What Chennai means to me as a Photographer?

This post is a part of an initiative by Chennai Bloggers’ Club; a Facebook community for like-minded bloggers. Around 30 odd bloggers are writing about, What Chennai Means to Them.
This tag was before taken up by Jothi Vel Moorthi –
http://jovemac.blogspot.in/
Who says “who never blogs ” fortunately he does blog occasionally like me.

Mera Bharat Mahan. <3

How I got interested in Photography ?

Photography is my passion now my livelihood. I have faint remembrance of yashica electro 35 a range finder, film camera which was a proud and prestigious possession of my uncle who had just returned from gulf. The best part is that very few camera owners knew about the working technology. Most of them flaunt by taking few clicks of their relatives,friends and soon on. Finally when they are broke would sell them off.

I own one such vintage camera after my marriage. My father in law, who was a proud owner, never sold it nor gifted it to me or rather say that i forcibly took it from him for the love of photography.

For my 1st son’s birthday I bought a Olympus sp 500uz power shot type camera which was slightly better than the point and shoot. That marked the end of film rolls at my place. What I loved this camera was the macro shots and manual controls which a dslr has but had to dig in to menus to get the right settings.

When my 2nd sons was born I was still hanging around with my Olympus, a colleague brought a canon 1000D he took few photos of us. The picture quality and the results prompted me to buy the Dslr.

So I bought my canon 500D been shooting since 2007.

I always wanted to set out early in the morning for my photo shoots. Learnt that I had to kick two of my bad habits

1. Smoking cigarettes
2. Consuming alcohol

The side effects of late night alcohol consumption is that, if you tend to wake early you have bad head ache, yes I meant the hang over. Were as for the Cigarettes, if you smoked early morning, you know what happens, Nature call you first. lol.

Now I pass the blog tag to

VJ Eshwar, Loves to write a lot but fails to print the publish button

Yesterday, Today …

It is a manic Saturday, for mommy.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

check out the new facebook layout

I have been wondering why the url had subdomain called “new”

http://www.new.facebook.com
and it turned out that Facebook is trying out a new layout.

A nice way to gain acceptance from users to try out old layout to new layout. If people still stick on the old design the designers at facebook know that their design sucks

Guys your new design is kewl, I am sure more users will adopt to the new design. All the best.
Technorati Tags: facebook, layout, new design, design, users, acceptance, usability, screen, designers

Know about Silverlight & Expression Studio in chennai

Here is a good chance for

• Creative Directors
• Design Managers
• Graphic Designers
• Interactive Designers
• Multimedia Designers
• Web Designers
• Usability Professionals
  
• UI Developers

to know more about Microsoft Silverlight and Expression studio, the seminar is happening today i.e 13th November 2007 between 6-7 PM at Dublin, ITC Hotel Park Sheraton & Towers, No.132, T.T.K. Road, Chennai-600 018.

Please Note: Registration is between 5:30 to 6pm. Please be at the venue a little in advance to ensure your entry.

Contact for more details: Mr. Brijesh (event organizer) @ 2472-8113

It is short notice and I am really sorry about that, I had saved this post as draft and forgot to publish it.

Hope to meet you all there

Don’t Make me Think! – Adobe CS3

I got to say “Jaw dropping effect from the Adobe CS3″ and hat off to the Adobe team and especially to the User Experience people out there. I had been to launch of Adobe CS3 at chennai Le Royal Meridien.

Things which I attended
Adobe Illustrator CS 3
Adobe Photoshop CS3
Adobe Device Central – content for mobile and other devices
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

Most of the demos which were said/illustrated are available in the web as demos on the respective home pages of the product, “feature tour”. The presenter had good knowledge about the software, and he tried to cheer the crowd as the crowd was silent.

Actually speaking the crowd did have words to give applause. Their  eyes poped out and speech less. Very serious crowd.

If you ask me whether it is worth the upgrade, I would blindly say “YES, YES, YES” Why?
If you are a photographer and not interested in the technical information on how to create panoramic views, Adobe Photoshop CS3 has the right set of tools to help the Photographer to create panoramic images, with few clicks of button.
I guess Adobe has stepped in to world of Web 2.0 as not to make the user “Think!!!” so does the heading of this post says.

Adobe has really understood the pain points of the users and has provided the right set of tools to improve productivity. Well the user can turn Dumb in the long run as there are in no ways to learn the basic or the fundamentals of Imaging tools.

To illustrate with a simple example
“How do you create drop shadow with Photoshop 3?”
People who have been using the software surely know how to create them with out using the “Blending options” on the layer.

But believe me Adobe Photoshop CS3 is for professionals as well as novice users. Novice users have to understand the basics, if they want a longer run.

I surely see a time saving, productivity tools for the Designers at the Design Studio and a great tool for pre press users. And with the current version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended aimed at architects, engineers and 3D professionals, who want to create intuitive designs having jaw dropping effects for their clients.

Technorati Tags: user experience, photoshop, adobe photoshop, adobe, usability, productivity, photographer, pre press, prepress, illustrator, chennai, concept, advertising, ad agency

Simple way to shock & win her heart

Did you just have trouble with your girlfriend or Wife
Here is a simple trick to give her a mild shock and just win her heart right away.

Take her to restaurant which has mirrors, you need to build up a story.
Here I had build my own story, here is the link
The story is left for you to build one.

Technorati Tags: love, life, wife, girl friend, heart, trickshot, little hearts

Royalty Free & Rights Managed Images (getty Images)

What is the difference between Royalty Free and Rights Managed?
I had asked the same with Getty Images (an Indian representative company in India) answered me as
Royalty Free Images
are the ones have a fixed price and can be used as many times you want irrespective of the media (web, Print, TV etc)
Rights Managed
are the ones which they offer for a price and there is constrained period, you may have to renew the rights if you wish to have them used on a media. some times the media can just be one (web or print or TV or others)

My only question is Why are the cost so high when compared with http://SXU.hu

Technorati Tags: getty Images, Images, copyright, royalty, rights managed

Photoshop trick – resize images by sampling – increase Productivity

Assume that you have four boxes out of which you had to re-size the first box and you want the other boxes to be identical in dimension.
What would you do?
You can choose to modify each box by giving the dimension in toolbar

OR

Here is the productivity Tip

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

here is the example look at figure 1, 2,3

to get to the figure 4 use
the magic keys are ctrl + shift + t

Figure 4

Thanks to my friend Arun Ray Innocent who tells me all the Photoshop tips

Technorati Tags: Photoshop, tips , tricks, transform, resize by sampling, shortcut keys, shortcut, keys, productivity

Simulate Illustrator Copy Transform – in PhotoShop

If you have worked on Illustrator you already know how to create a multiple shapes from a single shape and make multiple copies by using the Short Cut Key Ctrl + D on PC.

Well the same is also possible in Photoshop, This is a neat trick, I just learned it from My friend Arun Ray Innocent.

1. Open Photoshop, create a new document of size 640 X 480
   
2. Create a box using marquee of size 75 X 75 Pixels stoke it with black and fill it with white color
   
3. now duplicate the layer by pressing ctrl + j
4. now apply transform using ctrl + t
   
5. more the reference point location to bottom right
   
6. now rotate the shape for few degrees.
   
7. now duplicate the layer using ctrl +j
8. now press ctrl + shift + t , volia now you have duplicate the shape with transform.
9. repeat the above 2 steps (7 and 8) as desired to form your shape.
   

Technorati Tags: photoshop, illustrator, tricks, tips, transformation, shortcut keys