I believe in..

The most important thing you have is your word and your reputation. Once lost, they are never regained. - Stephen Ross

2009 China Trip - Part 1

Recently I was in China for a week on a business trip. Every trip to China is like a shot of glucose into my veins. There is so much energy and entrepreneurship in China! The pace of innovation, the pace of replication.. is just amazing.
Those who compare India and China in the same breath are nothing but fools. China is waaaaay ahead of India in terms of infrastructure and industry development.

This is not the first time I was traveling to China, but I noticed more things about China in this trip than any other trip.
While traveling around in Shenzhen I noticed these gigantic numbers on top of big sky scrapers.

These were numbers to call if you wanted to rent/buy office/residential space! Pretty interesting way to advertise. Compared this to the usual clutter of boards they'd have at our construction sites in India! Or probably a small board at the entrance to the site!
I also learnt another interesting aspect to these numbers. Chinese consider 8 and 6 as very lucky numbers, and 4 as an unlucky number! (And hence the no. of 8s or 6s in those phone numbers you see in the pictures).
Si - is 4 and the same word is used for death (different tone)

Ba - is 8 and is the luckiest number in China (Olympics were held on 8/8/08).. ba also means rich (diff tone) and Baba means father :)

Liu - is 6.. supposed to mean 'will go smooth'

This is also one of the reasons why there are no 4th floors in most buildings in China!

One of the other nice things that I noticed was that unlike the US, people even in the swankiest apartments, used the clothes line to dry their clothes! Go Green!


Bad thing about a lot of the big Chinese cities is that they're bloody polluted! Check out the smog on the streets! The sun is always shining a dull grey through the smog! Not much fun when you don't see the blue skies! Notice the next picture you can't see the hills at the background.

Continuing to learn something new

My multi-month exile from physical activity has brought out this desire in me to learn something new! Action photography has long been on the list of my things to get good at. In the process, I have come to learn that action photography is not only about capturing dramatic moments.. but it is also about processing the picture well enough to ensure that the drama in the moment is evident to the viewer!
Some of the things I've come to learn in the process is
a) Always shoot with very small Depth Of Focus (DOF). This blurs away most of the distracting elements in the foreground and background. Gives you a decent picture to start working with for post-processing. I shoot in the Aperture priority mode these days with the lowest F stop supported by my lens.
b) Shoot in mult-shot / burst mode so that at least one of the frames will actually capture the dramatic moment. You don't have to be worried about timing your clicking finger with the perfect moment. However, having said this, I'd say that even timing the multi-shot mode is an art.. and I'm still trying to get it right!
c) Crop the picture mercilessly! Anything that is not the main subject can be taken away, unless it adds to the story. Don't worry about maintaining aspect ratios on your cropping! Just go chop-chop-chop!
d) Increasing contrast/saturation can add to some of the dramatic visual effect
e) Equalizing can have some interesting effects
f) off-late I'm learning to use layers to edit. Here are some interesting effects from my learnings.
My favourite is picture no. 1. (No.3 is the original). What's yours?







Thanks to Miao for helping me get started on Layers..

Boulder ranks once again as top city for quality of life in the US!

I miss Boulder! :-(

http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/article/107039/Top-American-Towns-to-Live-Well;_ylt=AiVU4Q4grQ8korVteXowdn9O7sMF

CSK-ku periya whistle podunga!

Summa thatti eduthutanga!

A different side of Ultimate

Something I didn't know even though I started playing Ultimate in the US. Maybe it exists at higher competitive levels. I played at newbie levels.


http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/zagoria/catchandrelease/