Me, my cam and the clicks

"So when was the last time I held a camera in my hands to do some serious photography?", I thought before clicking my first photograph in a long long time. The answer to my question was "10 months back". I checked the EXIF on the last photo taken by me, and the "Date Taken" read 9/21/2009 6:19 pm. Long time, no clicks.

My interest in photography was born not in July 2008, when I had purchased my first Digicam. Nor was it born in the next couple of months when I toured, and captured lots and lots of snaps in beautiful places like Paris, London and Switzerland. Although I did capture thousands of pictures in these places, but these were not out of any thought of learning photography, or experimenting with it, but because of the fact that I was getting once in a lifetime opportunity to visit these places, and I wanted to capture and save most of what I had seen, in the form of photographs. And it turned out that of thousands of clicks, some came out really amazing. For instance, these -

However, it was not until early 2009, when I realized what true photography means. And I thank my friend Samit Tibrewala, as well as some of my ex-colleagues whom I know only by their names and through their snaps EXIFs (If you are interested to see their clicks, check this out). Samit gave me a small lesson on how to use Adobe Photoshop to enhance an ordinary photograph, and turn it into an extraordinary one. And on the SLR bulletin board of my previous organization, I found people sharing their knowledge and experiences on the rules one must follow during photography, as well as the importance of sometimes breaking these rules. Some of these people are Swaheel, Sandy, Ashay Dhavale, Vaibhav Garge, Bobokumar and Nikky Stephen. The photographs posted by these guys on the bulletin board were atleast 100 times better than those you would find on my Flickr photostream, and thats what inspired me to emulate these people. I started posting my own clicks on the bulletin board, and the members were kind enough to point out how I could improvize on these snaps to make them look even better.

And since then, I have learned a lot on SLR bulletin board, and on internet about photography and about using Photoshop. I also went through the complete manual of my P&S Sony cybershot DSC W-35.

Subsequently, the first thing I tried was to modify some of my not-so-good photographs, through Photoshop. The results were amazing. Here is one such example -

Before

After

In addition, I also learned the rules about shutter speed, aperture width, importance of light, placement of subject in the photograph etc. And slowly and stetadily, I started to implement these rules while clicking photographs. And subsequently, the photos started coming out perfect, and didn't need too much editing in Photoshop. Below are some examples of photographs where no Photoshopping is done (except very basic contrast adjustments).

The most important thing I have learned about photography, however, is that you do not need a very expensive camera to get good photographs out. Even a very basic Point and Shoot can suffice most of your photography needs (unless you are looking for wildlife, macro or bird photography). All you need is the experience, detail knowledge of how your camera works, know-how about the rules of photography, and a keen eye to visualize good clicks in ordinary situations.

Yesterday, all these thoughts raced through my mind in a matter of seconds, before I pressed the shutter button down first time in more than 10 months. And now I have decided to pursue this hobby of mine more regularly and without such a long break.

PS: You can find my best snaps from yesterday here.

So who completed the final act of Inception?

Hello friends. It has been more than 6 months now since I have updated my blog. Reasons are manifold - not many random thoughts erupting in my mind, a shift of interest towards playing guitar, and last but not the least, an accident which made me bed-ridden for approximately 2 months.

Watched the movie "Inception" recently, and I personally believe it to be one of the best movies that has come out in last couple of years or so. A wonderful treat from Christopher Nolan, who currently stands at 2nd place in my list of best directors (next only to Stanley Kubrick). I have seen each and every movie directed by him so far, and intend to maintain the record.

RULES
During the past couple of years since I started watching his movies, I have discovered that Christopher Nolan is a perfectionist. You won't find even a single loophole in any of the movies he has made so far, be it "The Following", which was his very first movie, produced on a very low budget, or the grand, Batman comic book based "The Dark Knight". Inception too is an awesome movie. It has a pretty dense plot, and Nolan has ensured that people keep guessing what the ending of the movie signifies. I personally believe that this movie deserves at least 3 viewings. First viewing to understand the plot, as it is pretty damn complex, and one would have to put all his thoughts into understanding the rules of dreamworld. A second viewing is required to gather some minute clues that Nolan has scattered everywhere, which are critical to the story, and to understand the bigger picture about which I am going to discuss shortly. And finally a third viewing, dedicated not to Nolan, the storyteller, but to Nolan, the director. I am yet to have a 2nd and a 3rd viewing of the movie.

I was recently having a discussion on Gmail with some of my friends who have seen the movie, and was also going through hundreds of posts on internet about what people believe the ending of the movie signifies. And a few thoughts of my own regarding the ending filled my brain (finally some random ideas after 6 months of inactivity of my grey cells).

I would be putting down my thoughts below assuming that you have already seen the movie and are aware of terms like totem, architect etc. If you have not yet seen the movie, I would suggest to read no further as there are spoilers in rest of the post (and anyway, you are not going to understand even a bit).

So here are my 2 cents about the ending -

THE DREAM















A totem, as described in the movie, is a small personalized item that only the owner knows a specific thing about. However, throughout the movie, Cobb is shown spinning the top in front of everyone else in his team (including Ellen Page who has not even officially joined the team yet). And everyone is aware what Cobb's totem is. Do you think Cobb, who is more experienced than anybody else in his team about the way things work in dreamworld and reality, would spin his totem in open? Maybe he deliberately did so. Maybe he wanted everyone (including audience) to believe that the spinning top was his totem.

Cobb always used his left hand for spinning the top. It is the hand on which he wears his wedding ring. As pointed out by many on internet, the ring is there every time he spins the top. However, it is not there in the very last scene. Is it possible that whenever Cobb used to spin the top, he simultaneously looked at his finger secretly? The spinning top would distract the onlooker (and the audience as well) into believing that it is the totem, while the real totem always lay on his finger. And in the very last scene, since he was not wearing a ring (indicating that he is now in real world), and since he also got his kids back, and had no intention to return to his old profession again, he did not care at all if the spinning top stopped or not.

Nolan is a fine craftsman. In most of his previous movies such as "The Following", "Memento" and "The Prestige", he has made us think only in one direction throughout, until the very end. Only in the last scene of each of these movies has he uncovered the truth. I think this time as well, he has made us believe something which was not the truth. But this time he wants us to uncover the truth ourselves, through the little clues he has left everywhere in the movie.

THE INCEPTION




Inception has more to it than meets the eye. Nolan is known for various experiments he has done so far in his movies. In Memento, he experimented with a non-linear narrative, and gave it a treatment very different than other such movies like Pulp Fiction. While in Insomnia, unlike other thrillers, he focused not on the psyche of the serial killer, but of the detective. And no need to mention that with the two Batman movies, he has redefined the way comic books are adapted. But I believe that his biggest experiment so far is Inception. Here is my reasoning -

Cobb and his team were not the only people who were able to complete the act of Inception in the movie. There was one more guy who actually was successful in this act, and it was Christopher Nolan. He planted the idea in the minds of millions of viewers, that the spinning top is Cobb's totem. And at the very end, the scene cuts to the spinning top, and everybody keeps guessing whether the top would topple to suggest Cobb's return to reality. Or would it keep spinning forever as if Cobb is still in a dream.

You would have noticed, that in both the incidents shown in the movie where an idea was successfully incepted into the subject's mind, it was the very end of the dream where actual inception happened. Although, the foundation of the idea was laid down slowly and steadily during the course of dreams, it was not until the end of the dream that the inception completed. If I draw analogies and say that movie was like a dream, audience the subject, and Nolan the architect, then it would be appropriate to say that Nolan built up the idea in audience' minds that spinning top was Cobb's totem. Nowhere in the movie has Cobb admitted by himself that the top is his totem. He spins the top, but maybe the reason for this could be the one I mentioned earlier. Perhaps the wedding ring was his totem. Or perhaps his children's faces (thats another theory posted on internet).

And at the very end of the movie, he leaves the top spinning, and audience come out of the dream believing that the top is Cobb's totem. Everyone on first viewing would have ignored the presence or absence of a wedding ring on his hand, and the spinning top in the end would have strengthened the idea that it was the totem (Remember, its not easy to recall what happened in a dream, except the very end). The reason why the last scene cut to the spinning top was because that was the idea he wanted to implant in our minds.

Nolan would be a proud man to have carried out this act of inception. And I personally believe that this is exactly what Nolan would have intended to do when he had finished the script for this movie. He implanted an idea in millions of viewers' minds that spinning top was the totem. He put an idea into critics' minds that the movie was just a well-crafted thriller - something like matrix. It is a perfect way of manipulating with a viewer's psyche.

Thought provoking. Isn't it?

Iambic Pentameter

I had recently posted what I call my first attempt at Italian sonnet, on one of the groups on Facebook. The poem was titled "A lonely road" (you can check it out here on my blog). And based on the comments and discussion that followed, I realized that it was not exactly a sonnet.

An Italian sonnet is characterized by the following 3 attributes:

1. Form - A sonnet is fundamentally a dialectical construct which allows the poet to examine the nature and ramifications of two usually contrastive ideas, emotions, states of mind, beliefs, actions, events, images, etc., by juxtaposing the two against each other, and possibly resolving or just revealing the tensions created and operative between the two.

2. Rhyming scheme - The Italian sonnet is divided into two sections by two different groups of rhyming sounds. The first 8 lines is called the octave and rhymes as follows:
a b b a a b b a
The remaining 6 lines is called the sestet and can have either two or three rhyming sounds, arranged in a variety of ways:
c d c d c d
c d d c d c
c d e c d e
c d e c e d
c d c e d c

3. Iambic Pentameter - This is another important characteristic of an Italian sonnet. Iambic pentameter is one of many meters used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used. The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet".
An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. And a line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:
da/DUM/da/DUM/da/DUM/da/DUM/da/DUM

While my original poem did have the first two attributes of an Italian sonnet as mentioned above, the third one was missing i.e. it lacked in an iambic pentameter. The poem had a proper rhyming scheme i.e. abbaabba cdecde. It also had a style wherein the first 8 lines posed a problem while the next 6 bore the solution. However, if you observe the rhythm of this poem, it would not be what you expect from an Italian sonnet. And thats because the number of syllables in each of the lines is different, which ideally should have been 10 per line.

I would like to thank Jaime Birch, Andy Morley and Alan Nettleton for letting me know where I was wrong and helping me out on the usage of iambic pentameter. And based on their suggestion, I have made some quick modifications to my original poem so as to make it sound like a real Italian sonnet in rhythm as well. Though I have made use of a pentameter in the new version, it still isn't iambic.

Here it goes:


Heavenly abode is what they all seek,
Through the blazing hells of fire, pass I must.
The road I walk is laid in thorns and dust.
Though the destination appears so bleak,
In tormenting pain I must neither creak,
Nor waver in desire or carnal lust.
In tempest and rains of doom, those who rust,
Are the ones whose lives, as ever end meek.

His name to my lips seems forever glued
Until to the end of desert I reach,
And where awaiting me stands my reward.
My contented eyes see what they pursued,
Since eterne, what they always did beseech.
Its the beautiful sunset boulevard.


As can be observed from the rhythm of this poem, just one of the lines contains an iambic pentameter, although all contain 10 syllables each. The line is: "The road I walk is laid in thorns and dust"

I guess I still have miles to go before I write a true Italian sonnet.

Sepia-toned Photographs

As I open an album of yesteryear,
I come across some faces that look familiar.
Faces smiling in some random pics,
Precious memories caught in those ordinary clicks,
Of those days when we vowed together
That tides of time won’t separate us ever.
Yet walls start growing between us now,
We’ve learned to blame new times somehow.

There’s a photograph of a cozy living room.
Ah, he must also be there one can presume.
He was the one who taught me new ways to live.
With him each ordinary day turned festive.
Together, we used to drink and laugh
To celebrate a raise in salary or a perk,
Or to forget a bad day spent at work.
And now though we live just miles away,
We drift one light year apart each day.

There’s a girl in that pic of shingle beach,
Adorn in a shirt that is color of peach.
A salsa together was our way to get high.
I faithlessly walked to church with her, just to be by her side.
Her lap was where my head always found comfort.
She could recognize each tear in my eyes
even though they stayed as dry as a desert.
And now as her life takes on a new quest,
The best I can do is to wish her all the best.

I make my way to the next photograph,
And I see a face too busy in a hearty laugh.
He’d crack that old joke, and I would smile each time.
If my life is a poem, he has brought all the rhyme.
For all delicious flavors of world he has served,
Or for those feelings of my heart that he so easily observed
That my heart often found understanding too tough,
In this life, I can never be thankful enough.

Faces come and faces go.
But there are those that shall forever glow
In some pictures that were captured by me,
On some photo films, and in my memory.
Some pictures would start ageing with times,
While some would fade away with changing climes.
The ones that shall, however, always stay the same
Are of those, on my heart who have etched their names.