After my little experiment to show that good cameras are not essential to taking good pictures, I still felt the point could be made clearer with more real-world examples. If I could show good photos taken by other people with less than stellar cameras that would be a big step in the right direction.

It was time to expand the experiment. I contacted a few people I knew on Twitter who took very nice pictures and whose camera quality was sufficiently suspect, and that’s how this wonderful showcase of Women With Bad Cameras came to be.

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As human beings we assume many things, but there are a few basic assumptions we make about that collective everyone, which are always contradictory. These assumptions have to do with what we have to offer to the world, and what we accept from the world in return.

1. I am different from everyone

We like to assume that we are different from everyone else, uniquely talented and gifted in ways that are beyond the abilities of others. It bolsters our sense of individuality and purpose, and it makes us feel at least a little superior. In our contribution to the world, we assume we are not like everyone else.

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If you have a serious interest in photography, in a professional capacity or as an enthusiastic amateur, you’re sure to have been greeted with this line at some point:

Great Pictures! Which Camera did you use?

On your less understanding days, there can’t be a more irritating thing to be asked, because the person asking usually assumes your good pictures are the result of the secret magic camera you use that automatically produces remarkable images.

If you are a photography enthusiast who’s been around the block, you know that is simply not true. But if you’re a regular sort of person who is just getting used to the idea of using a camera and having one around with you, you still think this way. This is my attempt to convince you otherwise. Why? Because if you ever want to take professional pictures and go beyond using your camera as a recording device, you need to understand that good pictures don’t come from your camera. They come from you.

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Aspiring writers have always been told to write what they know, and to read the classics. If everyone would have stuck to writing what they knew first hand, the written word would never have gone very far. The advice about the classics, however, hasn’t been brushed off as easily. Although you expect writers to be free thinkers, most of us want to be told exactly what to do, just like everyone else, and it sounds reasonable that an exposure to the best examples in the field would improve your skills. It makes sense to think that as a writer, you are what you read.

I am a designer, and one piece of advice in that field has always been to pay attention to the negative space, the blank part of the page that surrounds what you put on it. That space defines your design as much as the elements you put on the page. This nugget isn’t always understood by the aspiring designer, and not paid attention to by many who grow to proficiency, but a similar principle might hold true for writers and what they choose to read. I think if you’re a writer, you are what you don’t read.

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This blog was more of a focussed journal when I started the first version back in 2003. At the time my two main missions with the blog were to record my progress as I revamped my site, and for it to be a notebook of my adventures with learning how to create 3D graphics with the Blender 3D software.

Very early on, I did a recap of my experiences with creating 3D graphics up to that point, and then when on to journal my progress over the next few months. I did make a lot of progress, but unfortunately my blog ground to a halt with a casual report on some of my latest 3D images back in August 2004.

It was almost three years before my blog was revived, this time with a whole new design and its own domain here at SamirBharadwaj.com. I never stopped working with 3D graphics, but I never returned to that frenzied learning of the early days, and I rarely spoke about it on my blog, which has become more of a repository of my thoughts than of what I do. I’ve been thinking of re-learning Blender, since a drastically re-engineered new version (2.50) is almost ready. But before I start talking about 3D graphics here again, why not an updated recap of my adventures in 3D graphics? I might have been silent about Blender 3D and computer renderings over the last 5 years, but I was not idle.

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After my write-up on the philosophy of Hinduism, I got a fair bit of interest from people wanting to know more on the issue. Wendi was preparing to do an ethics presentation on Hinduism and stumbled across my article during her research. She sent me a few questions she had on Hindu beliefs, one of which was about the Hindu take on spiritualism and the afterlife.

More recently, I was chatting with a friend in Mexico who had a similar query. The amount of Spanish literature about India seems to on the rise in recent years, so a curiosity about the culture is a natural side-effect. She wanted to know about the Indian belief in past lives, and my take on it. My replies to both these questions, one academic and one more personal, was broad enough to be of general interest, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here.

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As animals go, human beings are not particularly unique. There are other creatures with considerable brain power, there are others that have a fair amount of dexterity, and there are many others that surpass us on every level of physical strength and prowess. One thing that does make us different from the rest, is our habit of storing memories.

Along the road, we found a way for every generation to not need to re-learn all the old tricks, but instead to build on what came before. We were able to learn from the past because, from the very beginning of our history, we endeavoured to record and pass on our memories.

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