Festive rangoli floor decoration courtesy of our maid. Next week India is celebrating Diwali. We'll be escaping the massive fireworks displays to Sri Lanka, hopefully to properly unwind.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Our villa, as seen from India
This is where we live as non-residents of Palm Meadows see it. Or rather, don't...
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Thank you for the music
Our son Joona's school staged a Mamma Mia musical show the past Saturday. I had bought a Nokia N8 the previous Friday so this was a good opportunity to try both the still and the video camera in pretty challenging lighting conditions.
Here are the results. If you're into the technical stuff make sure to check out the picture in large or original size as well as view the videos in 720p resolution.
I must I was really amazed at the student body talent making this musical happen, but the geek in me was equaly in awe of the camera and camcorder performance as well. During all this I was also following play by play on atpworldtour.com from Stockholm Open where Jarkko Nieminen was playing in the semi-final. Convergence happens.
Here are the results. If you're into the technical stuff make sure to check out the picture in large or original size as well as view the videos in 720p resolution.
I must I was really amazed at the student body talent making this musical happen, but the geek in me was equaly in awe of the camera and camcorder performance as well. During all this I was also following play by play on atpworldtour.com from Stockholm Open where Jarkko Nieminen was playing in the semi-final. Convergence happens.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Streetlife in Bangalore, part II
Ventured out of Palm Meadows again to practice photographing moving subjects. Tried to get some motion blur into the motorbike shots with some success. When the streets are where many people live it's amazing how much life you can capture by just sitting still and watching for an hour...
Saturday, October 2, 2010
On the state of tech "journalism"
As marketing has gone to Internet and people's purchase decisions are more and more shaped by influencers and bloggers, the temptation must be great to start leaning towards a particular brand in order to enjoy preferential treatment and perhaps some funding as well. Case of Eldar Murtazin and Samsung is a prime example. I should think every consumer brand now has their list of friendly sites and this is I think quite okay. The fiercest battle has for a couple of years been in the smartphone space - there is no bigger prize today in any business than selling the leading smartphone.
For me the boundary of brand-friendliness is crossed when one starts to tamper with the evidence to get a desired result. Engadget published a comparison between Nokia N8 and iPhone 4 cameras and to the surprise of many the results seem to favor the iPhone.
That's an interesting result, as the N8 should from hardware point of view have a camera that's miles better. The N8 has a 12MP sensor while iPhone sports a 5MP one so it should be able to capture a lot more detail in each shot, unless constrained by the optics. N8 The Carl Zeiss optics are claimed to have a great resolution too, so what gives? For reasons only known to Engadget, the comparison shots have been resized to 800 by 450, so almost all the additional details in the N8 original shots are obviously lost. It's like comparing the topspeed of a Lada to a Lamboghini and running the latter only in reverse gear. So obviously the comparison is rigged heavily towards iPhone from the start, but still I couldn't get over how bad the N8 pictures looked.
For some reason Engadget also included the N8 (but not the iPhone) originals in the article. I took one of them and resized it to the resolution used for the comparison shots with Photoshop. If you click on the pic and view it in the original resolution can clearly see that the comparison shot published by Engadget for N8 has been heavily softened compared to the original. Just look at the flags and flagpoles in the building in the background, the water of the fountain or the pigeon behind it. Or the leaves in the trees, which in the Engadget comparison shot are just a dark green mush. The added details were not invented by Photoshop, they were there in the original but got somehow misplaced by the person who made the comparison.
The Engadget article states, that "Naturally, all the images are entirely unretouched (but for our masterly watermarking)". Haha. I don't know if this true for the iPhone shots as they neglected to post the originals, but for N8 I call that statement BUSTED...
For me the boundary of brand-friendliness is crossed when one starts to tamper with the evidence to get a desired result. Engadget published a comparison between Nokia N8 and iPhone 4 cameras and to the surprise of many the results seem to favor the iPhone.
That's an interesting result, as the N8 should from hardware point of view have a camera that's miles better. The N8 has a 12MP sensor while iPhone sports a 5MP one so it should be able to capture a lot more detail in each shot, unless constrained by the optics. N8 The Carl Zeiss optics are claimed to have a great resolution too, so what gives? For reasons only known to Engadget, the comparison shots have been resized to 800 by 450, so almost all the additional details in the N8 original shots are obviously lost. It's like comparing the topspeed of a Lada to a Lamboghini and running the latter only in reverse gear. So obviously the comparison is rigged heavily towards iPhone from the start, but still I couldn't get over how bad the N8 pictures looked.
For some reason Engadget also included the N8 (but not the iPhone) originals in the article. I took one of them and resized it to the resolution used for the comparison shots with Photoshop. If you click on the pic and view it in the original resolution can clearly see that the comparison shot published by Engadget for N8 has been heavily softened compared to the original. Just look at the flags and flagpoles in the building in the background, the water of the fountain or the pigeon behind it. Or the leaves in the trees, which in the Engadget comparison shot are just a dark green mush. The added details were not invented by Photoshop, they were there in the original but got somehow misplaced by the person who made the comparison.
The Engadget article states, that "Naturally, all the images are entirely unretouched (but for our masterly watermarking)". Haha. I don't know if this true for the iPhone shots as they neglected to post the originals, but for N8 I call that statement BUSTED...
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Fly me to the moon, part deux
I'm happy to see I'm getting incrementally better at this. Taken from our balcony with Gorillapod tangled to the railing.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Almost Zen-like
Leela Palace Hotel in Bangalore has a fantastic Asian restaurant, Zen. Their Sunday brunch has become an essential part of at least every month for us here. The space is nice, the service quick & friendly, food sublime and the background music... utterly horrendous ancient Euro disco, loud enough to be distracting.
Bailando, anyone?
Bailando, anyone?
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
China cherry broken
Somehow I had managed to avoid going to China all these years. I've visited most Asian countries for business, pleasure or both so it's weird that there was never any reason to go. Until now, that is. I had the opportunity to participate in a leadership course that was held in Sofitel Wanda Hotel and to do some limited sightseeing squeezed in-between. Here's them results...
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Bike trip around the nearby countryside
Went on a very relaxed bike ride with the whole family and took these pictures. Many people when they visit foreign places try to find the "real" experience. In Bangalore it's not very hard - all you have to do is pedal a few kilometres out of town and the feeling gets very real quickly going through rice fields, villages with hens running around and schools full of children who behave if you're first white-faced camera owner they've ever seen...
Anti puncture
Off-road biking in India means lots of sharp spikes from bushes etc. going through the tyre like a hot knife through butter. The remedy was supposed to be an inner tube with liquid sealant inside. Granted, there was no punctures as the valve broke in half the second time I tried to pump air into it after about 20km riding distance.
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