Photography terms

Around 8 months back, when I just started photography, I was pretty clueless about many photography terms. Since then I've learned a thing or two about photography from books, friends, Flickr community and from many photography web sites. I have compiled a list of terms, knowing which, will give a better understanding of photography in general.

Well, I'm no photography expert and I have compiled this list after going through different websites (kodak.com, wikipedia.org et al). During my early days I used to be excited to find out and learn about different terms like Aperture, silhouette etc. So I thought of listing out the very basic terms in photography that anyone interested(or not) ought to know.

Hope you find this useful. Have fun photographing!

Aperture
Lens opening. The opening in a camera lens through which light passes to expose the film. The size of aperture is either fixed or adjustable. Aperture size is usually calibrated in f-numbers-the larger the number, the smaller the lens opening. The aperture value is responsible for the depth of field in an image. The image below was taken with an aperture of f4.


Bokeh
A term derived from the Japanese word for "fool" which when applied to a lens refers to the pleasing quality of the out of focus areas of an image produced by the lens. Below is an image with a pleasant bokeh.


Composition
The pleasing arrangement of the elements within a scene-the main subject, the foreground and background, and supporting subjects. When composed properly, the interestingness of an image drastically inclines.


Cropping
Cropping is the process of selecting and removing a portion of an image to create focus or strengthen its composition. May also refer to the framing of the scene in the viewfinder. Below is an example of how cropping can make a photo more pleasing.


Depth of Field (DOF)
The amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in a photograph. DOF depends on the lens opening, the focal length of the lens, and the distance from the lens to the subject. (photo: wikipedia.org)


Focal Length
The distance between the film and the optical center of the lens when the lens is focused on infinity. The focal length of the lens on most adjustable cameras is marked in millimetres on the lens mount.

ISO Speed
The emulsion speed (sensitivity) of the film as determined by the standards of the International Standards Organization. In these standards, both arithmetic (ASA) and logarithmic (DIN) speed values are expressed in a single ISO term. For example, a film with a speed of ISO 100/21° would have a speed of ASA 100 or 21 DIN.

Macro
Macro photography refers to close-up photography; the classical definition that the image projected on the "film plane" (i.e film or a digital sensor) is close to the same size as the subject. A macro photograph:


Panning
Moving the camera so that the image of a moving object remains in the same relative position in the viewfinder as you take a picture. Example of a panning technique: (photo: wikipedia.org)


Saturation
An attribute of perceived color, or the percentage of hue in a color. Saturated colors are called vivid, strong, or deep. Desaturated colors are called dull, weak, or washed out. See cropping above for examples of saturated and desaturated images.

Silhouette
A silhouette is a view of some object or scene consisting of the outline and a featureless interior. Silhouette is a form of art which can result in some very pleasing photographs. Below are silhouettes of temples in Kathmandu city on a lovely evening.


Time Exposure
A comparatively long exposure made in seconds or minutes. This is also known as long exposure. Long exposures can often create very dramatic effects in photography. Use a longer than normal exposure to create the impact of your image.


Wide-Angle Lens
A lens that has a shorter focal length and a wider field of view (includes more subject area) than a normal lens. A wide-angle lens takes in a greater angle of view than a normal lens. This image was made with an ultra-wide 16 mm fisheye lens. Notice the curved horizon.(photo: kodak.com)

Youtube playlist

Youtube is cool. Infact, it's very cool. There's no video that you can't find there. I visit Youtube almost on a daily basis. At work I can't install any P2P softwares to download songs and all. So, throughout the day I listen to songs from Youtube. I have a playlist in Youtube which has videos which I found really cool. Of course you can find millions of other cool videos there, but these are the ones I've come across... and here's the playlist. Hope you enjoy watching them.

A little bit (more) of Photography

Recently I've been spending a lot of time with my camera and I'm absolutely loving it!
Just came back from a 2 weeks vacation from my home town, and my 1GB camera memory is almost full. It was almost like a dream come true taking photographs in Kathmandu. It's such a beautiful place. Everywhere there is scope for photography. From the beautiful flowers in Mom's garden to Buddha's eyes in Swyambhunath templem there isn't any shortage of subjects for a good photo.

This was the first time I walked around the city with a fairly good camera hanging around my neck. I just could not stop clicking! During my stay for 2 weeks in Nepal, I shot around 1000 photos. 30% of those photos are in the trash, 40% are just OK (these will be up in my webpicasa page soon), 20% pretty good, and 10% will make it to my Flickr page - www.prakaz.com. But all of them aren't upload yet.. they will appear in Flickr slowly but certainly.

It would be a real shame if forget to mention my 2 days trip to Tato Paani (meaning hot-water) . It is a place in Nepal which shares border with China... I did step foot into China this time :-). It's a beautiful place. Full of streams, waterfalls and greenery everywhere you look. Really enjoyed taking photographs there too.

Photography has been more frequent since I got my Sony DSC-H2 around 5 months back. There has been lots of activities in my Flickr page too. Thanks to all who take time to view my photostream and post comments.

Here are some of my most interesting photos in Flickr.

My Flickr page can be directly accessed from: www.prakaz.com

Moments of bliss

As a dear friend likes to say - My blog is sleeping. Yes, again :-)

I've on vacation and have been spending some real quality time with my family in Nepal. It's been just great. Playing with my lil' niece keeps me busy all day. With her around, time just flies.

I've also been taking lots of photographs everywhere I go. I've just been going bonkers with my camera! This is the first time I'm taking photos in Nepal with a fairly good camera. So it's been good experimenting with different subjects and taking macro shots in mom's garden. Will be uploading them to my Flickr page in the coming days.

I've tried to keep myself away from the virtual world as much as possible since I know once i'm back in B'lore I will be spending most(almost all) of my time away from real people... So I'm off, getting ready to head to China tomorrow! :-)

Did I forget to mention how much I'm enjoying mom's food and roaming around in the city with friends... hehe

I became famous overnight!

These are snapshots I captured when driving down Fraizer town in Bangalore. But what's the big deal here? Well... how'd you feel if one day driving down the road you see a big hoarding by the road, and your picture was on it!!?? That's (almost) what happened to me. Strolling down Fraizer town I saw this hoarding with my picture on it. Yes, shocked i was! Who wouldn't be??
Now you might be wondering who took the photo in the first place... and why? when??
Let me explain...

It was a regular mid April weekend. I was hanging out with my friends in Kalyan Nagar as usual. All of us had gone to my friends' college to play basketball. As the day passed by all were busy doing their own thing, some playing basketball while some were just watching. Some busy gossiping while some posing for a photo.

In the late afternoon one of my friends got a call from a friend (from another college) asking some of us to come to Indo Asian college cause there was some photo session happening. She did not give much details but just asked around 10 of us to come to the college (which is not that far from where we were). After having mixed thoughts about if we all should go, finally some of us decided to visit the college (we were not doing much anyways). And did we know where the college was and why we were going there?... not really, and that's what made it more interesting. Living in that area for 4 years I never heard of any college called Indo Asia college. So i thought it was worth checking out.

After hunting for sometime, we found the college... finally. And who'd have thought the college would be right in the middle of a large residential area?! We didn't. Sheepishly we all (around 8 of us) entered the college gate. Upon seeing the college buildings we all looked at each other, surprised that the college was still under construction. Only about 40% of it was complete. We still didn't know why we were there.

Our friend (who had called us there) took us to a class room... o yes, this one was a real classroom. It was well furnished, painted and looked very much like how a neat classroom should look like. There were students there too!! We realized were not the only ones invited. But we still wondered.. why?

We were asked to be seated, and we did. Few minutes later a professional photographer entered the classroom(with his heavy camera equipment) and then it was all clear... We looked at each other and smiled. The college wanted to print out brochures and posters. And they wanted to include photographs of students who looked like... how Asians look. Since their buildings weren't even half constructed there was no question of anyone getting admitted. So we were to pose as students of the college. It was indeed a photo shoot!

After having a nice photography session there for around an hour, and joking about how the whole thing was really funny (since I am not even a student, and all others study in some other college) we left the place in the evening. I had taken my camera with me so we had a photo session of our own (Some photos at the end of this page). There was nothing much to remember from our time in the college. We all had nothing to do so it was like we just killed an hour or so of our weekend. All of us returned back... got on with the weekend.
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After few weeks, when driving down Fraizer town, I see a photo (taken in Indo Asian college) up on a (pretty) big hoarding. My friends did tell me about it before, but only when I saw it, I believed it! I still wonder out of dozens and dozens of photos taken that day, why this one was selected :-)

Well there it is. A little story of mine. Something which doesn't happen everyday... By the way a smaller version of this hoarding has been put up in many streets in Kalyan Nagar!

Here are few points Iwanna mention:

- I am not a student and I am not related to Indo Asian College in any way what so ever.
- The college's image above has been digitally created.
- I got a call from my ex-gf when she saw my photo on one of the news papers ads! She was shocked! :-)
- Someone's thinking right now that this post is way way way too long for my standards (finally I mentioned you in my blog... happy?) ;-)
- I never gave them permission to print my photo ( LOL! )

:-)

Software quotes

Going through the bundle of forward mails in my inbox, stumbled upon one which had some pretty cool quotes - software quotes that is. The geek side of me just couldn't help posting it here. Here they are... you might enjoy them as well:

Before software can be reusable, it first has to be usable. -Ralph Johnson

Fifty years of programming language research and we end up with C++? -Richard A. O'Keefe

C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works. -Alan J. Perlis

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. -Alan Kay

Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning. -Anon

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

I did say something along the lines of "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off." -Bjarne Stroustrup

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -Pablo Picasso

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. -Will Rogers

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. -Bill Gates

A day in the corporate world

A classic example of miscommunication... we're all human afterall ;-)

Excuses for not blogging *cough*

Today I was chatting with a friend and was telling him that the most important thing to do after starting a blog is to - blog regularly!

There I was, giving words of wisdom to others but not following them myself. It's been exactly 1 complete month since I did not post a single entry... *sigh*. Well was I dead? or did I go under a rock? Not really... The last 30 days of my life have been one of a kind. I went through quite a number of ups and downs (lets keep the count more to the downside) both in my personal/ professional life and had to take some time-out and take care of them. I guess it was one of those phases of life where you look back and ask yourself "what the f*** just happened?". But I am not alone, all around the world people go though different phases in life all the time, for instance check out these blog from Abdul and Flashguru. By the way, both are my role models :-)

Now slowly but certainly things are starting to look good. I'm a little exhausted... but not worn out. As I had written in one of my earlier posts, under all circumstances I did manage to take some satisfying photographs. Also, there's been quite some activities in my Flickr page. Here are the 3 most notable photos from the last 30 days:

Most favored, most viewed and most discussed photos:



or if you'd like - View all photos

I did have a fantastic, rocking and butt kickin' time on my birthday. No doubt, it's my best birthday party so far! I have uploaded all photos to picasa web, click on the image below if you are interested to know what went on in the party ;-)




Cheers! Rock on!!

Getting started with Apollo

Apollo has been a buzzword for quite sometime now. Couple of mails were exchanged regarding Apollo in the Flex India user group recently. I was not really interested to even know what it really was untill it was released and folks were talking about it in their blogs.

From adobe.com:
"Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop."

If you want to know what Apollo is all about, grab a free copy of Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers from O'REILLY. It's a good read to know what features Apollo is bundled with. I got hold of the book couple of days back and I'm finding it pretty interesting. Features like user system directory listing, communication with Javascript etc are prettly cool.

I cannot write much about Apollo right now cause I'm just getting started with it :-). Will be posting about it whenever I try out or find something interesting. I highly recommend you to read the first two chapters of the book, if you want to know what Apollo is all about.

You can download the Apollo runtime/ SDK here and a free copy of Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers is available here.

P.S. I've not been able to post blog entries recently because there was (still is) some problem with my browser, whenever i tried to publish a blog it would post a blank entry :-(

Torn Papers theme - Beta

It's up! Finally published the beta version of the skin for Blogger, which I had been working on for quite sometime. I still need to work on the bottom edges of the post and links. There are couple of things yet to be added, which I will put up in the final version. If anyone's interested, I will be releasing the source for this skin once I'm done with it.

This theme was inspired by pieces of scrambled/torn papers lying in my room :-)

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.

First shots with Sony Cybershot - H2

First things first: this post shouldn't be here!!
When I started writing blogs, I had thought of blogging only about Flash/ Flex, technology, the web and those kinda stuffs. But lately I've found myself wanting to post about off topics like photography, traveling etc and life in general. May be I will soon start another blog only for those stuffs.

Getting back to the topic, I've wanted to get a good digital camera for quite sometime now. To fulfill this long awaited wish, I went and got myself a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H2 over the weekend. I had planned to get this camera next month, but the craving was too strong, just couldn't wait anymore ;-)

I've used the cam for a day and I'm loving it already. The kickass 12x zoom is just what I had looked for since, it was little difficult to take pictures without scaring away the subject with the other cam i have - Canon digital IXY. Finally, i can take more natural pictures. I've been spending time checking out different features of the camera and getting used to taking pictures in manual mode. I took quite a few pictures testing the aperture, shutter speed, exposure and all those stuffs. Did manage to get few nice ones, but they all seem to be underexposed. Still gotta take more and more pictures and learn. I have uploaded few pictures to Flickr, check it out here:

The whole of this year I will try occupying myself traveling and taking photographs; I've always dreamed of doing that combination! I want to thank the folks at Dikenson Road for giving me a free tripod with the purchase of the camera :-) and also for giving me and Pema privilege to play a combat game almost for 30 mins in the Xbox 360 console which was there for demo play ONLY. Xbox really rocks!!

Programmers Don't Like to Code

You write code. Does that mean you like writing code?! Well, After reading this article, you might think twice. The article talks about how a coder might actually be interested in problem solving rather than writing code. Coding helps a programmer solve problems but all coders don’t like writing code, really.

Quoted from the article:
"From an outsider’s vantage, I can see why they’d think we like coding. We solve problems by coding, and we’re all happy and enthused while typing away or talking code. But they’re confusing the action and the intention. It’s not pulling the trigger that makes me happy, it’s hitting the target. The action approaches incidental"

That makes sense to some extent... Not all coders like to write everything from scratch. Either they would use built in libraries or write modules which they could use later. This may seem like the coder doesn’t like to code and may be wanting to spend more time on problem solving.

When I first read that article, I thought I was too more inclined towards the problem solving hill. But thinking about it, I DO like coding! I think this totally depends from person to person [*cough* coder to coder]. A person might like coding, a person might like solving problems or in most cases s/he might like both.

One line in the article says: “If programmers liked to code, we’d all be writing in machine language to this day”.

Well, that may also be true to some extent but I believe that human beings are ‘programmed’ to evolve and we have always looked for doing things the easier way. If the above statement held true, we all might as well be making fire using stones to this day :-)

Actionscript & 3D are now good friends

[Over the years] I've always been amazed seeing the coolest 3D stuffs done in Flash. But I have to say, this one tops it all. The first time I saw this demo, my jaw almost dropped! Check it out, more demos here. [Important: If you can't see any 3D action, make sure you have the lastest version of Flash Player]

[Over the years] Flash has come a long way from being a cheesy GIF animatior to a kickass tool for developing cool web sites, games, desktop applications, videos... and now some amazing 3D stuffs.

Thanks to the [opensouce] project Papervision3D [and FP9], 3D is fast becoming a [sleek] reality in the Flash world withough chewing up your CPU. I haven't tried out anything yet with papervision, but want to try out at least some basic stuff. Thinking about it, I've really never done any 3D stuff with Actionscript or other 3D software.. umm... I guess they say, it's never too late to start :-]

Early days of blogging

Almost for a year or two I've been regularly reading Flash blogs. Yes, just reading. Always wanted to blog myself but for some strange reason, never really started. It was high time I did justice to the unconscious blogger inside me and started blogging. Just sometime back grabbed a template at blogger.com and wrote my first blog entry. And here we are!

2007, I want to make it a point that i blog regularly, not just because I've always wanted to, but because i want to contribute to the flash community and meet new people. Well it's not really necessary to blog to meet great people like Abdul and Arul, you just have to be a part of Orkut. I've met some awesome Flash people [Hi, Debabrata :-)] in Orkut and i think its a great place to find old pals and keep in touch with them [err.. did i forget to mention that you could waste hours of your day posting scraps and going through friends' friends' lists in Orkut. Abdul's been a victim himself!].

Right now there is nothing much on this Blog but I'll be posting regularly about Flash/ Flex in general, RIAs, Web 2.0 and Geeky topics. Will be adding more links and gadgets too.

Hello to Active Blogging!

picnik: very cool RIA

While browsing through Manish's blog, I came across this neat looking RIA called picnik. It's an online photo-editor with a twist! It's pretty impresive how you can quickly edit a picture [from your system, or providers like flickr] and save it back. Due to my proxy setting i was not able to upload & edit images from my system. But you can allow picnik to access your flickr account and walla... all your flickr images are loaded neatly inside it. Then you can do pretty cool stuffs with all your images - the interface is very neat, easy to use. A very good example of how Flex is shaping up the future of kickass RIA applications.

Looking at this, I got reminded of another flickr browser entirely in Flex done by Alessandro.