Parthiv.

I had to do this for the good of my soul. I am not a long term fan of Indian classical music. In fact, I believe that I am mostly an uncultured bum. But I do like listening to good music when I encounter it; I simply lack a technical understanding of it. Listen to THIS PERFORMANCE by Parthiv Gohil. It is a rendition of the classical piece 'Albela Sanjan'. Parthiv was a SareGama mega finalist where he came to the limelight due to his mastery of realy difficult classical pieces. A brief description is here, and this is his homepage.

Operatic.

Shout; again

I wrote a really rotten exam today. My ego is thoroughly crushed, I feel like shite. Hence I believe it is necessary to ramble about why people who review DSLRs are frequently idiots. If you do now know what a DSLR is: it is a Digital Lens Reflex Camera. These (SLR) cameras represent a certain philosophy (and attendant technology) for photography that has been developed in the early 1930's in film cameras and has stayed and been developed continually. There are certainly more sophisticated technologies around, but we will not delve into them. The DSLR is the tool for the seasoned press photographer, as it is also the instrument of choice for the amateur who is willing to put a little extra effort into his pictures, and is willing to spend a little extra as well. Recently a few 10 Megapixel have made their entrance, and HERE IS A REVIEW OF THEM. Now it is time to bash the post. Here goes:
1. The review is already out of date. Olympus has just released the E510 and E410, quite possible the most value for money yet in the 1000$ market, and also the most sophisticated.
2. The Samsung GX10 is a Pentax K10D with its logos switched. Samsung does not yet make DSLRs. Count them out.
3. Scene modes don't count. Keep the scene modes in the point and shoots. Seriously, just giving me five notches on the mode switch: Auto, Manual, Shutter, Aperture and Program does fine.
More later, bye.

The great Indian dream: where did things start going wrong?

The great Indian dream: where did things start going wrong?

The Indian Constitution is one of the greatest achievements of the human soul. For the first time perhaps, a nation was built on the principle that everyone is truly equal. Even in that other democracy, the one that ‘trusts in God’, there is a presumption that there is one ‘God’, and that one must trust in ‘Him’. But India was built on a dream far greater: that we trust our fellow man. This was a dream that did not ask for the admiration or approval of the West. But human venality and pettiness are another thing altogether. The venerable Congress Party led from the front, at least for the first decade and half. Let us not digress into whether Vallabbhai Patel would have been a better PM than Nehru, that discussion usually leads nowhere. Let me just state, as a matter of opinion that even if Nehru was not the individual he was, we would have had to create a hero to look up to. That is how things work out.

It is difficult to say when the rot started to creep in. Perhaps it started way back when Gandhiji ousted Subhas Chandra Bose from the leadership of the Congress. Perhaps it started when people assumed that Lal Bahadur Shastri was just a placeholder who was to keep things on an even keel until Indira grew up to step into her father’s shoes. Perhaps it was when the Emergency happened, and we did not have the courage to give Jay Prakash Narayan the backing he needed.

But say what we may, we Indians have brought upon ourselves this hell. And again, let us not equivocate about this: this is indeed a hell we have turned our beautiful country into. The agony of the Mandal Commission, the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Godhra and everything that followed, and finally Nandigram. We take pride in our rockets whooshing into space. How many of us have spared a thought about the hovels of our ‘megacities’? Yes, we have IITs and IIMs, but what about the countless millions of children who have to work from the age of seven and will never open a book in their lives? While eating a Rs 300 pizza at some food court on the top floor of any generic posh mall in Mumbai, do our young software professionals spare a thought for Kalahandi? Hell, do they even know that Kalahandi is known as the ‘starvation capital’ of India? Hey, what are we talking about? I thought we had already had the Green Revolution, no one starves in India! Wrong.

India is not ‘Shining’. Reliance/ Tata/ Infosys or some other hotshot firm acquiring a few foreign companies does not improve things in India. Oh well, it does, for maybe the top 100 shareholders. And if you are one of them, then I am sorry; this article is not for you. Things have to change. We need a few reasonably intelligent and honest politicians. We need a few IITians to return to India after they have made a few dollars. We need to stop thinking the India that lives in the glitzy streets of Bangalore and start thinking about that other India that you will see if you ever travel along the Coromandel Express from Chennai Central to Howrah Jn. Anyone game?

And Debu da's pictures are here.

This guy has been my inspiration for a lot of my interest in photography (the other person is one Ayan). I found his photopage and put it up on the sidebar.

Picture at sundown.

Remember that post about shooting pics of the church at sundown. Here is a pic, no retouching except for conversion to grayscale.

Good music needs preparation to listen?

This post was sent to me by my friend Anindita. Read and enjoy.

Movies and other things.

I saw a bunch of movies in the recent past. The most memorable was 2010, Odyssey Two. I disagree a wee bit with Roy Scheider being cast as Heywood Floyd. Floyd, in my mind is an altogether older and much more established character. He is the typical physicist who gets things done (for your information, such people exist). But having said that, he did a good job. Moskvitch was his friend and not some random Russian science administrator. And again, Clarke had envisioned a much nicer world than the one that the scriptwriters had given us. Typical 80's paranoia. You people should have had more faith in old Mikhail and his glasnost-perestroika. There was never any naval blockade over the Honduras. And lastly Chandra has been shown as the American idea of what a geeky scientist should look like. He was not one. He was a meticulous person, someone whom my man Hercule would have described as a 'man of method'. Remember his office at the University of Chicago? All it was supposed to contain was a terminal to SAL 9000, and two photographs of the the Gods of the computing pantheon: Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The movie showed his office as a cluttered rubbish head from which scientific ideas are presumed to jump out. Bullshit. Oh yes, the entire scene in which HAL is resurrected simply does not carry the impact it has in the book. The first time I read that, it was quite eerie and downright spine tingling. Here it was just... tame. And one last thing: Lagrange point refers to a physicist called Lagrange. It does not refer to a place called Grange in France.

Photography.

My latest album.. continually being updated. Comments and criticism much appreciated.

Atlas Drugged.

Arnab sent this to me. Check out. Makes especially good sense if you are a Bengali.

Nothing is permanent...

except for death and taxes. I think it was Ben Franklin who said this. Now it is to be remembered that he lived at a time when the colonies were rebelling against the mighty Empire, and all taxes levied were sorely begrudged. But, I dislike my taxes going to fund all kinds of random stuff I am not interested in. But, hey, death and taxes. Anyway, I finished my return and shot it off today. Power to me.

And today....

After getting into a colossally bad mood due to the stupidity of Microsoft Excel, I recovered a bit after one and half hours worth of QM when the underpinning of the Van der Waals interaction was explained at great length in class. And now I am reading this article about IBM in India. Very interesting in what it will do to Indian software firms.

Recent events.

Which are of no consequence to anyone. Hence, this explains why I blog. I blog mostly because it gives me immense delight to laugh at my own thoughts six months later (I was actually doing that??!!)

Pradeep wanted to hang out and get dinner yesterday. Which was fine. I was walking down this road when I saw this church and caught myself thinking 'nice light (or lack thereof); I should come back with my camera.' (To answer your unvoiced question, yes: I think in complete grammatical sentences.) Then I realized that what was weighing me down on my left side, was, in fact my camera. Out it came, and there I was having a lot of fun shooting random angles of the church. Taking good architecture pics without a wide angle lens is not always easy. But then, it is the photographer first and his gear next.. so no complaints.

Anyway, dinner happened. After that, actually quite a bit later, Bachhi came over and brought with her, a copy of Eli Roth's Hostel. This is a particularly gruesome movie (t**s and gore), and hence we all wanted to watch it. Which probably explains why I am feeling so woozy now.

I told Pradeep that I am using shell scripts with awk programming to handle log files from REDCAT analysis. He shuddered and told me to learn Perl or Python or something equally funky. I don't know when that will happen. I am still learning awk.

Zoom, Magnification, etc.

Zoom, magnification, and other such things.
1. For another zoom lens, ratio of maximum focal length to the minimum focal length is the zoom. for a Zuiko digital (ZD) 14 to 45 mm lens, this is 45/14, or slightly more than 3.

2. Optical zoom is the only 'true' zoom. When PS (point and shoot cameras) are advertised with 4X optical zoom and 3X digital zoom, the digital zoom part of it is simply equivalent to blowing up a photocopy on a Xerox machine. This does not help anything at all, and in fact fools people into believing that their camera has greater 'reach' than it really does.

3. If you want to better see (and photograph) a distant object, what you need is a lens with a large focal length. So what is a ‘large’ focal length?

4. For a Canon/Nikon DSLR, which uses an 23 mm (approx) APS sensor, I would say that between 150-200 mm enters the range of low telephoto. This is the lens you would use if you wanted to take face shots of people across the street.

5. A note on sensors: the film ‘sensor’ is 35 mm across. The APS sensor is about 23 mm across. This leads to the APS sensor behaving as if a 100 mm focal length lens is actually 150 mm. In other words, you multiply all focal lengths by 1.5 times when you use them on an APS sensor camera (such as Rebel TXi or a Nikon D80). The Olympus/Panasonic/Leica Fourth Thirds sensor is 18 mm across. Hence, the multiplier becomes 2 times.

6. So what is the big deal with a 10X zoom anyway?
If you were taking a picture of a building, you would want as much of the building in your viewfinder as possible. This means you would use a SMALL focal length, say 20 mm. Now, imagine that you were shooting pictures of a hot dog stand across the street. You would want nothing else, apart from the stand and the hot dog man in your viewfinder. To have a ‘tight’ frame, you would use a LONG focal length, say 140 mm. So if you had a lens that allowed you to change from a focal length of 18 mm to 180 mm, that would be perfect. In fact, such a typical lens, which has a zoom of 10X (see point 1) is offered by Olympus as part of their ZD line.

7. There must be a catch with these 10X lenses!
Yes, there is. Firstly, they are expensive. There are more optical elements to build and move. Then, these lenses will compromise on how large the aperture is at either end of their focal length range.

8. What is this aperture thing anyway?
It is simply the diameter of the circular opening through which light passes and falls on the sensor. This is expressed in terms of a ratio of focal length by aperture. Thus f16 means that the focal length is 16 times the diameter of the opening. A small ‘f-number’ means a large opening. This allows you to photograph fast motion, such as a speeding car, without blurring. Large apertures are expensive. A 10X lens will probably compromise on aperture.