that it would close GeoCities and stop the free hosting services. On October 26th, 2009, Yahoo shut GeoCities and deleted all webpages from its servers. A piece of history was killed.
But geocities wasn’t just a service. It was a community, an important archive in the history of civilization and technology. It recorded many events and was resource for people-drive information on the web. From a college kids’ writings & photographs, to probably serious academic journals, GeoCities had a lot in it. Should the archive be left to disappear for ever? Some wise guys at a bar in one corner of the world decided that it shouldn’t disappear. And then worked out on a bar napkin, a plan to save the archive. As Yahoo shut www.geocities.com, another website was born. It was called the geocities.ws .
Sometime this year, I met my friend Mitesh Shah at India Coffee house, a cafe in Bangalore. Mitesh is PR professional and was planning a trek along the same railway route that I had chronicled in my GeoCities webpage. Mitesh wanted some tips and information on the route. It had been nearly 8 years since the trek, and I couldn’t recollect the details. I promised to get back to him later. I returned home to search the computer for the travelogue. I didn’t know which of my disks had it. Damn! guess I am not that good in archiving my writings! This was when I really missed my geocities page. I could have just mailed him the link to the geocities page if it still existed.
Then I thought of a crazy idea. I wondered if Google search could retrieve pages of the geocities website from its cache. I gave the keywords and did a search on Google. The search result left me speechless. Geocities.ws had saved and archived my first ever homepage. Every word and every photograph was there. It was the year 2003 when I had last edited the old site, and the layout was still the same. I was in tears. I thought I’d never see the page again after Yahoo GeoCities was shutdown.
The guys at Geocities.ws have done a commendable job. Maybe, somehow of you here also had a homepage on Yahoo GeoCities. You still have some hope left in recovering it. The geocities.ws has an archive of all the pages they could index and save before Yahoo closed the original GeoCities. One can search, find and retrieve it (if available) easily after verification of user-ID. I found my personal history and have retrieved it.
I have moved on to my website. But, I will keep the geocities page alive as it is part of a larger history of civilization and of the World Wide Web. It saddens me when we lose connection with our past and roots. This time I’ll make sure that I don’t lose it. Below, is the link to my retrieved geocities page. If you visit it, then please do read the travelogue of the trek along railway route. Also, do view the photographs present there. They were some the first photographs that I had made and shared to the public.
The retrieved homepage - http://www.geocities.ws/nix_ant/
The direct link to the Travelogue - http://www.geocities.ws/nix_ant/Trekking_adventure.htm
The earliest photographs - http://www.geocities.ws/nix_ant/photo.htm
The Geocities.ws site -http://www.geocities.ws/
(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
Tagged donigal, edakumeri, edukumeri, geocities, greenroute, gundya, mitesh shah, railway, rvce, sakleshpur, shiradi ghat, trek, trekking, western ghats, yahoo, yedukumeri
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