Taking Good Pictures Isn’t About The Camera

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

Great Pictures! Which Camera did you use?

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

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

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You Are What You Don’t Read

Unread books

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

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

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5 Years of 3D Graphics and Blender Rendering

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

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

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

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Understanding the Hindu Afterlife

Many-armed Hindu Goddess - Hindu afterlife

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

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

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The Cost of Perfect Memory

Old holiday snapshot with camel

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

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

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Durian Dreams and Dust Baths

Durian Dreams and Dust Baths

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?

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Weekend Drives With My Canon G9 Camera

I‘ve had my Canon G9 camera for almost 2 years now. While I’ve put up a fair selection of photos taken with it from my sojourns in India, I’ve rarely shown much of what do with it for the rest of the year, when I’m in Dubai. The truth of the matter is, I probably take more photographs during the 30 days I spend in India over the year, than I take during the remaining days of the year I spend in my adopted home. Most of the time there just isn’t that much to photograph that meets my tastes. But it is also true that while my India trips really push my photographic skills, it is during my time in Dubai when I do my more considered experiments with using the camera and what it is capable of.

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