My ever-restless and creative friend Reena was recently talking to me about a series of photographs she’d taken over her last trip to a national park in her neck of the woods. They were just not turning out as dramatic and eerie as she wanted them to. This, of course, set my photographer-sense tingling and I wanted to know what the original pictures were like and why they weren’t working out.

She had already attempted a black & white version of one of the images of a rock pool, and while it was fairly dramatic, the flatness of the tones and a very bright highlight told me that the image was very likely overexposed. Since my curiosity had been piqued, I asked her to send me the original image to play around with. Since I was playing anyway, I thought I’d record my thought process as I tried to fix this overexposed photograph.

(Read more…)

We all made paper boats when we were kids. If you lived through even a single monsoon in India, it would seem unnatural not to, and they were a lot of fun to make too. My Grandmother’s place in Bombay used to be an old muddy compound back then, and when it rained a small pond would form at the base of the stairs leading down from the building. The water would collect there and as the monsoon progressed it would get deeper, because eventually the soil was saturated and couldn’t absorb any more. It was probably only ankle-deep water, but you know how proper civilised people are about “dirt”, so after much “suffering” someone decided it might be a good idea to throw a few bricks there as stepping stones to save them from the muddy water.
(Read more…)

For writers, bookshops are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you were probably first inspired to have writing ambitions somewhere in a bookshop, surrounded by the wonder of words; On the other hand, bookshops and the books in them can be the greatest obstacle to writing that was ever conceived.
(Read more…)

Like most people, I didn’t even know they were making a new X-Men movie until I heard some buzz online and saw the first character shots. It all looked harmless enough. Then I saw the first trailer in the cinemas, and that got my attention. But what sold me on seeing this film was that Mathew Vaughn was directing it. I’m glad I did, because out of nowhere, the man has given us one of the best comic-book movies ever.
(Read more…)

Creativity is a balancing act, but it is also a show of strength, so size matters. This balance, this contest of strengths requires an opposite, a counterpoint, and that counterpoint can be found in fear. It goes by other names as well, some choose to call it resistance, or procrastination, and sometimes writer’s block, but at the core they are all a variation on fear. What is feared and the degree of it varies, but it is this fear that must be balanced out and defeated for creativity to triumph.

(Read more…)

I‘ve done this before and will do it again, this probing of my thoughts to put into words why I must redesign by website. As a site grows in size and complexity, redesigning it, and more specifically re-engineering it beyond the aesthetics, becomes a bigger challenge. So convoluted has my particular challenge seemed, that I have been considering this redesign for over two years now. As with all personal and important projects, it has always taken a back-seat to more important things.

From the first moment I decided to have my own website, my plans for it were grand. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me a bit; All my plans are grand. Every time, I scaled down my ideas to achieve a finished product in some reasonable time, or simply because I had to have a site, to show a client or share with someone.
(Read more…)

Of all the stories of supernatural heroes in the Marvel Comics universe, that of Thor, the God of thunder, is unique in that it was not an outright invention. Norse mythology was interpreted and integrated into the modern world in clever and campy ways to create an entertaining and larger than life character. That was the other thing about Thor; While Marvel made its name on the backs of teenage-angst and utterly human and flawed heroes, the God of thunder, while flawed, was larger than life even in the world of the comic books. That balance between human and God was always a tricky balance to handle, which the comic books started off dealing with using the old secret-identity trope, but they later discarded that in favour of making Thor a complex character in his own right.

Director Kenneth Branagh’s Thor sticks with that decision to explore Thor more thoroughly, but also tips its hat to the original ideas of the God of Thunder having to learn a few things by being human. The movie achieves that balance, not just in the character, but in its entirety, leaving you with an experience that is both enjoyably human and intensely mythic.
(Read more…)