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.

Alexa Brown

Alexa is an actress and a model, living in London and travelling to the far flung corners of the British Isles and beyond, as she battles rodents, spiders and runaway cars for her craft. She is also a freelance writer.

She received her first camera as a free gift with her bank account, and has since used a Polaroid camera, a series of unglamorous phone cams, and some disposables. The pictures here were taken with A Sony Ericsson K800i, an iPhone 3G and a 3GS.

Alexa Brown can be found at her website and @alexabrown on Twitter. She assures me she will be the official announcer of Government safety warnings at the Apocalypse, so I feel it prudent to follow her daily musings.

Andrea McLeod

Andrea is from Brisbane, but now lives, breathes and practices her Hindi skills on the unsuspecting passengers of Mumbai’s local trains. She loves travelling, cameras, good books, good food, and bad movies, which she used to write reviews for at some point. In her day job, she works for Help A Child, an NGO that funds the higher education of deserving students from the villages of India.

When she was 12, Andrea was gifted her first film camera, and she’s been clicking away ever since. She was a reluctant convert to digital photography and has stuck to phone cams and cheap point-and-shoot compacts. Most of her images below were taken with a Blackberry 8520 phone and a Kodak C613 compact.

Andrea McLeod can be found at her hibernating blog (which she should be goaded into restarting) and @andreaclear on Twitter. I follow her for her uncanny skill of staring blankly at computer screens while wondering what she wanted to do.

Leena

Leena practices immigration law in Oakland, CA. She also dabbles in writing, music, acting, and radio presentation on the side, and would be very happy to add Resourceful Slacker to her list of credentials. Who am I to refuse a worthy request?

She is the officially designated paparazzi among friends and has owned a series of cheap Sony and Canon compacts since she was in college. This selection of her photographs was taken with an iPhone 3GS and a hot pink Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Yes, of course, the hot pink is important photographic information; Have I taught you people nothing?

Leena can be found at her blog and @leenark on Twitter. Her short updates on her road trips are interesting to me because I like road trips and she has a lot more road to play with than I do.

Neelima

Neelima, by her own admission, lives in a galaxy far far away. Needless to say she loves movies, and writing about them, and ranting about them, like all wonderful people from far-off galaxies. This, her travels, and theatre she likes to blog about. She is also rumoured to be the first wave of an alien invasion force trying to brainwash unsuspecting humans with propaganda from the alien plant people, but you didn’t hear it from me.

Since the days of film, Neelima has always liked carrying a camera with her on her travels. She used a Canon PowerShot SD790 IS to take the images below, which she graduated to after she smashed the LCD screen of her older Canon IXY with a laptop. How medieval!

Neelima can be found at her blog and @gobbledyspook on Twitter. We may or may not have been separated during childhood at the fair grounds, Bollywood style. I’m waiting for tell-tale signs that she’s the evil sibling in this story.

Vivia

Vivia lives on a very picturesque village lane somewhere in Suffolk. So it’s a good thing she likes the countryside. She also enjoys gardening, swimming, cycling, maps, drawing, and clouds, many of which show up in her pictures. On a more sombre note, this brave woman battles with a life-long and debilitating allergy to ironing.

She comes from a family of social photographers, her Grandfather even developed his own pictures. At 10 she was handed her first Kodak Instamatic film camera and cameras have been constant companions ever since. She loves the idea of capturing and sharing snapshots of what she sees, and depends on very traditional wisdom for her pictures, such as going in closer and always saving one picture in the can (Wow! I haven’t heard that gem in way too long). All the images below were taken with her trusty iPhone.

Vivia can be found on her blog and @Farctum on Twitter. Her #floweroftheday posts are the perfect thing to brighten up your day, if, like me, you enjoy plants and flowers. But I’m really just after her mopping secrets.

An ode to bad cameras and the women who use them

This post started as a simple exercise in showcasing the good work of people who might not consider themselves serious photographers, and were producing great results with technically limited cameras. It just so happened that those I knew who fit the profile happened to be women, and it made for a really cool title.

The ladies included in this little gallery were extremely gracious to let me tinker with their photographs, and in some cases even gave me access to their large personal collection of images so that I might have more to choose from. I can’t thank them enough.

If there’s one pattern that emerges from the profiles above it is that all of them have a variety of interests, and are not satisfied with resting on their laurels. I think that need to do more and better shows through in the beautiful photography shown here. That attitude allows them to do wonders, regardless of any limitations of the equipment they use.

Putting this together was a lot of work, but more importantly, a lot of fun. I got to better appreciate some very talented people, and play with a lot of photographs and push them to their potential. I should do things like this more often. More Women With Bad Cameras perhaps, or Some More Persons of Un-specified Gender With Lousy Photographic Equipment. The possibilities are endless!

Until then, thank you for browsing, and if you have your own bad-camera stories, questions and ideas for me, or for the five real stars of this show, you should leave a comment below.

Samir

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.

2. Everyone is like me

We also like to assume that what we like is exactly what everyone else wants. We often use our own opinions as a measure of public opinion, to figure out what people want out of life, love, entertainment and any number of other human activities and interests. When it comes to what we accept from the world, we use our own feelings as a barometer of the feelings of everyone. In our likes and dislikes we assume everyone is like us.

3. Everyone does it

Everyone has been used by the individual to justify all manner of human stupidity, injustice, and irresponsibility since the beginning of time. Because everyone does something or thinks a certain way, this line of thought makes it an imperative that you follow suit, irrespective of the consequences or better judgement. Too often, everyone is used as the ultimate measure of right and wrong.

Unique like everyone else

On the one hand, we act self-assured in our uniqueness, separate from the rest of humanity. On the other hand we expect the rest of humanity to share our desires and choices, and use the choices of the unnamed masses to justify our actions. We go so far as to be disappointed when the majority disagrees with our pronouncements of aesthetics and good and bad, and hence holds back on their approval of us.

Assumption conundrum

In science and society we are warned not to make assumptions, but making assumptions is the way the human mind works. It is a strong evolutionary safety mechanism that helps us learn from past experiences and extrapolate the results to future events. Decisions could never be taken without assumptions because verification by direct observation is limited in its usefulness in many situations; By the time you have had the chance to observe something, it’s often too late to act on it.

Assuming a position of acceptance

Assumptions are necessary, but contradictory assumptions toss you into a confusing and counter-productive frame of mind. Either celebrate your uniqueness, accepting the inevitable mismatch of thoughts and ideals with others that results, or accept that you are part of the herd, and while you will live in the comfort of knowing you are in agreement with everyone out there, you are not as unique and radical as you would like to believe.

Don’t make assumptions

There is no right choice here, because each of us as has varying views on the balance of power between the individual and the system. To believe that you are both completely unique and also just like everyone else is not only the first step to a lot of suffering, it is also impractical and immensely silly.

So don’t make assumptions for everyone, and be comfortable with who you are, as unique or conforming as that might be.

Samir

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.

The Experiment

Being a very scientific sort of chap *cough*, I figured the best way to show you that good pictures had nothing to do with great cameras, was to prove it with examples. From this came my idea for an experiment. I would take both good and bad pictures with the best and the worst camera in my possession.

Having used and abused over half-a-dozen cameras since I was a child, I thought deciding on the best and the worst might be a challenge. But I very quickly settled on my current regular camera, the Canon G9, as the best one, and my currently active and ageing phone, the Sony Ericsson K500i, as the worst one. The G9 was bought about 2 years ago and is a semi-professional beast of a compact, which can take 12 megapixel (4000×3000 pixel) digital images in RAW format (the best option for the maximum quality), and the K500i, while being a good phone, is a really bad first-generation phone-camera from 5 years ago. It produces mostly crappy VGA (640×480 pixel) JPEG images.

I did look at my older cameras. I gathered up the film cameras I could find (pictured here) to consider them. There are a few more that are packed up somewhere, but these should suffice as representation. The Samsung Zoom camera(top) from over 15 years ago, was a brilliant thing, with a body by Porsche design, no less. The Praktika MTL5(left) was my first try at SLRs. It’s a completely manual old-school piece of German engineering with a Russian Zenit lens. I still love the sound of that shutter. The Ricoh compact was bought for a photography art class in university and produced some beautiful black-and-white shots for me at the time. While none of these can compare to all the technological wizardry of the G9, they are also nowhere close to being as bad as my phone camera. So, these old beauties were left out of this test.

My plan was to take two pictures of the same subject with each camera, one bad picture and one good picture. While I wasn’t about to ruin images to prove my point, I did attempt to take pictures which were fairly typical of what normal people take when handed a camera. I wanted to cover a small variety of subjects, but also to concentrate on pictures of people, since it’s a popular subject. So, I’m afraid you’re going to have to suffer multiple self-portraits of me in this experiment. I just didn’t have the gorgeous models who I would have liked to photograph instead lying around my living room. Also, I work for cheap.

The Bad Camera – Sony Ericsson K500i phone

Let’s start with the bad picture using a bad camera. Obviously, that’s easy to do. The phone camera has horrible image quality, and this completely uninspiring shot of a building that seems to be showing nothing in particular is the perfect example of the average snapshot. Dull and boring all around.

The second image was taken a few seconds after the first, using the same phone, standing in the same spot, and of the same building. And yet, this one isn’t all that bad. As pictures go it’s dramatic and pleasing on the eye. This one was more thought out, this one has a focus, and no, I didn’t use fancy settings or anything, because the phone doesn’t have any! It’s still a good shot.

Moving on to the human element, this shot of myself is fairly typical of the kind many take. Badly lit and no composition to speak of other than sticking a face in the middle of the frame. Bad.

This, on the other hand, is far from bad. Here the same phone camera captures some good detail, and all that was done was to change the angle of the shot, let the light from the window fall on my face, and put on one lamp in the background to form a strong silhouette. Considering this was taken in bad evening light with a very noisy camera, it’s a minor miracle. All good photographs are.

The Good Camera – Canon G9

Might as well stick to my mug for now, to provide a more direct comparison. This shot was taken in typical self portrait fashion, with the G9 held at arm’s length and with it set to full Auto mode. The results are typically bad. The flash has gone off, washing everything out, the wide-angle lens is distorting my face into a strange bulb, the composition is boring with random distractions on the bottom right, and worst of all, the camera has focussed on my shirt instead of my face, making it a bit fuzzy. In spite of vastly superior image quality of the G9 over the K500i, this is a pretty lousy self-portrait. Yes, you can laugh.

For the second shot I used the G9 at a slightly different angle. I’m still standing in the same spot, but the settings are changed for a close-up shot, the camera is taken off auto, the flash is disabled, and the composition is improved by putting that interesting twisted yellow curtain and the window frame in the background. That’s a pretty good shot for a scary-looking unshaven guy, don’t you think?

Now for a change of photographic subject. I tried taking a picture of some CD cases I had lying around, using the G9. As I’ve said, it’s a great camera, but set it on auto and take an unthinking snapshot like this one, and you will end up with a bad result even with the best camera. It’s boring, it’s bland, and I haven’t even bothered to make sure a bit of my foot doesn’t show up in the frame at the bottom right. Am I being unrealistic? No, this is how most people’s pictures look, and I’ve taken many like it myself in my time.

Photography is about a fresh way of looking at things. I switched the G9 to macro mode and took a shot of the same CD sleeves, but this time extremely close-up with a dramatic angle, and light from the window in the background. Notice that while back-lighting ruined the self-portraits, it makes this one more interesting; There are no strict rules. Does this even look like it’s in the same place or using the same camera as the previous one? It won’t to most people. That is the difference between good photography and bad. And that brings us to the end of my little experiment.

Good cameras help

One thing that does become clear from these images is that while a good camera can’t make you a good photographer, it can certainly help with its superior image quality. I am not contesting the fact that there are good and bad cameras. In fact, finding a good camera among the hordes of mediocre ones is always a challenge, and something I get asked about often. I do plan to tackle that large topic at some point on this blog.

In the meantime, you should get the best camera that you can afford and the best one that fits your need. Everyone doesn’t need a huge SLR to lug around, and everyone doesn’t need a cute slim fashion statement to slip into their pocket, but you should certainly get a good camera to get rid of some of the technical challenges for you.

Magic cameras don’t exist

Technical challenges, such as speed, image quality, and stabilisation, to name a few, are really the only things a good camera can bring to the table. While there are an increasing number of intelligent cameras that have face-detection and smile-detection and all sorts of tricks that pretty much take the photograph for you, you, the photographer, are still the only one who can actually take a good picture. If you think your professional photographer friends are holding out on you by not giving you the model number of that one magic camera that turns out brilliant images all by itself, you’re wrong.

Photography is a craft, like writing, or drawing. It is true that the technologies involved in photography are a more sophisticated, and the end results depend more on them, but cameras can’t make you a better photographer any more than a certain keyboard can make you a great writer, or a certain brand of pencil can make you a master artist. The skill and the thought must still come from you, because if there’s anything you can learn from my experiment above, it is that to take good pictures you need to think like a photographer.

Brain-On Photography

The real difference between the good and the bad images above are not in the camera used but in whether or not I thought about what I was trying to show, and what would be the best way to present it. It’s thinking about light, angles, composition, balance and several other things that all sound complicated, but which become second nature once you’ve experimented enough with your camera.

Good photographs come from having your brain switched on while you take them, and bad photographs come from having your brain switched off. The bad news, for all you aspiring photographic super-stars out there, is that there is no secret weapon camera which you can buy to make you a great photographer; It’s all in your thinking. The good news is that with a bit of practice, you can upgrade your thinking and train your brain to be the photographer’s secret weapon you always wanted. And that’s all there is to it.

Samir

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.

The complexity of all crafts is that not only must you be well versed in the subtleties of human sentiment to express what you need to, but you also need to be a master in the language of your medium, if your expression is to be understood by anyone. This dual mastery of both expression and language is not as common as you would think. It is probably the foremost reason why many dabble in crafts of various kinds, but only a few distinguish themselves with their creations.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. An infant, ordained to be a painter or visual artist of some sort, is brought up blind-folded. She is never allowed to see, except at occasional intervals when she is sat up in a dark room with black walls, and the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci are flashed onto a screen in front of her. If she has never seen anything in the world besides the visual depictions by da Vinci, what are the chances she will ever invent Pointillism?

Thankfully, visual artists rarely have to face such a nightmarish reality. They grow up absorbing visual information their entire lives. A study of the masters might steer their artistic interests in a particular direction, but the richness and depth of their visual experience means they will always end up being slightly unique, they will bring something into it which is their own because their visual experience has been their own.

Writers are not always so lucky. Reading is not a basic biological process like seeing. To experience writing is not a basic human function, so it is much simpler to have a straight-jacketed experience of what is and isn’t possible in the written word. If you only read the approved reading list, you’re like that blindfolded artist in the dark room. You might have a great repertoire of expression in your craft, but you will always lack something in the language of it. What we experience is not just about what is the best for us to emulate, it is about weighing the possibilities, being able to recognise what you like and don’t like, what works and doesn’t work. It is about having the entirety of life to draw from in your work, the good, the bad, the weird, the disturbing.

I find it strange to hear lesser actors speak of their difficulty in performing a role far removed from their personal experience, because the solution is a simple one: ACT. That is inherent to the job description. Writers are duty bound to bring a similar imagination to the proceedings, but imagination helps more in expression than in the language of the medium. If you’re a classically trained writer, your limitations in language are defined by all those things you abstained from reading, the things that were somehow beneath you, or maybe even irrelevant to you. By doing so, you gave up the benefit of experiencing all those bad or brilliant metaphors, those ripe or rancid turns of phrase, those grotesque abominations of grammar and those glorious accidents of sentence structure, which might have made perfect sense in that piece of pulp pornography, but no one has ever tried in a computer manual. Simply because they never knew it could be done.

Imagination can take you far, but there are only so many experiments any of us can commit to in a lifetime. The fact of the matter is, the majority of your random experiments will fail. The diamonds in the rough are few and far between and your ability to express anything as a writer will be severely damaged if you are constantly trying to invent over trying to communicate. Which is why you must read as far and wide as you possibly can. Not because it’s good or inspirational, but because people have experimented before you and to ignore the rich treasury of results as to what works and doesn’t in various writing situations is utter madness.

You are what you have never read, because it is what you chose to not read that defines your limitations as a writer, and above all else a writer must be free of limitations. If entire universes are to be birthed within you, if rich characters are to take their first steps in your mind and battle through unforeseeable odds to tell their stories before laying down to eternal slumber, if new ideas are to be born and take root in the hearts of many from the spark set off by your words, you need to be drawing from more than the language of works approved by those who likely never wrote anything themselves. You need to be drawing from the vastness of all existence, or at least as much of it as you can manage to read.

Samir

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.

3D Contests & Community

My last post on my 3D work was about images for the Weekend Challenge held on the Elysiun forums. Elysiun is now BlenderArtists.org and it is still a vibrant community. Back in those days, I continued to participate in the weekend challenge when inspiration stuck, and interesting images did result. Above are some.

One contest that did catch my attention was the car design competition organised by Peugeot. They hold a contest every two years for artists and designers to submit car designs based on a theme. I thought it was a great excuse to push my images to a more finished level, and the Belisa is what I turned out. Working on it taught me a lot, and I’m still proud of making this from scratch without any deep-seated obsession with cars.

Along the way another interesting opportunity presented itself. I got a chance to write an introductory Blender 3D tutorial for CHIP India magazine. I was a fan of the magazine for years before that and it is one of the most widely distributed in India. I had a 4 page tutorial published in the magazine about how to create the image above. A great feeling to see your work and instructions in print.

3D Illustrations for Design

By this time, I was confident enough about 3D rendering to start using it in my other design work. And in some cases, I began to receive projects based only on my 3D skills. The character above was modelled on the figure in the Puranmal Restaurant logo. This was to serve as a modern take, and this image still adorns the front of all their menus in their many restaurants throughout Dubai.

When I was working on a corporate magazine/newsletter for a few years, simple 3D images like the pie-chart above (left) would often help add some pizazz to an otherwise plain page. It got me out of many tough spots. At other times, like in the front image for an Eid greeting card (above right), 3D helped bring together unmatched elements like the moon and engineering plans, and give them that magical feel.

3D Logos & Identity

While I’m almost a purist when it comes to logo design, I also started experimenting with using 3D imagery in logos and identities. In an increasingly online world, there are opportunities to design logos that will rarely need to suffer the rigours of print production or work on a fax transmission. At some such junctures I did add in a 3D touch into some logo design options I presented to clients.

Web site graphics were another place I included 3D graphics, when it was appropriate. When done well, rendered graphics immediately lend a professional look to the site. The top and bottom images above were meant as “Under Construction” screens for websites. The top one was just for a personal site, but the 3D makes it look much more serious. The middle image was created as an element for a web template. There is plenty you can do with computer imagery if you go beyond the obvious.

3D Animation & Video

Being asked to do my first animation project was a fairly big step in my using 3D for serious work. I was called in to create a 3D visualization for a shipping company who wanted to simulate ship movements and port procedures to show clients. The challenge was that it needed to be a real port with the ships at real scales, so that it made for a realistic simulation of how things fit in the space. Also, I had less than a month to complete it, obviously. My computer(s) were rendering thousands of animation frames for weeks, and both me and the client were quite pleased with the result.

Once in a while, I did continue to just play with 3D graphics. For a while I was doing weekly themed exercises with some friends, to help us learn animation. Strange things like the Carrs animation above resulted. Just snippets of a few seconds which helped keep my 3D muscles healthy.

A couple of years ago I was once again handed a big animation challenge. A regular client was participating in an important exhibition and they wanted one of those fancy corporate videos to show off at their stall on an obscene flat screen TV. The only problem was, they had no video, and the only material they had was still photos of their various construction projects. Making a slick video from fairly boring stills was fun. I used Blender to do the whole thing, moving and manipulating images and graphics in 3D space, instead of using a video editor. Quite an interesting way to work, and the end result looked very impressive on a wide screen TV, while also covering all the technical information required.

3D Rendering Tests

On and off I have continued to open up Blender and tinker with effects just for the sake of trying something out. All the images above were a result of such playing. They all started as trials for lighting ideas, or texture ideas, or in the case of the origami flower, just wanting to see how easy or difficult it was to recreate an origami design in 3D models.

From the beginning of my 3D journey, creating human models has always been a dream. While I’ve never put the requisite time into it, I did play around with getting the right skin look at one point, using the readily available Victoria female model from the Poser and DAZ Studio software camp. This image was done with fairly simple material work, before Blender was capable of faking SSS and doing complex node materials. Now I’m sure much more convincing skin effects are possible, but for the time, I was quite happy with my progress.

That is a summary of my 3D experiments over the last half decade of silence on the topic. Now, Blender is about to have a completely redesigned version out with the completion of the Durian Open Movie project. I look forward to re-learning it and getting back to more regular experiments in 3D. Maybe I’ll even tackle that human model I’ve always wanted to try my hand at. Whatever I do, I’ll be sure to write about it on this blog as it takes shape.

Samir

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.

The Hindu view on the afterlife is that the essence of life is immortal and cannot be destroyed. As with all things in the Indian belief system, this basic idea can be interpreted and understood on many levels. The very religious view is that the individual soul survives intact and is reborn in another form. The more philosophical interpretation could be that that life energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only be converted from one form to another. How much of each of those opposing ingredients you wish to put into your own personal afterlife sauce, is entirely up to you.

Rebirth is said to be based on the concept of Karma — a distillation of past actions, behaviour and thought. In the most simplistic way, you could think that your next birth depends on whether you’ve been bad or good. That’s how many understand it, but the philosophical thought is more complex. It considers all of physical life to be a sort of audio-visual-experiential tempering ground for the soul. The soul is born and reborn in various forms and as various things, so as to gain all the experiences it needs to come to a true realisation of the nature of existence, i.e. enlightenment. This is also thought to be based on Karma, but here the process is not considered as one of punishment, but rather of evaluation. The soul decides what experience it requires as a next step in its progress towards enlightenment, and then takes that step.

All generally agree that once enlightenment is reached, the soul is freed from the imperative to be reborn and take physical form. It is then finally one with the ultimate soul/God/the universe/or whatever you want to call it. That’s where the Buddhist concept of Moksha come from. Liberation.

When chatting with my Mexican friend, her questions about what I was describing brought up some interesting contrasts that don’t come up in detached philosophical musings like the one above. I was telling her about the Hindu belief that people, animals, and all life is born and reborn, depending on your thinking and behaviour in your current life. For example, predominantly greedy and inhuman thoughts might lead to a birth as an animal, a creature of instinct. But, nothing is permanent, with each life you learn, hopefully improve, and are born in higher and higher forms until you achieve nirvana &mdash the same enlightenment I described before &mdash you understand how it all works, and you are freed from the cycle.

This was a more ground-level description of what regular people believe, free of philosophical detachment. Her counter-question was interesting. She said that if you´re reborn as an animal, for the animal´s life you would not be aware, as animals don´t think. So how could you behave well to be reborn in human form? Or are you just a human in an animal´s body? That’s a question that would have never occurred to me, but it is a very valid one if you believe that the human soul is unique, which is the basis of all the Abrahamic religions (Catholicism, Judaism, Islam). By contrast, most Eastern religions generally believe in the soul being common and equal across all life. Human beings might largely be more developed souls, but other life has a soul too. This fundamental difference in thinking is part of why there are so many vegetarians in India. It comes from that belief that ending any life too early, and especially an animal one that is closer to the human level of consciousness, is to stop its development prematurely and prolong its time in the cycle.

Of course, there is much commonality in the thinking about the afterlife across all religious thought, even if the details vary. It all comes down to your behaviour in life, with the afterlife serving as reward or punishment. My friend had the same thought about her beliefs and the concepts of heaven and hell. She did, however, detect the abstractness of what I was saying in comparison, so she wondered whether I thought I would be reunited in any way with my loved ones when I died. Now, this is one of those points where what we believe depends on how comfortable we are with the dissolution of ourselves in the larger scheme of things. It’s safe to say the the philosophical stream of Hindu thought thinks of reuniting of souls after death in a more abstract way. That is to say, the specific personalities we take on in life may not survive the transition, but souls that have been close in their lives will recognize each other. Maybe not always thinking of each other as mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, but just as kindred spirits. It comes from believing that the soul or spirit is the real thing, and the person is merely a temporary costume.

I myself am not completely sure of what I believe, because I like to think beyond blind belief. Either way, I look at all the different ways of seeing and interpreting this existence of ours, and I find it all very fascinating. While being part of Life, what life is remains one of the greatest mysteries, not just to the philosopher but even to the most rigorous scientific minds. So it comes as no surprise that the end of life garners so much attention from us. How do we understand the end of something that we can barely begin to explain in the first place? A mystery within a mystery, and perhaps so it shall always remain, no matter what we choose to believe.

Samir

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.

Animals pass on instincts to their young and in some cases, the elders teach the young by example, but the idea of storing knowledge for the benefit of those to come seems to have been a human innovation. Even with our increased ability to communicate, and therefore to teach our offspring, before technology, remembering perfectly was not an option.

The human mind is designed to forget all but the most important material. In our relatively long lives, facts and trivia are lost in the cavalcade of random memories of daily existence. Sure we can answer a question when asked, but there is no singular compendium of memory waiting to be poured into the awaiting next generation at a moment’s notice.

In this journey of storing our memories, and hence our knowledge and understanding of the world, we have come very far, from colourful scratchings on rocks to tiny USB storage devices that we now throw around like detritus, filled with email backups, address books, journal entries, video clips and digital snapshots galore. Now everything is on permanent record, and yet it is more fragile than it ever was. A flick of a switch and decades of carefully collected memories can be lost in an instant, a small technical error in equipment that is ever making itself obsolete, and entire branches of thinking can be struck for good from human record. So, on both a personal and a societal level, the act of recording, sorting and collating memories has become a major portion of our lives.

I myself have written on this topic before, from my erstwhile hunt for personal information management(PIM) software, to my reflection on the benefits of looking back over your old text messages. For there can be no doubt that all this record-keeping and memory-collecting has its benefits; The development of the entire human race has depended on these things and will continue to do so. But it must be asked, that as we get involved in this process of personal record-keeping on an unprecedented scale, how much of active living do we miss? In honouring the past, don’t we sometimes dishonour the present?

Let’s clear one thing up at the outset, record-taking is not a creative accomplishment. It is simply necessary administrative paper-shuffling. In the far past we had storytellers who were the guardians of memory, and then we had historians. Their accomplishment was in the interpretation and the presentation of the memories they possessed, and they continue to play an important role in fixing our collective memories, in being our conscience for past deeds, and a warning for the future. Today, however, we are all historians, building up the perfectly constructed picture of our own little worlds, gathering an amount of data that will be impossible for any human being to consume in a life time.

It is not far fetched to imagine that at some point a new function will be created in society, those that honour the dead by reliving their memories, all multiple quadrillion terabytes of them. Then, we as a culture will truly have perfect memory, irrespective of whether or not what is remembered is significant or useful. The question is, will there be enough people around capable of learning from it? For reliving the memories of the past can be so much more enticing than trying to create your own.

Samir

The Durian is hard thorny fruit on the surface with a soft flesh inside. It is purported to taste divine and smell foul, and it gets its name from duri in Malay, which means thorns. A very conflicted fruit for sure.

A dust bath is exactly what it sounds like. Birds often push dirt into their feathers to dislodge parasites that take up residence there. Other animals do this too. Who’d have thought flinging dirt could help make you cleaner?

These two seemingly unrelated things came before me yesterday, and they brought to mind the general perception of accepting the unpleasant, the hard, and the arduous to get positive results. It struck a cord because I had just finished skimming through an article on Homoeopathy, with all the usual one-sided arguments that I often see. They are always arguments, in the worse sense of the word, because writers on contentious topics like Homoeopathy have made up their mind a long time before they put down the first sentence. It’s a belief thing.

For example, this particular writer, who was playing the scientific intellectual card, ended with an appropriately horrific story of an infant dying of eczema because the parents stuck to homoeopathic treatment. This was meant to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of Homoeopathy. Yet as always, these shock tactics did not consider the opposing facts, like how many people suffering from not so fatal ailments are killed by secondary complications and the effects of religiously sticking to conventional medicine and not trying alternatives. When such obvious arguments are brought up against any established norm, the idea of having to pay the price for the greater benefit always comes up as validation. Everyone wants you to eat that mythically perfect durian, with the hard thorny shell, and the horrid smell. It’s good for you.

Keeping within the realm alternative health therapies for now, let’s consider something like massage. Its therapeutic prowess cannot be measured in any practical way while accounting for the placebo effect; There is no such thing as a placebo massage. A massage is a massage, and it affects mind and body, whether you like it or not. Which brings to fore the artificiality of the imposed mind-body divide in these examples, and the artificiality of similar strict binary divisions of various other aspects of life and thought.

These differences in opinion are often slated as an argument between scientific thought and blind faith, but what this sort of arm-chair science ignores is that science is, and always has been, as much about considering all the possibilities and being open to new radical hypotheses, as it is about proving things. We should never forget that science has been responsible for as many missteps, and a supporter of as much dangerous misinformation, as blind-faith. Today’s science is often tomorrow’s superstition. On either side, it is the assumed infallibility that is the true danger.

It comes down to two opposing belief systems. One that states all things worth doing or experiencing come with a hefty price to pay in suffering of some sort. The other states that everything of worth flows smoothly and naturally into its perfect state. Whether we realise it or not, most of us hold one of these beliefs to be true, and apply this logic to how we see the world. You could grossly simplify it down to pessimism and optimism, but it really is more than that. These are mental models of how you think world works, and frankly, they are both wrong. Both paradigms start with the assumption that there is some morality to existence, and that paying the price has some intrinsic moral value.

If you are a creative person and deal in the currency of ideas, this issue is a more important one that you realise. In formulating, evaluating, and deciding between sometimes opposing creative ideas, this belief system plays a key role in the choices you make. Are you making the right choices, or simply the ones you believe in? That is the question you need to be asking yourself at all times.

Which neatly brings us to the question of what the “right” choice is and if it can be clearly defined. As with all things, there exist some grey areas here, but of all the decisions I’ve talked about here, I think the decision between right and wrong choices might be the simplest to referee. There are no universally right choices to be sure, but the majority of creative thinking is applied to the solution of a problem. This problem might be a practical one or an abstract one, but every idea you define is in answer to a question. In the specific situation and context that you need that question answered, there most certainly is a right choice, because one meets with all your objectives and one doesn’t. There is little ambiguity there.

So when you’re dabbling in the realm of creative thinking, which you should be doing no matter what your work or life entails, make sure you are choosing what ideas to pursue based on what is right for your needs, rather than what is difficult or easy. There is no mystical blessing of rightness that goes with pursuing a difficult idea, nor is there a similar guarantee when you go with what seems like the easy solution. Judge ideas based on their own merit and what they provide in results, not based on whether or not it involves you showering yourself with enough dirt along the way.

Samir

This post was brought to you by the letter D. Well, at least that page about the letter D in my trusty old dictionary that I ended up on while brain storming for ideas about what to write. I spotted the words durian and dust bath, and this is what resulted.

Most of my time with the G9, while I’m in the UAE, is spent inside a car. Weekend drives are my photographic laboratories to capture as varied a series of subjects as this little country has to offer, without suffering the heat and sand that prevails outside through a large portion of the year.

Taking pictures from a car is far from the ideal set-up. It doesn’t let you get close to your subject, and you’re often trying to hit a very rapidly moving target as you zoom past, but like I’ve mentioned about street photography from a bus, it does have its advantages and unique perspectives.

On the road

The road itself can be a very attractive subject when you’re on the move, because the road is rarely a straight and boring strip of tar. More often it twists and turns, hugging the contours of the landscape and creating a mesmerising line that disappears into the distance in front of you.

The front wind screen also happens to be an attractive target for your camera when you’re in a car; It’s large and wide, giving you a wonderful viewing angle, and more than all the other windows it is designed to have the minimum of reflections, which can ruin a photograph.

Architecture

The buildings you come across on your travels are always interesting subjects for photographs. Taking pictures of architecture while moving can be tricky because angles and positions change so quickly. With my first digital camera, the Olympus C400Z, the limitation was most often its slow reaction time to shutter release. Anticipation and timing comes into play no matter how quick your equipment is, but the Canon G9 is certainly a big improvement in the timing department. It’s no SLR, but it performs admirably for what it is.

Industry

In a similar vein to architecture, industry has always fascinated me as a subject of images. It has all the magic of architecture, often with grander scales and even more detail to capture, in the form of conduits and mechanisms all laid bare to see.

One challenge with industrial subjects is that they are usually placed a good distance from the road. While some very dramatic shots can be achieved with a wide angle view of factories and landscapes, it is useful to be able to frame more details with a good telephoto setting. The bump up to a 5x zoom on the G9, from my old 3x zoom on the C400Z, is a welcome addition for subjects such as these. The extra focal length helps target more interesting compositions rather than resorting to wide shots for lack of choice.

Signs

Everywhere there are roads, there are signs. Signs on the road, and also next to it, can be interesting elements in photographs, but they are a challenge to capture when they are small.

Some signs you can freeze by panning the camera as you drive by, but most often you will get some blurs unless you are in bright sunlight. Thankfully, signs are plentiful at traffic lights and junctions where you get the chance to slow down or stop for a few minutes, and that provides the perfect opportunity to properly compose a sign into your shot.

The G9 has quicker focus responses, which is an immense plus in situations like this. The separation between road signs and the background is often dramatic and easy for the auto focus to get wrong. But by aiming at the sign, half-pressing the shutter release to focus and then recomposing the frame before taking the picture, you can achieve the sharp results you need.

Construction

Dubai is the construction capital of the world. There is almost no photography possible in the city without showing some bit of construction in the frame, so when you can’t avoid it, it makes sense to embrace it. Construction sites and machinery make for strong images, and the fact that they are often found very close to the road you’re driving on gives you a ring-side seat for the best shots.

An SLR would perform better under the circumstances, but the G9 does a fairly good job of focussing within the narrow time frame when you’re in just the right position to take a shot of something next to the road, or even something hanging above it as you drive by.

Clouds

In photography, clouds are almost cheating. I say that because it is quite difficult to take a bad picture of clouds, but that’s not to say it can’t be done. Clouds do provide an almost infinite collection of good compositions, but capturing them well, and with a certain amount of your own style put in, is still as challenging as any other subject.

While taking shots of the sky from inside a car, reflection on the glass can be a big problem. Not only can they show up in the frame and ruin the shot, they can also confuse the auto focus and give you a fuzzy image. The G9’s manual focus setting is fairly easy to get into, and setting the focus to infinity takes a few quick rotations of the settings ring at the back. This can be quite convenient for taking those tricky sky shots through glass windows. The rest is up to finding the interesting composition and waiting for the right moment to click.

Vehicles

You generally ignore them, unless you’re trying to avoid barrelling into one, but the other vehicles on and around the road can also make good photo subjects. You can have them zooming past as a blur, or frozen with a quick shutter and some smart panning.

Either way, with the right light, even the most boring car or van can be a striking visual element. Strange or unusual vehicles help add that little extra, of course, but even your bog-standard white van in the right context can look great.

Landscapes

A classic subject for all forms of art, landscapes seem like an easy subject, but they are almost always a tricky one to make interesting. There is the traditional idea of what we consider a landscape, wide angle images showing plenty of land and sky, but there are many variations you can make to that rule.

One interesting alternative is to try out landscapes shot in portrait orientation. It might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s often the best way to capture some subjects. The Canon G9’s zoom helps greatly in narrowing down the field of view to interesting features some distance from the road, while still keeping the image in landscape territory. Since these scenes are often rushing by, the G9’s built-in optical stabilisation is a boon, getting rid of all the minor vibrations and hand movements to provide crisp shots of even the most complex natural scenes.

Man on the street

We gravitate towards images of people, but sitting in a car in Dubai, people are a bit hard to come by. Not being the most pedestrian-friendly place in the world, people at close quarters are a rare sight unless you enter crowded market areas, not quite the usual destination on weekend drives. But go to the right out-lying areas or near public places and you can get some good shots from a distance.

One opportunity for photographing people at close quarters on the roads in and around Dubai are the many construction and road workers constantly toiling on the ever present construction sites. On one hand you get to see them busy in a variety of positions and activities, but on the other hand what you end up with is images of hard hats and uniforms, anonymous and iconic.

Most people shots, while out on a drive, invariably involving panning the camera very rapidly to keep them in frame. The stabilisation feature mentioned before is very helpful in this (the Canon G9 even has a special panning stabilisation feature that only works in landscape orientation, which I rarely use), but the surprise feature of the camera that helps is its relatively heavy metal body. The weight helps steady the hand and avoid mistiming while making smooth panning movements.

On foot

Even while on a drive, sometimes you need to stretch your legs. And when you get away from the concrete jungle that is Dubai, you take what little natural solitude you can get and you like to savour it outside the confines of your car. The desert is ever present in this region, and while its lands are fast being taken over by human development, vast tracts of virgin sands still remain in places. These areas are great for some close up photography.

My Olympus C4000Z was a difficult act to beat when it comes to macro shots. Its lens went up to an astonishing aperture of F1.8, a brilliant thing for those dramatic macro images. Thankfully though, the Canon G9 is no slacker in that department either. Its aperture is not as wide as the Olympus, but it makes up for it in weight and balance, and with a brilliant LCD screen, which makes taking properly framed macro shots even in bright sunlight pleasant.

Those are some of my observations about using my Canon G9 camera on the road. I loved my Olympus, but the G9’s improved performance means that I now take many more usable pictures on the move than I ever did before. Then there is the fact that the G9 saves in RAW, which I have been using for a while, and the benefits of which I have not even begun to scratch the surface of.

Samir

There is much said and written by writers on how to overcome writer’s block, but I’m considering a more basic question. Why should you overcome writer’s block? The answer seems obvious, so that you can write. Why do you want to write? Because you’re a writer. Why are you a writer? Because you must write.

The writer’s challenge

When I say a writer must write, you might assume I am referring to the fact that writing is a writer’s job; We must all do our job, because that’s how we earn our living, that’s what gives purpose to our lives, that’s what satisfies our needs, and that’s what our boss told us to do. But that is not the must that I’m talking about. You’re not a writer if you happen to put down words on paper or screen, you’re not necessarily a writer if people pay you for your words. You are a writer if writing is an imperative that you cannot ignore. If every cell in your body needs you to write, and if writing is just so much less painful than not writing, then you’re a writer.

Although writing must be done, that doesn’t mean it comes easy. Writing can be a struggle, and part of that struggle is the mythical state of writer’s block. It’s a blank, confused, and scared state where you don’t quite know where to go from here, so you freeze. That freezing is part of what makes writing such a challenge.

Writer’s block gives you insight

If writing were the mere transcribing of thoughts to words, it would be much more commonplace, because if there’s one thing every human being is a born expert at, it’s thinking. We’re thinking all the time and can’t stop if our lives depended on it. So difficult is it to not think that throughout human history people have tried to come up with techniques to quieten the mind. And so hard are these disciplines, that there are even fewer people who successfully meditate in the world than there are people who successfully write.

No, there’s more to writing than translation or mere communication. Writers share insights with the world. They present a way of looking at things, of understanding them that is uniquely theirs. It is that unique vision that writing is all about. Writer’s block raises the bar for what it takes to be a writer, and it makes writing an exciting adventure. Writers are better for it, because in surmounting the challenge, writer’s block often gives the writer the thinking time and the vantage point to get those essential insights.

Writer’s block gives you momentum

On the writer’s journey there are many twists and turns along the unexplored path, but none are as treacherous or unexpected as the barren cliffs of writer’s block, which suddenly rumble up from the Earth and block the way. Some stare up at the seemingly unconquerable cliffs and give up right there; Many are the failed writers who have called the base of these cliffs their home. Others take a step up, and stumble, and continue to chip away at the unforgiving rock until footholds are chiselled into the mountain and they have reached the summit. Not only is the view afforded by conquering writer’s block an essential enlightenment on the journey but it’s also all down hill from there.

Standing there admiring the road ahead from the clouds, the writer is rewarded with one thing he could never get if the path had been less treacherous: potential energy. All that effort put into the climb is now at your disposal so that you can speed down the hill as an unstoppable river of inspiration, brushing aside minor obstacles that come in your way until you reach your destination in the warm ocean. Writer’s block gives the writer momentum.

Writer’s block is the secret ingredient

That which is elusive we always want with greater intensity. And writer’s block plays an important part in making writing an elusive prize. Many of us want to be writers, but a small number of us actually want to write, not because of what being a writer entails in the world, but instead to fulfil our inherent need to express that which we cannot express in any other way. Our need for expression is deepened by the fact that writing is such an elusive craft. You can read all the books you want about what makes writing good or bad, but ultimately that certain quality is unknowable and unmeasurable. That unknown and the fear of it is one of the foundations of the mountain that is writer’s block, and it is that unknown that fires our obsession and crushes our innards with an unending yearning to write.

Why overcome writer’s block? Because writer’s block makes writing an imperative. Writer’s block conspires to make it so that you must write. Writer’s block makes you a writer.

Samir