The Edge

You’ve been to the edge of childhood, haven’t you? It’s a few streets from home, at the corner of Saturn and The Milky Way, where the stars become trinkets and shower down in a haze. There is a great big tree there; it bears a million leaves each year. Today if you were to climb up a branch and shake it lightly, little pearls might rain down still.

Your bicycle could have well been your stallion, for you were known to use your sheets as capes. There is a plastic cricket stump in your attic that has seen the blood of many a dragon. What about the Math teacher who wanted you to add things in your head, and the midgets who wouldn’t let you? If you had the foresight then, you’d have fed the midgets to the dragons and done well in math too. Your first math lesson wasn’t even math. The kid next door held up two hands and began counting backwards on his fingers “ten, nine, eight, seven, six and add the five from the other hand and it makes eleven” he said and ruined your entire week.
Remember the trusting toad you put in a box and carried to school for your science project? You let him live after all, and it is a story the frogs will never forget. Your name signed all over the neighborhood with the talented direction-control of piss; you had named it and claimed it and owned it. Those bumbling neighbors who spoke of your mom slyly would have known better if they had cared to smell their walls. Summer nights spent sneaking into the smuggler’s house down the road to check if he was storing gold biscuits in the garage.

Some little kid was run over by a truck and you had to play carom for weeks, no one cycled in the streets, you sang movie songs in the night and when someone mentioned the kid’s name there was silence all around. You saw him once or twice after that, always waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the tree make scary shadows on the window pane. You had to try many times to blow off all the candles lined up on the cake that year, and your cousin said it was bad luck.

That year you also learnt that fathers sometimes leave and go away without even dying, that sometimes the lies people tell about your family have a way of coming true. Zeroes made their way into you report cards and somehow, inexplicably, at the same time teachers became friendlier. Dragons became scarcer; the shadows on the window became scarier. You punched a boy in the street because he said something about your parents. He got up and screamed something nastier, you rushed at him screaming and teeth barred. Tell me, when you went home that evening, were you consoled or punished? Tell me. You’ve been to the edge of childhood, haven’t you?

–Hameed Uddin

Flea Markets

A wise man once said that the best way to rob a bank is to own one. the US Govt. is dead set on proving him right. Yet another wise man put forth the ‘Iron Law of Institutons‘ which states that any person holding a position of authority or power within a given institution will first look to cement his power within the institution without regard to the overall health of the institution. The US Govt. is dead set on proving him right too.

Exhibit A:

“State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system.”

Explain to me again why Wall Street is a shining example of a free market?

 

 

(FYI: Yes, I’ve been wanting to use that title for a while)

A New Project – 105 Portraits with the 105

As some may have noticed, portraits are not entirely our strong point at Fotogenesis when it comes to photography, and consequently, our portfolio is relatively lacking. However, we have also recently obtained a Nikon AF-Nikkor 105mm f/2D DC lens that is eminently suitable for portraiture. Therefore, I would like to invite you to drop in to the studio for a portrait session(give us an hour or so) where we can get you a real portrait – something that is more than just another picture of you. Something that evokes your inner self. If you do not feel that the studio is a convenient location – and we know without an AC in the summer it can get a bit uncomfortable – please feel free to suggest an alternative location which speaks to you and your spirit and we will try to make it happen. If you know someone who doesnt have many good portraits, this will be a good occasion to nudge them to get them to us.

All sitters will get the jpeg digital files, one 4×6 size photo print and the company of your friends at Fotogenesis for an hour.

Since we are not doing make-up, we would appreciate it if you had a good night’s rest the day before coming to visit us. Trust us, it does make a difference!

Please RSVP on Facebook and we will contact you for an appointment. Please note that This is limited to the first 105 people only.

Indian General Elections 09

Election09, originally uploaded by pangalactic gargleblaster.

I did my part, voted. Dad went late so i didnt get to take his photo. Mom was first, i went second. annotations available on the flickr page

all i want for christmas…

is a Nikon D3, but that’s not what this post is about. I spent a substantial part of the day shooting a Canon 1D MkIII. it’s what news and particularly sports photographers generally tote around, hidden behind their monster lenses. one of my classmates happens to own one. i had a damn near religious experience. shooting was a joy (not that it isn’t with my D200, but even more so than usual) and there were no niggles whatsoever.

it’s almost instant focussing(it helped that he owned 2 dead sexy lenses) and that big fat vertical grip make it a joy to use… and the image quality is expectedly awesome(better be at those prices). oh, and you should hear it fire away at 10frames-a-sec.

while the 1D MkIII is many kinds of amazing, i dont get the canon interface paradigm at all. the ferris-wheel took some getting used to and for some reason it was setup so that you had to change both aperture and shutter values with the same dial and a button-press. why is this even possible? also the custom function menu interface is so 2001. please canon, implement a nice little ‘help’ button like nikon does on all it’s cameras so that there is a decent explanation of what exactly the function is supposed to do.

oh, my point is that if i can have so much damn fun with a canon, i can only imagine what it would feel like if it was actually a nikon :-D

help a photographer out, buy me a D3! or at least a battery grip so i can pretend to roll with the big boys:-p

One of the following won me a prize

(details)

GIVE ME METAL!

in the spirit of thanksgiving, i would like to thank the gems of R&D at Kodak in Rochester for developing the Endura Pro Metallic Paper. I just had a couple of prints made at 8×12″ size to test it out(as it costs twice what a regular print does) but I am FLOORED! the two images (from the still life series) were very beautifully rendered and have a distinctly 3D feel to them that was lacking in previous glossy and matte-finish prints on either Fuji or Kodak paper. I was considering custom – i.e, digital inkjet – printing my final collection, but Endura has lured me back into the optical fold.

if you dont get what this is about, run out and get your favourite photo printed at a minimum of 11×14″ size and ask for a ‘metallic’ print. gorgeosity should emanate from the print.

chutzpah intelligence agency

wow

The CIA didn’t just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA’s role told in Daniel Leab’s book Orwell Subverted.

via Teh Tomb!

this right here is a time-lapse

this is the FAIL version. note to self: time gets faster as your shutter speeds get slower