It is leaning to the left!
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Fake Steve's speech
I never have enough patience to watch any youtube video longer than a couple of minutes. Hence I was very surprised when I watched all 50 minutes of this video and felt like I could watch some more. Dan Lyons is indeed a very nice speaker. If you have been a regular with The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (which means you like the kind of satire and humour he uses), you will enjoy this too. Agreed, it is more than 2 years old, but it is still very good.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Holding a contest in the age of digital photos
We were holding a photography competition in my office. While forming the rules for the contest we realized how difficult digital photography has made it to hold such a contest. It was so much simpler in the (good?) old days of film.
First of all, ownership/copyright. In the old days, it was easy to say who the owner of a photo was. Whoever has the negative! It was as simple as that. With digital photos, anyone who has a copy of the image has as much control over it as anyone else.
Second, about digitally enhanced photos. We made a rule that digitally enhanced photos are not to be submitted. However, we knew clearly that there is no way to detect it in a fool proof way. It is now close to impossible to spot simple enhancements (color/brightness/corrections) to photos. Also, should cropping be allowed? Thinking about this from another angle, most digital cameras can do some amount of processing of the image based on the specialized photo settings used. Ideally that too should be disallowed! Also, some cameras allow you to edit the photo after it has been taken. So is it okay if the photo is edited in the camera rather than photoshopped/gimped on a computer? Where do you draw the line?
Next, we were trying to create various categories. One of the thoughts was to have categories based on camera types. This quickly ran into trouble. Now-a-days it is becoming difficult to correctly classify SLRs and point and shoots. Also, some cell phone cameras already have 12MP cameras, whereas my point-and-shoot is just 4MP. Technically, any cell phone camera (for that matter any point-and-shoot camera without a viewfinder) is an SLR! We would then have to classify cameras based on their cost! But wait, cost in India or abroad? Which year?
We just decided not to worry about any of this and have the contest in free format, just for fun.
First of all, ownership/copyright. In the old days, it was easy to say who the owner of a photo was. Whoever has the negative! It was as simple as that. With digital photos, anyone who has a copy of the image has as much control over it as anyone else.
Second, about digitally enhanced photos. We made a rule that digitally enhanced photos are not to be submitted. However, we knew clearly that there is no way to detect it in a fool proof way. It is now close to impossible to spot simple enhancements (color/brightness/corrections) to photos. Also, should cropping be allowed? Thinking about this from another angle, most digital cameras can do some amount of processing of the image based on the specialized photo settings used. Ideally that too should be disallowed! Also, some cameras allow you to edit the photo after it has been taken. So is it okay if the photo is edited in the camera rather than photoshopped/gimped on a computer? Where do you draw the line?
Next, we were trying to create various categories. One of the thoughts was to have categories based on camera types. This quickly ran into trouble. Now-a-days it is becoming difficult to correctly classify SLRs and point and shoots. Also, some cell phone cameras already have 12MP cameras, whereas my point-and-shoot is just 4MP. Technically, any cell phone camera (for that matter any point-and-shoot camera without a viewfinder) is an SLR! We would then have to classify cameras based on their cost! But wait, cost in India or abroad? Which year?
We just decided not to worry about any of this and have the contest in free format, just for fun.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
"Terrorists" in our daily life
I have not written in quite some time... must be writer's block or something. So I thought I'll just dump something here, though it isn't as coherent as I wish it was.
If you do the mistake of watching/reading any media, you would have realized by now that pretty much everything around us can harm or even kill you. Here I am not referring to things like bombs, guns, etc. Those are so 90's-ish. These days the fad is writing about things that you always thought were benign and telling you why those are the new criminal scum that you should be highly afraid of. "Car AC can kill you", "Chocolate can harm your sleep patterns", "Pesticides in fruits could eat your first born", "Antibiotics could make you grow 10 heads" and so on. Every other day, you learn that one more thing you use regularly in your life could be the worst thing to ever happen to you.
No doubt, there is truth, in whatever quantity, in each of these reports. However, many reports project just one side of the coin, while totally ignoring the other side. I feel the report makes sense only when both the sides are thought about. Also, the reports are decorated with flashy headline and filled with exaggerated claims to ensure that people read it.
People sometimes fail to realize that this 'bad' thing that they are writing about is bad only in very long term or the chances of them really harming you are so small compared to various other things around them. I have seen a lot of people stopping doing what they have been doing for years because they saw one such report. Some examples: a) Stopping eating any rice because that's what makes you fat b) Stop eating apples because they are covered by wax (really, this has happened) c) Stop drinking coffee completely. d) Stop travelling in city buses because there is swine flue threat.
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