I haven’t written a Hindi movie review since Band Baaja Baaraat, not because there have been no films worth writing about, but because none have seemed to need the extra attention, or have required that I share my point of view on them beyond a recommendation. Like the previous film by the same team, however, Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is a deceptively simple but intricate creature, which pleases me on all the levels at which I enjoy watching movies. Once again, I’ve been given a film I do have a few things to say about.

Ranveer Singh returns in this, his second outing as actor, playing a conman who travels through India, swindling young women out of money using a variety of schemes. In Delhi he uses his position as boyfriend of the effervescent Dimple Chaddha (Parineeti Chopra) to con her father into buying property he doesn’t own, in Lucknow he quietly convinces the in-laws of young widow Saira Rashid (Aditi Sharma) to part with a payment for a large order of hand-crafted fabric he has little to do with, and finally in Bombay he cons the hard-nosed corporate employee Raina Parulekar (Dipannita Sharma) to pay millions for a fake painting. The publicity behind that last scandal gets the three women together and they decide to track down their common foe and con him into returning their lost money and more. To do this deed, they take on the help of Ishika Desai (Anushka Sharma), an exceptionally talented sales woman at a local department store, to be his fake new mark. To con the conman, what can be a more challenging game?

A year ago, I described Baand Baaja Baaraat as resembling a golgappa, an explosion of street-side flavours all forming a startling and appetising whole. To continue the street food analogies, I would have to say Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is more of a Bombay Sandwich. A Bombay sandwich is a similarly deceptive beast. Seemingly made of perfectly ordinary ingredients — tomatoes, onions, cucumber, potato, all sliced and layered between mass produced white slice bread and enhanced with butter, a herb chutney and some workman-like ketchup — you’d think this food, made on street corners by people with a small glass box on a stand, would not be much to write home about, but if you are a fan of food without the pretension, the Bombay sandwich, is delicious, filling, a marvel of food preparation and so much more than what it seems. This film is like that, layered, complex, including entirely predictable ingredients, but the resulting package is surprising, refreshing and endearing in its directness and lack of ostentation.

True to their word a year ago, the film-makers have returned with a film that is very much in the same vein; It is a simple and straightforward tale about enterprising people. This in itself is strange for the world of films, often filled with amateur dramatics by people who are constantly letting circumstances get the better of them. Here a spirit of experimentation and entrepreneurship is lauded and admired rather than ridiculed. Ranveer Singh has grown into an even more refined actor in this film, in a role that requires more restraint than the village-boy character of the previous film did, and Anushka Sharma is similarly more understated and worldly than her firebrand Delhi-girl of the last film. These two are very likely some of the strongest acting talents we have at the moment, and their youth gives us the possibility of many years of interesting performances ahead. The cast delivers handsomely, including a rich collection of supporting characters to tell the story. The three ladies of the title have well fleshed out characters and major roles to play in the film to rival the top-billed protagonists, with Parineeti Chopra doing an exceptional job at incidental humour in her debut performance.

All the hallmarks of Band Baaja Baaraat are here, the exceptional attention to detail brought in by the director Maneesh Sharma, Habib Faisal‘s excellent dialogue, this time lent a touch of sophistication over the rampant colloquialisms of the previous film, a nice shift that suits the tone and setting of this one. The film is exceptionally shot by cinematographer Aseem Mishra, who makes Goa look more attractive and like more of a real place than all the films I can remember that showcased it before. The same goes for the various cities mentioned, which are given their own distinct visual treatment. Set in a more gentrified section of the social milieu, the dramatics have been cut back further in Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl, with much being conveyed in silences, subtle body language and good editing, a brave move in a world of Hindi films approaching ever greater levels of circus-kitsch in the name of irony and intellectual homage. Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is unapologetically clean, minimal, calculated, and entirely free of cheap tricks, clawing melodrama, and unnecessary twists.

The real wonder of Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is that like the Band Baaja Baaraat, it embraces the methods and madness of its subject matter. If the previous film was in many ways one long wedding celebration, this film is a very elaborate con. The trailers will have you expecting a very slick and extremely ‘cool’ film with the cool protagonists acting cool all the time, as numerous high-concept cons are in progress. The reality is much simpler, less dramatic, and much more heartfelt. Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl remains about the people, and the cons are straightforward, fairly practical and do not try to break new ground in convoluted scheming. More importantly, you might walk in expecting a huge showdown between the two protagonists, the allegedly warring con artists, but what you are given is a story that’s as much about the three less-than-scrupulous women who are conned, as it is about the two people on most of the posters. The alleged supporting cast are more often the focus of this film, and the hero and heroine are the means to an end; Albeit a very talented and extremely entertaining means to an end.

As a big fan of heist films, I know one of the oft repeated rules of the genre is that you can’t really con an honest person. That is the unsaid crux of this story; No one conned is truly honest, with the conman merely exploiting what they want in all the cases. And as the audience, this film demands of you a certainly honesty too. If you are a true lover of movies for all the things that make them one of the greatest mediums of storytelling and entertainment, you will love the con of this film, of giving you something very different from what you might have expected. If you’re in it for the frivolous glamour and to gossip about the steamy blatantness of it all later, you are likely not going to get it. Like the Bombay sandwich, all you may see is bread and vegetables, when what you’re given is so much richer than the sum of its parts. Needless to say, I am an ardent admirer of both the Bombay sandwich, and this little masterpiece of a film, and I hope Maneesh Sharma and gang continue to makes these surprise packages of entertainment whenever the mood suits them.

Samir

P.S. It seems unfair that only I should have Jigar da tukda, one of Salim-Sulaiman‘s excellent musical contributions to this gem, stuck in my head on loop, so here you go.

Of all the much touted maxims of modern society and intellectual thought, things like separation of church and state, equality and equal opportunity for all and the like, the one I think is the most artificial construct is detached, unbiased and impersonal reporting. There is a prevailing falsehood about the effect of personal bias on the story that a reporter tells and how it affects the perception of ‘the truth’ by the reader. The falsehood is not in believing this bias exists and changes things, but in that it may actually be a perfectly avoidable evil.

I just finished reading Dreaming in Code, and what stays with me after Scott Rosenberg‘s comprehensive and appropriately fragmented tale of the early years of the Chandler open source project, is not primarily the insights gleaned about the process of programming software, although those were numerous enough even for a closet coding enthusiast like me, but rather the impressions that remain from his last concluding chapter with his more personal take on his involvement with the project and its originator Mitch Kapor. Stray bits and impressions from a quick scanning of his end notes, and the human dynamic of 3-years on a project like this, which emerges from his acknowledgements, is what will stick until my next reading.

Detachment is a fine theory, but what does it most often yield? Dry, uninteresting, unengaging, indecisive waste, for the most part, which forms the daily news. There’s a reason I don’t read the news, because as we step into a world of instant feedback, always-on telecommunication and global sharing of information, you come to realise that ‘the facts’ are in fact not all they are cracked up to be. I never read the news, on paper or on screen, so you can save your breath about my personally contributing to the downfall of fat publishing empires by not buying a ‘real’ newspaper. In spite of my disinterest in the news of the world, however, I am somehow constantly aware of the facts of the world, more than I would like on most days. For example, I can’t help but see a few headlines on the Yahoo! home page every time I log-out of my often neglected email address. Even less avoidable is the exposure to the essentials of what has people huffing and puffing in short 140-character bursts on Twitter. And this, mind you, is after following less than 50 active tweeters, none of whom are closely related to traditional news media. ‘The Facts’ are much simpler and cheaper than you think.

There are, of course, the ever fascinating gory details of how many dead, and how exactly people died, and what new suffering I should be fearing for myself based on what’s happening in the world, but those are drugs I’ve never been interested in smoking. I find my thoughts, as cutting and disturbingly cynical as they can be, to be infinitely more interesting and educational than any amount of surrogate suffering dished out on a daily basis by objective reporting and devoured by most. So I decline to partake.

As soon as there is a reporting of events, even facts, there is a subjectivity to them. Subjectivity, the bias of the observer, is a simple fact of existence that even science has a growing realisation of, so it seems pompous and entirely self-serving for news and non-fiction writing to maintain some religious sense of objectivity. There is no real balance, or covering every side, or seeing both viewpoints, when we gladly ignore the viewpoint that’s clearly counter to any social norm or against the current mode of politically correct thinking. News and objectivity in reporting is a myth and it is about time we realised this. Perhaps the slow decline of print media and traditional news channels is in part an unconscious realisation of this fact, brought on by that great leveller of ‘balanced’ opinion, the internet. The internet, as an amorphous entity, is ever ready to go off on clearly inhuman tangents if those tangents are popular enough, or to challenge nonsense if it isn’t popular enough to ignore. The reality of balanced reporting, and the fantasy of everyone having their say, is closer to utter chaos than utopia.

Why then chase this outdated dream, when the invested reporter or writer, one who accepts their role in the process of observation, interpretation, and representation in relatable stories, is so much more affecting and informing? Why must the events and stories of the world be read in long pages of pretend facts when those could be read and gleaned in bullet-points, and when a personal story about the broader sweep of events, developments and people, even if it attempts to stick to the ideals of objectivity, can be so much more informing, involving, eye-opening, insightful, and most importantly, more human?

As human beings, we read for an insight into what another human being thinks and feels, and what they glean from their interactions or observations of other human beings. This is the fundamental human activity, the one thing that takes us beyond the level of instinctive beast, this sharing of memories and stories of self-analysis. Stories are human, the ones that are born in the human imagination, and those that merely pass through the imagination between the observing senses and the storehouse of experience. The human imagination is an essential aspect of our humanity and also the way we perceive and understand the world. Yet as a society, we have chosen to ignore this equal power at our table, and we’ve banished it to the position of unacknowledged bastard or entertaining buffoon, the black sheep of the family we must all be ashamed of. It has gotten to the point where we even refuse to acknowledge that the imagination is the only one at the table that reads and describes a picture of our world to the rest of our being, the virtually blind masses of our intellect. ‘Stop dreaming’ is the commonly spit out warning of the vengeful adult as the unfettered child is slapped out of listening to their imagination, their storyteller, and another bastard is born.

We lose ourselves in fiction and fantasy, because in that realm the human spirit is sanctioned in its biases, its emotional investments, its unbalanced interpretations, its unobjective reporting of the facts. But in the things through which we learn of and understand the world, the stories and non-fiction accounts through which we explore our real world passions, learn our crafts, form our personalities and absorb our opinions, we choose to banish all those parts of our minds that make us who we are. We see emotion as a guilty pleasure, tucked between the lines and secretly sniggered at in mental back-alleys like a dirty thing, all the time self-righteously proclaiming a perfect objectivity that cannot exist. We live a lie, when what we should be doing is embracing the filter of our existence and demanding that our tellers of facts and stories be human rather than feign inhumanity, while remembering that there is no perfection in the given truths.

As writers, we must strive above all else to be human, tell the story of human affairs honestly, and with all the emotions, pains, biases and joys which our humanity grants us the ability to see and to share. To not do so would be dishonest and hypocritical. To imagine that doing so is a completely avoidable evil would be delusional and dangerous.

Samir

Like much of my fiction reading, The Gates of Eden (1983) by Brian Stableford was picked up in a bargain bin, where all the strangest treasures are to be discovered, this one in a second-hand book store. The cover art by Doughlas Chaffee showed an auburn-haired beauty standing handsomely holding a spacesuit in an alien landscape. I love the traditional science fiction paintings of the time, so I had to see what this was about.

Before the hyper-space vessels could go from planet to planet, stations had to be set up. And that meant manned spaceships cut off from Earth for decades.

The explorer vessel Ariadne had gone toward galactic centre and was considered lost–until its call was heard appealing for a xenobiologist.
…

And the blurb continued on the back cover, but I was already hooked and wanted to know more. So I picked up the book.

Lee Caretta is the xenobiologist who narrates his tale. The book drops us straight into one of his nightmares, which we learn he suffers from on occasion, along with blackouts. All this is unknown to his space-faring colleagues and is nearly forgotten as he gets a call to visit the vessel Araidne which currently orbits a strange habitable swamp planet dubbed Naxos. The entire initial survey team has died suddenly and mysteriously, and Caretta, along with a few other experts, is called in to find out how it happened. They must determine if the planet is safe enough for further exploration and possible colonization, which was the Ariadne’s original mission in heading off into the unknown.

The author, Brian Stableford, is a scientist. It shows through in the thoughts and words of the characters in The Gates of Eden. Thankfully, he is also a very fine writer of fiction and the short book makes for gripping reading with much to admire in the crafting of the phrase and the succinctness of the words. The book plays out like a very tight procedural, a science fiction murder mystery of sorts, with the usual assortment of shady characters and unknown motivations, but mixed liberally with a whole lot of biological discussion and hard-core science-fiction musings. The reality this story creates is an intriguing one, because on one hand humanity has found other habitable words and intelligent alien species and faster-than-light travel, and on the other hand, Earth has undergone no revolutionary changes and remains very much as we can experience it now, stagnant for centuries. It’s a premise that is dramatic in its mundanity.

I enjoyed The Gates of Eden, not just because it is very well written in a technical sense and engaging, but because it took me back to a childhood of reading Asimov and those more straight-forward and clean science fiction stories of old. It is from a school of science fiction written by a particular type of geeky writer, perhaps for a particular type of geeky reader. The story is, at its core, an episode of Star Trek. A ship arrives in orbit around a planet, there is a mystery to solve, teams go down to the surface and intrigue and adventure follows. This is procedural science-fiction at its best, and it even abides by many archetypal elements from those old stories I grew up reading; There is the mildly ineffectual male protagonist, a female sidekick who is his superior in many ways, the both practical and philosophical discussions about science and humanity, and in the end, the real problems are solved by people putting their heads together and figuring things out with words and discussion rather than just incendiary devices and bravado.

There are complaints that can be made about The Gates of Eden, mostly to do with the fact that it might feel too short, and in its brevity, many of its plot choices and character motivations come out feeling clichéd. However, I do wonder whether those choices would have seemed tired back in 1983, before all of us had been exposed to thousands of hours of rehashed television plots and a multitude of pulp fiction in every conceivable medium.

While this is by no means a masterpiece of fictional storytelling, I can say unequivocally that it is gripping, it kept me entertained throughout the reading, and I know I will read it again given a spare day with some time to kill in cerebral relaxation. That can’t be said for a lot of fiction, and I don’t think there can be a better testament to the qualities of a story.

The Gates of Eden is a wonderful little nugget of science fiction which is over a little sooner than you would like it to be. But within that time, it creates in your mind a comprehensive universe, alien and yet not too far removed from our own, characters who are utterly relatable even within their archetypes, and a story that keeps you entertained, occupied, and imagining. Such stories are always a pleasure to live.

Samir

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.

Exposure Correction Tools

The best cure for overexposure is prevention. Making sure you get a properly exposed shot from your camera is really the only true answer, and you can usually do that by setting the Exposure Compensation to a negative(-) setting in your camera (if you’re using one the automatic or semi-automatic modes). In daylight, at least, I find most digital cameras tend to overexpose, and a bit of negative exposure compensation does nicely.

Even with these precautions, however, the odd overexposed shot does slip through, so it’s helpful to know how to salvage them on the computer. For these corrections, a proper photo-editing application is the best way to go. I am well aware that there are now a slew of software tools like Aperture and Lightroom and the like, which make it much easier to handle large volumes of images with various automated pre-sets and complex features. They take a lot of the decision-making out of the hands of amateur who just wants a stunning image with the least amount of fuss. I don’t know anything about those and am more of the hands-on type of photo editor, so my choice of tool is a more nuts-and-bolts image editor which I use for all my professional work, and that is the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

A layer-based photo editor gives you the best fine-grained control over the final image if you know what you’re doing, and if you’re serious about photography in the digital age, you would do well to learn your way around one of these. It’s very much like printing your own pictures in the dark room in the old days as compared to handing it over to a photo shop, even a professional one.

GIMP comes with a fairly complex collection of built-in features and capabilities but I will also be using one additional plugin script for the software called Shadows & Highlights, which well help us deal with some of the specific issues faced in badly exposed images. So if you want to try these methods on your own photos, I suggest you get a hold of these tools, which are both free, keep the GIMP manual open to figure out the specifics if you get lost, and follow along.

What is Overexposure?

The concept of exposure is at the very basis of photography. Photographs are formed or captured by light falling on a sensitive surface for a specific fraction of time. In the old days that surface was film, and today it is often a digital sensor. Either way, the concept remains the same; A certain amount of light energy is required to be captured to form a clear image. Dark scenes thus need a longer exposure, while bright subjects require a shorter exposure time. A dark scene that isn’t exposed for long enough turns out dark and underexposed, while a bright scene exposed for too long creates an image which is overly bright and overexposed.

This is exactly what has happened in this original image. The sensors in cameras that decide on exposure and other settings in automated modes, look at the average light quality of the scene in front of them and mathematically calculate the optimum exposure time. If a scene is very evenly lit, these averages turn out good results, but in scenes with drastic contrasts of light and dark, averages are often skewed away from the ideal. This is how, in an image like the one above, the camera can select a longer exposure to properly capture the dark and shadowy cave and rocks, which leads to the sunny parts of the scene being washed out with an excess of light.

This is apparent when you’ve looked at enough photographs and know how it works, but it is still useful to analyse these images more thoroughly to understand exactly what has gone wrong. One method to do this is to use a visual tool called an image histogram. This is a graph representing the amount of light, dark and medium value shades in an image. Many cameras can show you this read-out live on the scene, but once you have opened your photo in GIMP, you can display its histogram by going to the image menu Color > Info > Histogram. That displays the Histogram dialogue shown above.

The histogram represents the occurrance of shades in the image ranging from black on the extreme left to white on the extreme right. So as you can see from the histogram of our overexposed photo, it has no pure black or very dark shades at all, and you can see a sliver of the graph that shoots up on the white end, showing that some of the highlight areas of the image have been washed out into pure white.

This washing out of highlights is the more serious issue with overexposed images. Dark shades can be darkened, but once a highlight has been washed out into pure white, a phenomenon called clipping, there is very little that can be done to restore the visual information lost in those places.

The fact is, nothing in the real world is ever a mathematically pure white. There is always a tinge of colour and variations of shade in even the whitest of objects, so when something is captured as pure white in a photo, it is merely a symptom of not enough information being captured for that area. Look at the excessively darkened section of our image above and notice how the highlight foliage is beginning to turn red. That is because the pure white has no correct colour information, so the computer mathematically jumps to red when extreme darkening is attempted. There is almost nothing to be done about this particular problem, but first, let us tackle the broader overexposure problem.

Level Adjustment

The best place to start correcting exposure problems like this, is to remove that gap in the image histogram we saw earlier, and stretch the photo’s values across the entire range of dark to light. We can do this by bringing up the Adjust Color Levels tool through the image menu Colors > Levels.

The levels dialogue includes a histogram display, but this time with adjustments for the black point, white point and mid-point or gamma of the image, which are represented respectively by the black, white and grey triangles below the graph display. You can adjust the image by sliding around those triangles to new positions along the graph, or changing the numerical values in the boxes below them (0-255). For this image, the idea was to close the blank gap on the dark end of the graph so the black point was moved towards the point where the image data actually began. To solve the excess brightness of the image the gamma point was also moved to reduce the level of the middle values to something more natural looking.

As you can see from the resulting image above, this one adjustment to the photograph already gives it much more depth, and makes it look more true-to-life than the washed-out original. Levels adjustment is one of those essential tools in a photographer’s toolbox to improve almost any photo and bring it close to what was intended. Learn to use it well, because for a universally applied adjustment it pays dividends for very little effort.

Selective Layer-Based Image Improvements

Universal adjustments to image quality are all you need if you have a perfectly exposed shot, but as the scenarios get more complex and the subjects more varied, you need to start delving into layer-based adjustments to the whole or parts of the image. Some areas of a photo often need to be processed differently to get a good result and that’s where editable layers and layer blending come in.

In photo manipulation software, layers are like transparent plastic sheets stacked on top of each other. Things can be put on these sheets to super-impose them on whatever is below without erasing it, with what is below showing through the transparent parts.

Photo editing layers go further in allowing the top layer to affect the look of the layers below it by blending with them using various mathematical methods. There are a growing number of blending modes in most software, but there a few basic ones that are universally helpful. In Normal mode the layer simply super-imposes itself on the layer below, depending on the transparency of the imagery on the top layer, and also optionally on the opacity setting of the layer. In normal mode, layers work exactly like plastic sheets.

The three modes shown in the image above are particularly useful in photo editing. The three sections of the image were created by duplicating the image layer, so that there are two stacked layers with the original photograph on it, and then changing the blending mode on the top layer.

The Screen blending mode lightens the result depending on the lightness of the the image on the layer. A light area lightens more than a dark area. The Multiply mode has an opposite effect, darkening the final image, with the dark areas having a stronger effect than the light ones. The Overlay mode mixes the previous two modes, with light areas lightening and dark areas darkening the final image result. By applying these blend modes on duplicated layers of photographs, many exposure issues can be corrected with a great degree of control, by varying the opacity of the affecting layer.

Since layers can have only sections of the image and transparent non-affecting parts, it allows us to selectively apply these effects on only some parts of the image to make more localised adjustments. This is exactly what the Shadows & Highlights script mentioned earlier helps you with. If you downloaded and installed it correctly, it should be accessible through the Image menu Filters > Light and Shadow > Shadows & Highlights.

The Shadows & Highlights dialogue that appears has two settings which you can change but you don’t need to, because they have no permanent effect. The plugin works by extracting a blurred version of the shadow areas and the highlights areas of the image and creating new layers with them.

The new layers are set to the Overlay blending mode with the ‘fix highlights’ layer rendered in black and the ‘fix shadows’ layers rendered in white. The image above shows what the two layers look like if set to the normal blending mode. If you remember the earlier description of the Overlay mode, this means the ‘fix highlight’ layer darkens the highlights and the ‘fix shadow layer’ lightens the shadows. How much of an effect they have can be adjusted by changing the opacity of the layers and it is simply their initial opacity which is affected by the plugin settings.

For this image I chose to switch off the ‘fix shadow’ layer (click on the eye icon in the layers list), because the problem wasn’t with the shadows. The ‘fix highlights’ layer was kept on full opacity to bring back as much detail as possible from the light areas.

Trying to Recover Detail in Clipped Highlights

The clipped highlights are always the trickiest part to handle, because there is no amount of mathematics that can be applied to it to get back what was lost. Baring painting in all the missing details manually, there really is no way to recreate the missing detail, like in that one blown out branch in our overexposed image. That doesn’t mean the loss can’t be minimised, however, so I experimented with making the best of what was available. This entire section is entirely optional and may or may not even work for many images.

Since detail had gone missing, I thought I’d try to add in some random noise at least, to not have that part of the image be the only blank colour. I created a new layer filled with a middle grey, and then applied the RGB noise filter accessed from the menu Filters > Noise > RGB Noise.

The noise needed to only be applied to that one clipped highlight, so I right-clicked on the noise layer and created a layer mask using the Add Layer Mask option, setting it to white when asked. A layer mask decides which parts of a layer are opaque and transparent, without losing any actual image data. White makes the entire layer visible. The ‘fix highlights’ layer already had a selective representation of the highlights, so selecting that layer, it was copied (Edit > Copy), and then selecting the layer mask of the noise layer, the copied image was pasted (Edit > Paste). With the new floating layer anchored into the layer mask by right clicking on it and selecting Anchor. Now all the highlights were black on a white background in the layer mask, but since that would make the highlight areas of the noise layer disappear, the layer mask was inverted by selecting Colors > Invert from the menu.

All the highlight areas of the image now had the RGB noise appearing in them. Since I wanted them only for the branch in the top left corner, I selected the layer mask and right clicked on it to make it visible using the Show Layer Mask option. Then used the Magic Wand tool in the toolbox (with a threshold setting of 20 in this particular case) to select that white shape of the branch. I then used the Selection > Grow menu to increase the selection by a few pixels in every direction to make sure the highlight shape was fully covered.

To make sure everything else on that layer was transparent, I inverted the selection on the Layer Mask and then used Selection > Clear to make everything except the branch black. Now the RGB noise layer would only affect the branch in the corner.

Now, since pure balck & white noise isn’t exactly a natural occurrence, it was time to bring some colour into it. Making sure the RGB noise layer was selected and not the layer mask (notice the white border around the grey noise in the Layers list, rather than around the mostly black layer mask to its right), the Colorize dialogue was brought up from the menu Colors > Colorize. The Hue and Saturation slider were adjusted to create a leaf green. Here the saturation slider has been set to 100 to heighten the effect, but that should be lower to fit in with the natural colours in the image.

Perfectly sharp noise is also unnatural so the noise layer was then blurred using the Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur dialogue set to 10 pixels to create a more muted noise effect. To complete this attempt to add detail to the clipped highlight, the noise layer was set to the Dissolve mode which creates a mosaic-like noise effect on the image below, and layer was also duplicated with the top copy set to the Burn mode to darken the highlight area using the noise as a template, with a lowered opacity to make it blend in.

The dual noise layers did a decent job of adding some detail to the highlight and even helped recover some of the edge details of the branch. I wouldn’t say the dissolve and burn layer modes are the definitive method to achieve this effect. In fact, the dissolve mode can be quite distracting in most images, but I hope this gives you an idea as to the sort of thinking that can help you experiment with the various modes to achieve the effect you need.

The final layer-adjusted image above is quite strong and would be enough of an improvement in most cases, but I thought the image could still be pushed a little more for that extra dramatic flair.

Monochrome Layers For Dramatic Images

No matter what political and social arguments can be put forward about the dangers of the supposedly new issue of manipulated images, there is no such thing as a real photograph. Every photo is a representation, either a limited one, or a heightened one, based on what the equipment is able to record. So there is no less validity in processing an image to create the desired effect as there is in trying to make it “real”.

Since this little experiment started with the need to create a dramatic image, I thought I’d try bringing in the power of B&W into the mix. While a conversion of a colour image into monochrome isn’t always desirable, black & white images do have a sense of drama and a graphic starkness to them that few will deny. So even if you don’t want to lose colour information, a monochrome layer can often help you push an image into pleasingly dramatic territory. I flattened all the layers that I’d created thus far and made a new image file to work on from this step forward. Such consolidation is often necessary when working on large images, for both your sanity and that of your computer hardware.

I duplicated the image layer to create a B&W version to play with. The simplest way to do the conversion is through the Colors > Desaturate menu, which will convert the current layer to monochrome using the setting provided. For many images, it can do a decent job of it, but there are other methods too.

The B&W conversion method that can provide the most dramatic flair, I find, is a GEGL operation in GIMP simply called c2g (colour to greyscale). It can be accessed in the menu under Tools > GEGL Operation, and then selecting c2g from the drop-down list.

This c2g operation can be very slow and processor intensive, so use it and make settings changes with care, especially if the live preview is enabled. It allows for 3 settings. Radius is a pixel size that is considered to create the range of greys. Setting it to around the width of your image will give you good results. Samples should be used with care because a higher number makes for a smoother image, but anything more than an increase of a few points can bring older computers to their knees. Increasing Iterations is also meant to improve quality, but the effect isn’t clear enough to bother with in most cases. Using mostly modest settings, I created a c2g version of the image on a new layer.

Considering the very high contrast look of the images produced by the c2g method, I set the layer opacity to 50% to temper the effect on the colour image, and blended the layer using the Darken only mode. This way the white areas of the c2g image wouldn’t effect the colours while the dark areas would deepen the shadows and provide more visual depth.

A final touch was to add a darkened vignette effect to the edges of the image. This was achieved by creating a new layer filled with a plain black. I then created a layer mask for it to control how much of it shows through. To create the vignette itself, the layer mask was filled with a radial black-to-white gradient with the whites towards the edges, so that the black fill of the layer would show through. The Colors > Brightness/Contrast adjustments were used to tweak the gradient as needed, and the vignette layer was then set to the Soft light blending mode to allow it to darken the edges without completely drowning them in black.

I am generally happy with the final result, because it corrects the problems with the image and also manages to achieve the drama that was missing. Having said that, it’s not perfect and I’m sure more tinkering would yield better results at various steps in the process described. Also, there are always options such as cropping to solve some of the issues, which were not considered for this particular walk though. The noisy highlight at the top left is an improvement, but the image would be a lot better if that top horizontal band of the photograph were removed completely to create a more wide-screen format image, for example.

These and many other improvements are possible and entirely different ones will be possible with the particular image you try these methods on. The purpose of this exercise has been less to tutor you in exact techniques and more to expose you to the thought process of trying to correct images. Once you understand more of that you will be better equipped to adapt your techniques to the need of the individual images and your intended effects for them.

Most of all, experiment, and learn your way around the software and the way layered editing works. Your photographs will be better for it.

Samir

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.

When the monsoon passed, these three or four bricks lay scattered in front of the stairs quite senselessly in the summer. Of course, they wouldn’t stick around for too long. Eventually some galli cricket (street cricket) crew would run out of stray objects to use as their wicket, and the precious life-giving bricks would be stolen away, once again to leave the good people of Paraag building at the mercy of the coming deluge.

One day, at some point before the rains arrived, the bricks were thrown around as always and someone had the brainwave that this thing could be made steal-proof, and into a permanent solution for future monsoon seasons. The local mason was called, I’m sure his advice was taken on the cheapest solution, and a half bag of cement was poured like dough right over where the slip-shod bricks stood by chance and stray kicks from careless feet in the darkness of night. The next morning, in the shadow of the Jaam tree that canopied over that little front yard of the building, this strange misshapen bridge led from the stairs to the middle of nowhere. In this case, the middle of nowhere happened to be the place along the slope of the muddy yard where the water reached acceptable civilised levels of monsoon yuckiness.

It soon rained, and the bridge worked fairly well, although when the torrent was extra-heavy the water would go over even that device. What it did for the compound though, which I’m sure was not in the civil engineer’s plan for the ambitious bridge, was to divide the waters that flooded the front yard in two. You stepped off the stairs and to your right was the majority of the yard that formed a large shallow puddle that would seep into the soil in time. To the left was a smaller portion of the yard, guarded by a head-high tree with little white flowers, which we would often pluck to suck out the meagre nectar from. That portion of the newly dammed yard was deeper, and maybe because of the small tree, the water would stick around there for quite a while longer than in the other half.

Thus the waters were divided in the front yard and the left pool was always deeper than the right. The large pool on the right had the mentioned canopy of a large pink-fruited Jaam (wax apple) tree that loomed over it. The tree was technically in the next compound, but trees have very little respect for real-estate boundaries. The left side pool had the little flowering shrub, and it had a sparse canopy of another Jaam tree, this one the white-fruited variety, that hung over it. An old Ashoka (Mast) tree stood in the corner, before the yard led into a widish path that led towards the street between buildings. When it rained, the smaller deeper pool would be a shimmering mess of droplets attacking the surface, while the large shallow pool in the shadow of the tree’s canopy would be quite detached, with the large droplets of collected water from the 3-storey-high leaves making giant ripples in the overgrown puddle.

For paper-boat-making children, the new cement bridge was a mixed blessing, at best. On the one hand it had cut off the yard so that you had to choose which side to deposit your vessel in, if you were going to step down for that. If you were going to be brave and drop the boat from my Grandmother’s first-floor balcony, it had to be the large shallow puddle which it over-looked. But, on the other hand, the deeper puddle off to the left could sustain a well made boat for hours, and with the eddies and currents formed around the bark of the flowering shrub, the boat would make its own complex voyages around its little ocean.

Still, the large puddle that covered two-thirds of the yard had its attraction, beyond the ease of a dropped boat. It was large, but also more adventurous because there was always the danger of your perfectly crafted vessel being downed by a good solid droplet from on of the leaves above. More frustratingly, the pool shallowed out towards the edges very quickly and many were the brave explorers who were grounded on treacherous land before their time. Thankfully we were patient, and not beyond the adventure of sneaking down in the rain and setting a grounded boat adrift again; Gods playing with the fate of imaginary heroes, watching their every move, hoping for the winds to be favourable.

On some occasions, when were were truly in the mood for seafaring, we would step down to the ground-floor, sit in the meagre shade of the little landing at the base of the wooden stairs, protected from the elements, and old school notebooks would be plundered. Boats were built and launched, and the misshapen cement bridge acted as fancy jetty into the very heart of the vast divided ocean.

Companions at our shipyard at the bottom of the stairs varied over time and with occasion. There were always my cousins who lived in the suburbs, who would often stay over during holidays. There was this little girl who was the niece of the Bengali lady who lived down-stairs. She visited during a few summer vacations from Calcutta. Well, she was not little then, slightly older than me, ever active, vaguely bossy, and always wearing a white petticoat.

There was also the resident cat, who would sit there to get out of the rain, only to be shooed away by the Mangalorean family who lived across one half of the ground-floor. They were used to doing this from the many visits of the fish monger to their door step when the cat would try to insert itself into the proceedings. When driven away on these rainy occasions, it would run off, stand a little away and stare back with a look that seemed to say, “I’m not here for the fish this time fools!”, and then wander off in that vaguely disdainful way of cats.

Also, at the base of the stairs, in the mud, were an ever growing population of earthworms, crawling up the masonry to escape the big deluge. I tried to step around them carefully as far as possible, and while none were knowingly harmed, one or two might have been sent off on voyages by sea. It seemed like the decent thing to do considering I couldn’t go myself.

Many discoveries were made there in the rain. The best way to make the standard origami boat. How important it was to have that little hat of air at the bottom, to keep it from tipping over on its side. And also new boats and new tricks. Either by some serendipitous folding from a paper balloon design, or with some instigation by someone else, (I don’t remember now, although it seems like something I could have come up with) eventually we discovered a floating boat-like thing that looked like a tank with a gun-turret in front. Soon entire navy fleets were setting off, and since the design was a blow-up rather than an open vessel, it often survived longer if the paper was stiff enough.

In time, double-hulled boats were tried, and even sail boats, although I never had much luck with those. And then an Italian gondola was attempted, which like all my initial origami knowledge was supplied by my Father painstakingly having learnt it somewhere and repeating it for me till I got it right.

Eventually the fun would stop. Other more concerned parents would order their children back into their houses, or my Mother would give in to my Grandmother’s proclamations of the end of the world and a calamity of children’s health of galactic proportions, and I’d climb up the wooden stairs with the smooth banister and head home. Heads would be vigorously treated with precious dry towels, clothes might be changed, and then I’d be back leaning over the balcony checking the progress of my comrades on the waters.

In later years, when the school frenzy reached new heights, there were no vacations in India during the usual monsoon season, and these chances diminished. In time the cement bridge was demolished and the entire compound was tiled in stone; Some all-encompassing municipal order to avoid stagnation and mosquitoes, and just like that the seas were gone.

Now the rains fall and the leaves drop their droplets in a shallow film of water over the stone. There is still suffering to be had in the rains for those who insist, but for some strange reason, even though I don’t have to, when a torrent is on and I’m heading towards home, I will always follow the path where the old brick and cement bridge used to stand. There are no oceans on either side any more, no stepping stones to step on, but my feet are sure and my mind set on not disturbing the sailing grounds of all the adventurers who sailed before.

Samir

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.

I am often asked by people much better read than me, whether I have read their favourites from the recommended reading list, be it a Victorian classic or a modern fantasy marvel. More often than not, I haven’t read them, because I never followed the recommended reading lists and because I simply haven’t had the time. Think about it, the most common sort of book, the novel, is hundreds of years old. Many of its classic examples are from the early decades of its existence, but ever since then that list of recommended novels has been growing every year. There are the popular but well regraded yarns, there are the much awarded and much lauded brilliances, and there are the cult favourites that grow in popularity with time and discussion. All these are recommended, and with time, it becomes more and more impossible to read even a minor selection of them, if you wish to do anything in life besides read. That’s not even considering the other forms of book in both fiction and non-fiction.

Obviously, doing nothing but reading in life is a possibility, either as off-hours entertainment or as your work, if you’re one of those few people who worked their way into the position of a book reviewer or other commentator on literature. On some days it might be a chore, but on most days you are doing what you love for a living. If you are a writer and not just a reader, however, losing yourself in the created world of others is not a healthy option for your craft. For a writer, reading is an education but education is also the easiest form of procrastination, especially when it comes as easily as to a writer.

When I walk through the doors of a large bookshop, especially one with a sprawling fiction section, with its multiple aisles of carefully segregated genres and wonderfully balanced stacks of best-sellers, I am at once overwhelmed and also taken over by a form of book-lust. Those among you who would consciously admit to your bibliophilia will know what I am talking about. For that moment, you are utterly consumed by an impulse to read absolutely everything in front of you and posses every beautiful edition of every middling piece of franchise fantasy, because you are besotted and that is how lust works. Then your rationality kicks in, to some extent, and you resolve to not give in completely to your impulses. You lose yourself among the sweet smelling aisles and you come out either victorious against the overwhelming paperback hordes, or having come to a respectable compromise between your spending money and your book lust.

Respectable compromises are a relative and varied thing. I know many people who likely dispose most of their disposable income on books, and quite random ones at that. Not necessarily good ones or memorable ones or collector’s editions or special editions, just any books. They are addicted to reading. They’re reading all the time, every day of he week, every hour of the day, and when they’re not, they’re either pretending to work at a job or bragging in various social circles about all the books they just read.

Some of them even have ambitions as writers. I understand the feeling completely, they would be writing right now, but they really need to read more to hone their craft, to absorb the techniques of the masters, to ridicule the foibles of the literary quacks, to criticise the uneven sentence formation of the popular authors with their long-running book series and their populist fan followings. They need to learn more and then their masterpieces will be written. I know that most of them will never write.

No one ever became a master chef by eating a lot and doing little else. No one became a magician of culinary flavours by only analysing the preparations of others and never crying over an onion. The only way to learn how to write, to write well, and maybe even become a “writer”, if you must, is to write, and the more you read without control, the less that is likely to ever happen.

Sure you can fool yourself into lauding your continuing education in the craft of the written word, but all you’re learning to do is read, if that. Writing is a whole different ball game and you know it. You know why there are so many mediocre writers out there who are published in glossy paper backs so that you can question their intelligence and their literary merit? Because they’re the only ones who bothered to show up everyday, write, and finish their manuscripts. The rest of you literary geniuses were too busy raiding bookshops, obsessing over thematic inconsistencies, and arguing the pros and cons of race and gender archetypes in genre fiction.

In writing, as in every creative field, there is a fairly strict divide between the two sides of the realm: there are the creators and the consumers. The creators might start off as consumers and continue to be consumers at a very limited and discerning level, but the real consumers always remain consumers and do nothing else. To write, you have to make that transition from being a consumer to being a creator. You have to build up your skills and more importantly your confidence to put your effort where your mouth is and do the work. Reading all the books in the world and being able to spot grammatical niggles at twenty paces will make you a very good consumer, a very opinionated consumer even, but never a writer. A writer writes. A writer writes a lot, and consistently, and bravely, and against all odds, and against better judgement and many detractors.

Unfortunately, most of us choose to be detractors. It’s easier. It’s so much easier to tell someone what they’ve done wrong after spending a few hours with a book than it is to spend the few months or few years writing it, and revising it, and revising it again. It’s so much easier to read and read and imagine you are creating a better writer within than to write more and actual learn to write better. It’s so much easier to be a serial escapist, forever losing yourself in the next imaginary cocoon of someone else’s work, rather than to face the harsh reality of wrestling with words and sentences and beating them into submission, and seducing them into poetry. It’s so much easier to be a book lover and aspiring writer than to actually ever have the courage to write.

The next time you find yourself in one of those situations where you’re surrounded by the temptation of fresh, crisp, reading material, where the plump prose and the sensual covers call out to you to posses them and make them your own, hold back a second. Before you give in to your bookish instincts, decide on whether you want to write or you want to be a reader who forever deludes themselves with grand claims of wanting to be a writer. I can tell you categorically that wanting to be a writer is a lot easier, and a lot more glamorous in the mind. Writing on the other hand is hard work, a slow process, and what you write is guaranteed to be misunderstood or misinterpreted by everyone who reads it. But writing is better, because then you would have written, and you will have created, and you can let the other weaklings worry about your own seductions that call out to them from the shelves and trap unsuspecting readers in their embrace.

Samir

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.

Departing completely from the first trilogy of X-Men films, X-Men: First Class takes us back in time to the beginnings of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, to the story of how they met and became the central figures of the X-Men mythos, as we see later in the comic books and movies. Set in the 60s, before and during the Cuban missile crisis, it takes us through how Charles Xavier first begins his quest to find and help his fellow mutants, trying to be a positive force in the greater humanity, and how it leads to the birth of the X-Men, and Professor X as we know him, and Magneto.

This strange faux historical fiction of this fantasy universe allows the film to have a great cast of younger actors essaying all the roles, and makes for a film that is a lot younger in mood and more cavalier in spirit. A wise decision that takes this film well above the forced gravity of most super-hero stories in recent times. X-Men: First Class gets what comic books most often get right over other mediums, and that is to concentrate on the story, the entertainment and the engagement of the imagination, while letting issues and subtext be a secondary layer of the magic trick. The earlier movies were a little prone to let subtext take over the proceedings and it is wonderful to see these stories return to their roots.

It’s difficult to critique or praise very specific elements of X-Men: First Class, because while it leaves you remembering the minutest of details, it works so well as a whole package that singling out smaller technical aspects would turn into extremely repetitive gushing or petty nit-picking. The sounds, the visuals and the camera work are all extremely convincing. Director of photography, John Mathieson‘s not too dramatic camera work is an essential element to the straight-forward mood of this film. That might sound like a consolation rather than praise, but it is a huge challenge to not go overboard with visual drama, especially as technology makes it easier to play with light and camera work. Mathieson has much dramatic photography in his portfolio of films, so the good, solid, clean photography here was obviously a conscious decision. The same can be said for the CG and special effects department, which has done just enough to convey what needs to be, but never too much. This restraint pays dividends in keeping this film focussed on the important stuff.

The important stuff I am referring to is the cast, without whose frankly stellar performances, this film would still be a vaguely dubious artefact. Jennifer Lawrence plays a younger Mystique with an adolescent innocence which is a great foil to the provocative nature of the character in future times. Zoë Kravitz as Angel Salvadore, Caleb Landry Jones as Banshee, Lucas Till as Havok, and Edi Gathegi as Darwin are all sufficiently filled with promise and teenage bravado in their roles, and Nicholas Hoult plays an endearing young Hank McCoy/Beast. However, when they’re on it, the screen undoubtedly belongs to Michael Fassbender as Eric and James McAvoy as Charles, because that’s who they are here, Eric and Charles, with none of the baggage that comes with being Magneto and Professor X.

McAvoy plays Charles Xavier with an intelligent frivolity that makes him endearingly human. His trying too hard to be a charming, normal human being while using his extraordinary powers to help, makes for very entertaining viewing. Fassbender is a revelation of a different kind. His lines are few and crisp, and he brings a true vulnerability and intensity to the haunted Erik Lehnsherr that has you cheering for him throughout the film, even into his inevitable role as Magneto. Fassbender does such moving things with his face in this film, that his on-screen ability to manipulate metal pales in comparison. My compliments to the crew for making an action film that relies so much on close-ups, giving the actors the latitude to work their true powers.

The one stray dubious artefact of this cast is January Jones as Emma Frost. Her on-screen presence is cold in all the wrong ways and she never seems to quite get into any character other than her own. The choice to use her reminds me very much of Halle Berry as Storm in the previous movies (more on that later), but in this case it is a minor irritant in an otherwise marvellous film. A big part of the marvel of it comes in the form of the Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw. He’s quite brilliant as a middle-aged Nazi scientist who taps into Erik’s powers when he is a kid, and he’s resplendent as a more youthful super-powered version of himself later on in the story. He makes a worthy villain to the piece, and Emma Frost thankfully blends into the background while hanging off his arm.

While the Director, Matthew Vaughn has been involved in film-making for a long time in various capacities, his list of credits as director is now only four films long, including X-Men:First Class. His first, Layer Cake, was a gritty and stylish crime thriller, and it could have been single-handedly responsible for getting Daniel Craig the role of James Bond. Stardust was a beautiful fantasy fable that I thoroughly enjoyed, and now comes First Class, which as I mentioned before, is quite possibly the best comic book movie ever, for the fact that it’s not only entertaining and gripping but manages to get the superhero team dynamic to work on the big screen. No small task. Vaughn has a wonderfully varied repertoire and I am now very curious to see Kick-Ass, his only directorial venture I haven’t seen yet.

The first X-Men movie was a great piece of action fantasy, and Bryan Singer (who was still involved in the story and production of this film) got a lot right in setting the tone for what superhero movies could be. You had Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, who will ever forget Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, and Halle Berry as Storm. Wait, what?! Yes, exactly, those films suffered from their own big budgettedness (that is too a word), and due to their expensive star-cast and similar extravagances, they famously had to cut back on a lot of ideas. For example the idea of showing the winged Angel character was cut because the special effects shot with the CG wings was too expensive for the short homage that it was. Another thing they obviously cut out was any true attempt at having team battles. Every fight took place between two isolated characters and happened in sequence, giving the films the feeling of a very high budget beat-em-up video game at times. A team superhero movie without the team fighting and acting together at most times lost part of the point of tackling the X-Men on the big screen. And then they started doing some really strange things with the sequels. So pointless was the third film in my mind that I’ve never even bothered to watch the one-off Wolverine film.

The reason I’ve spent so much time talking about the (now) old X-Men films is that as astonishingly good as X-Men: First Class is in isolation, it is even more remarkable in how it improves on the earlier trilogy by cutting back. I remember the older films (mostly the first one) and their drama, and the some of the action set pieces, and broad things like that, but very few of the characters and their stories come to mind, because those movies were just not paying as much attention to the human element. The spectacle and subtext did take over, in spite of them starring many of my favourite actors. X-Men: First Class, in comparison, is first and foremost a human story, and it is a celebration of human stories brought to the foreground using these more-than-human characters. The film works because of all the things they hint at but don’t elaborate on; I would gladly watch an entire film of Eric Lehnsherr tracking down former Nazis for revenge, or Charles Xavier’s adventures in Academia, or Charles and Eric scouting for mutant talent (which is included in a great little montage in this film), or even the two of them training themselves and their team to control their powers. All those things would make for great material in isolation and yet these people manage to put all of it into one film that both fulfils your every comic book dream and also leaves you wanting more.

X-Men: First Class is one of those films you start watching and you can’t stop watching, with your eyes shifting away from the screen only when the credits role. That is a rare commodity, even in the spectacle-a-minute film-making of the times. While I wouldn’t force the topic, I would love to see a sequel, or several sequels, or prequels, or any one of those side stories I have already mentioned, because what this cast and crew has started here is good and I hope it is the sign of more and better things to come. Stories about superheroes that depend so much on the human element in such an effortless manner deserve to survive longer. Even if they don’t in practice, they will in spirit, because I think Matthew Vaughn has a deft hand at crafting fables, no matter what world or time they’re set in.

Samir

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.

Here is where it gets tricky, and why size matters more than you might think in this battle between two very human forces. When we think of two balanced opposing forces, we think of evenly matched adversaries; that is how balances work. But I’m sorry to inform you that fear doesn’t play fair. Either fear is a denser and heavier creature than creativity, which is why it so easily weighs you down, or perhaps it has simply studied the laws of physics carefully to get itself more leverage and have a stronger effect. Fear takes a lot more than a balanced force to beat.

To guarantee a win against this negative, you need to do more than put in a satisfactory effort, or even a healthy competition of positive. Instead, you need to completely decimate and overwhelm the fear with your creativity, only then will your schemes succeed over those of fear’s. Your success will usually be in direct proportion to how overboard you go.

There are some fathomable reasons for fear’s disproportional strength over our hearts and minds, and they come down to two aspects that both fear and creativity share, that of imagination and emotion. Imagination is the content of what we see in our mind’s eye, what we dream and what we hope, but also what we fear. And no piece of imagination is devoid of emotion. How visceral and tangible that emotion is, decides how clearly and how honestly we imagine what we do. What we imagine and the strength of the related emotion can be both in the direction of fear or of creativity. The reason fear often wins is that what fear imagines is often so much more concrete and basic, and the feelings attached so much stronger.

The common subjects of fear are extremely real and go down to our simplest instincts for survival. Death, disease and destitution are practical things that stare us in the face on a regular basis, either overtly or on the fringes of our experience, making them difficult to dismiss without adequate force of will and hope. Hope comes in the form of our creativity, the things we wish to build, to do, to achieve and the strength of emotion with which we think about them. The scale of these dreams and hopes and the raw feeling behind them must massively outweigh those of our fears for us to ignore them, loosen their power over us, and get the ball rolling towards the positive side of this equation.

If you want to be creative, if you want that positive bent of mind, that urge to create anew and imagine fresh possibilities to define your being, dream big, think big, imagine at scales never imagined before. Then inject that imagination with a strength of feeling few reasonable people would dare dabble in, because there is no moderation in this contest. If you give in to being reasonable, you lose, and fear wins another easy victory.

There is a further warning to heed. If you are trying to do anything that is even mildly creative, you need to deal with not only your own fears but also those of others, for you see fear is quick to recruit allies. Eventually, someone you care about and who cares about you is bound to advise you in all seriousness and in utter concern that you must be reasonable in the things you wish for, hope for, and work towards. If you’re serious about your dreams, I can offer only one piece of advice: Smile, say no to them nicely, if an answer is required, and go out there and be us unreasonably creative as you can be.

Samir

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.

I started making websites in the good old days of static HTML, with no CSS styles in sight. It was all HTML code with FONT tags and baroque TABLE based layouts all stacked careful to make a pleasing final result. Very soon I decided I needed to make a site of my own to showcase some of my work, so with a few client sites under my belt (yes, I got paid to make websites for other people before I made my own), I set out to make a graphically rich portfolio of my work. It was meant to be more impressive than comprehensive, and the site needed to be tiny and quick. I was still using a dial-up connection at the time, as were most people I knew, and I was going to host it on a free account to get my feet wet. I knew little about web hosting and domain names at the time, and as a student, free was a great price to start with.

My first static portfolio site, in 2001, was quite a masterpiece of simple HTML, enhanced well by low-colour imagery to keep file sizes to the minimum. I balanced out the need for fewer colours by using large and bold graphical elements. Much of my subsequent graphical identity in print and web came from some of the patterns and decisions made for that initial site.

When I was freed of academia, I wanted to finally start learning things I knew I wanted to do. It was 2003 and the buzz around blogging was well on its way, but being a hands on person, I was never willing to have my blog on one of the few free blogging services back then. I wanted to do things from scratch and understand them, so I decided to start a blog about redesigning my site and also learning 3D graphics in Blender using a self-hosted Perl script. As a result I learnt more about web applications and content management scripts than any college education could have given me. The blog was added as a section on my old static HTML portfolio. In time, I did learn quite a bit about blender, and blogging, but real-world client work started to pick up, my portfolio site grew outdated and the blog died from the simple lack of time and attention.

A year or so later, in the thick of client-work frenzy, I realised I needed to have at least a basic portfolio online to share with potential clients, so I cannibalised an abandoned plan for my site’s redesign and used a negative of the graphic style I had come up with to make a simple single page portfolio of thumbnails of my work that clients could browse. For a few years that was my only online presence.

By the end of 2006, I had gone through a couple of further iterations of my simple one-page portfolio. My joy at client work was beginning to diminish and there was the urge to learn new things again. The previous year and earlier that year I had taken on a few CMS-based web site projects which had given me a good understanding of Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. I had just setup my first WordPress site for a client (why learn for free when you can get someone to pay you to learn?), and I had the urge to revive my old blog, this time using the much more flexible WordPress platform. The plan was to revive the old blog and mix into it my static single page portfolio, with the grand plan of eventually making a full fledged portfolio gallery system that would be easy to keep updated with both new work and new thoughts.

That is how I came to the site I have now as I write this. A fairly active blog of involved articles and a static Works page. But the shiny dynamic portfolio system never materialised, and since my interest in traditional client work diminished, there was less reason to hurry. I have not being hurrying on that for three years now.

Meanwhile, the blog has grown, I have become active on Twitter, and since this was only the second WordPress site I ever created, I have come to realise that on a technical level it is a lot of crap. Granted, I have made plenty of improvements in functionality and speed over the years, but there are some things you just can’t tackle without a ground-up rewrite. Also, I have been practising my technique and my ideas. My design studio site Primordial Soop finally started last year with an updatable, dynamic portfolio system using WordPress’s new custom posts system, and more recently, I even started a design blog on that site that has a lot better code and styling features than this site. It’s about time I translated all those skills back to the site that started it all and still remains my most well known and well visited online presence.

What needs to be done

Portfolio, portfolio portfolio

From the beginning, the need to show my work was the main stay of the site, then my first experiments with blogging took over, and then the single page portfolio again. My current site merges the single page portfolio with my reasonably active blog. My dream of a comprehensive system to display my work was never realised.

What I want to create is not a portfolio in the traditional sense, in that it is not meant to showcase my most impressive work to catch the interest of clients. My need is to create a comprehensive online archive to show all my work that is worthy of display. This will include not only graphics but also writing and will be made as much for myself as for sharing with others. Few manage to create a complete archive of their major and minor works, especially if you’ve been as prolific and wide-ranging as I have been in bits, but I would like to try.

Minimise and streamline

The current site is a standard WordPress blog with a Works page added in. It behaves like a blog, looks like a blog and works like one. I started it at a time when blogs were notoriously crowded with widgets and side-bar options and all manner of visual and textual clutter. While I have reduced some of this over the years, the site needs to be re-thought, both to make a cleaner blog, and also to create a site that is more than just a blog and has a separate identity for the different sections and kinds of content.

Portal magic

With time, I have created other places online where I share my thoughts and exist, so to speak. There are services like Twitter, and there are also a number of new focussed sites I have begun work on. As of this writing there is the Primordial Soop blog called Origin of Life, and also the technical and content management blog Content Deliverance, but I fully expect for other such long dormant ideas to spring into action in the future. Considering these many tentacles of my interest, my site, and more specifically its home page, needs to be transformed into a portal that displays and informs the reader of the breadth of my interests and also about all my various articles, posts and activities around the web, as they happen. SamirBharadwaj.com needs to become a portal to my online thoughts.

Tagging, thumbnails and theatre

WordPress was a fairly simplistic blogging platform when I started with it many years ago. Since then it has grown by leaps and bounds into a much richer blogging experience and a viable content management system for multiple varieties of content.

Some built-in features that are now possible but weren’t when I began this site are tags and post thumbnails. I made do with inherited and new categories to organise my blog posts at the time, buy I have since tamed the rough edges of redundant categories and would very much like to implement a useful system of tagging for the blog. While some work has begun in the background since the feature was included, my front-end theme was never designed with tags in mind and so a redesign is mandatory.

On the more visual side of things, post-thumbnails used to require plugins to implement, but now is a native feature of WordPress. Considering I’ve always gone out of the way to have all my posts supported with illustrations or other imagery, a clever use and integration of post thumbnails is well overdue for a better and more navigable user experience on the site. That combined with the to-be-built portfolio stream will make a comprehensive use of image thumbnails possible. As these different sections of the site, blog, portfolio, and possibly others, begin to appear there is going to be a need to maintain a site-wide visual identity while also making the demarcation clear to the reader. First and foremost, a reader must always know their location in the site. To that end, section-specific graphics, backgrounds and similar visual cues will need to be implemented, to make this site all it can be, creating unique sets to make the story clear.

These are the main issues and requirements I have in mind for the redesign of this website. Many technical changes, such as the removal of extraneous categories and the consolidation of posts into more logical divisions, has already begun. This leaves tagging and finally the re-engineering of the site structure and theme to accommodate the new functionality.

The trick is going to be in creating something revolutionary while being evolutionary. I have generally liked the look of this site, as have many of you, and it does have a strong visual identity. That and the fact that I have never felt I pushed this look and layout to its maximum potential with this iteration of the site layout, means I’m going to have to change a lot without destroying what works. That is always a tough ask and much more challenging than starting from a blank page, but whether or not I succeed in this mission only time will tell.

Samir

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.

The realm of Asgard, in all its gilded magnificence is where a lot of the story unfolds, adding weight and gravity to this tale. In a different time this part would have been either glossed over for a lack of ability to execute it visually, or it would have been made a mockery of by the half-hearted attempts at rendering such a fantastic place real on celluloid. Today, computer graphics come to the rescue and Asgard is a true wonder to behold. It is created with splendour and nuance, majesty and intelligence, and some of the interpretations of the old sights from the comic are bound to bring a smile to your face for their beauty and cleverness.

It is, however, the human element that will make this film a lasting favourite. Chris Hemsworth is variously gallant, a buffoon, vulnerable and thoughtful as Thor, a feat that is admirable considering how easy it would have been to make this character a caricature in a costume. There could have been no more grand a choice for Odin than Anthony Hopkins, who plays the role with great restraint and understated power. Thor’s Asgardian friends in arms add a welcome texture to the story and they are ably assayed by Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Dallas, and Jamie Alexander. In a fleeting role as Thor’s mother Frigga, Rene Russo makes you wish her role was more involved, but she is good while she’s around.

On Earth, Stellan Skarsgård and Kat Dennings bring in healthy doses of mirth playing colleagues of Jane Foster, a central character in the comics, and Thor’s human love-interest. Here Jane is played by Natalie Portman and is now a physicist rather than a nurse, to fit her into the updated mythos of the story. Portman is effervescent and accomplished as Jane and plays an enthusiastic and smitten young scientist with a casual flair, a welcome foil to her more intense roles of recent times.

For me the best surprise was Tom Hiddleston, who plays Loki in the most balanced and un-theatrical way that you can imagine in so theatrical a story. This film fleshes out Thor’s brother as a much more complete character than you expect of antagonists in comic-book movies, and his intensity and earnestness make him the one to watch on screen when he is in his element.

All these choices of character and motivation can be assigned in no small part to Kenneth Branagh, who not just gets these sometimes intense and sometimes frivolous performances out of his cast, but also chooses the best techniques in capturing the performance and enhancing the effect on the audience. With the help of Director of Photography Haris Zambarloukos, Thor makes liberal use of close-up shots of faces, a strange choice for a film of so much spectacle, but the camera’s intimacy grounds this story very much in humanity, and the experience is vastly better for it. Branagh has a strong directorial style that, as in the case of masters of storytelling in any medium, dissolves into the background until you specifically pay attention to it. This balance between subtle and flamboyant is a thread that runs through every aspect of this film and is what makes it work.

As they managed to do with Iron Man, Marvel have created a version of Thor, possibly their most super-human and theatrical character, that is mythical and yet intimately human. Most importantly, Thor is extremely entertaining and consistently humorous throughout its running time. The point of comic books, beyond their many subtleties, was always to be entertaining and grand, and Thor manages both with style while switching effortlessly between the realms of a vast cosmos and a small town in New Mexico. That is no small feat for a story about a man with a red cape and a magic hammer, but this one strikes the perfect note. I for one will await Thor’s return in The Avengers with more than a cautious optimism.

Samir