Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Title courtesy fus.

Dunlop, the tyre company, is making pillows? Perhaps they are rubber-scented, for compulsive roadies?

Silence is optional?

Behold! Here be the source! Now we know who’s responsible for all the bad spelling.

In a spare moment last evening, Vickram Crishna took out a harmonica and played a Dylan-esque tune. I asked if it was 4th Time Around. He said it was something he had just made up, but asked what album that was from. I didn’t know. I know my artists and tracks, but albums?

MP3 has changed the way we listen to music. With tapes or LPs, you didn’t get to choose what track to listen to. You just played the whole album beginning to end, and remembered tracks by their sound—and by the sound of what came before and after. Sometimes when listening to an MP3 of what I got used to on tape, I start imagining the next track, and am somewhat disoriented when something else plays.

I still see the occasional rant about ditching an audio player because it can’t shuffle whole albums instead of individual tracks.

Of all the possible roadside dangers: losing your head to aircraft that missed the runway.

View from the Srishti School of Art’s new building, Yelahanka. 30 second exposure. Wonder if there is a way to prevent the light from burning out while exposing for detail.

I’m doing a two-day workshop at Srishti on collaborative media. Today was discussion: I introduced them to weblogs and got them all LiveJournal accounts. Tomorrow I’m covering documentation, especially wikis and sites like Wikipedia, where the content is more important than the identity of its author (which weblogs emphasise).

The south Indian darshini. The original stand-up breakfast, lunch and dinner restaurant. Where else in the world can you imagine a small furry animal, and look down to find a little boy between your feet, scrubbing the floor?

But this is not one of those places. In Chickpet, there is no place to even stand up. In Chickpet, you take your meal and eat standing on the road, which is anyway too narrow for more than a vehicle apiece. I went there again Sunday afternoon and had a seven rupee lunch, topped off with a three rupee golisoda. Few meals have been as joyous.

On the walls of the Bowring club.

Seen on a bathroom door.

So I succumbed to the temptation and got the lens they were raving about. A Nikon 50mm 1:1.8D. Was riding starting to ride to Yelahanka when I saw this fellow. Shot from the bike with a helmet on. I love this lens already.

So I opened a Top Ramen pack to make myself breakfast, and this little thing dropped out. It’s barely over half the size of a regular pack. Bold typeface on the cover declares it the “Right Size.” I declare fraud. Thanks to these brilliant marketers, I’m getting only half a breakfast.

This way please, for The Best Indian Business School Blog.
Need explanation?

Thanks for the comments, folks. Here’s another picture shot the same day. 78 second exposure.

Read on...

A paved court, a dirt patch, two games and flying balls. Mr. Yellow Checks and Mr. White Shirt yonder are cricket fielders guarding the overlap, with predictable results.

Michael Reichmann’s advice on exposing for the right side of the histogram is perhaps the most useful advice I’ve had on digital photography. This picture from the Jayanagar sports club grounds—frequently mistaken with the Madhavan park across the road—happened when testing said advice.

The spectrum analyser in this music deck in a Tibetian restaurant is shaped like a flower. Wonder what it does when running.

Traffic on Bangalore roads is regulated by these mobile semi-autonomous units. They are easily redeployed where needed, and very effective owing to their autonomy. Unlike as with a regular speed breaker, there is no way to learn the fastest way around each. When it comes to regulating traffic, these units mean business.

For this picture, I used a tip from mangudi_iyer. I set the camera on a tripod, pointed at an area with some activity, set the shutter speed to bulb mode—in which the sensor remains exposed for as long as the button is depressed—set the focus to manual and at infinity, aperture at f/18—f/11 was too blurred—covered the lens with a black card, released the shutter, and waited. The idea is to expose when there’s activity, and expose again to a clear sky so that the surrounding dark details also show up. This is what you do when the camera doesn’t support multiple exposures on a single frame.

The hardest part of shooting like this is the waiting. It’s one thing to see a fantastic display every few minutes and wish you had a picture. It’s another to wait second after excruciating second, wait with a finger holding the button down and another hand the card, the evening’s rain water irritating your heel, ignoring everything not happening within your camera’s field of view, because you can’t miss it when it starts there, because you can’t reorient your camera quickly enough, because you can never tell where and when the next will be. Either you get lucky with activity in your field of view, or you reorient for the next shot and pray you get lucky.

In about half an hour of trying, this was the only decent picture I managed. 42 seconds of waiting. I mistimed for the landscape and it came out dark, so I cropped for effect.

Sometimes life goes up, sometimes life goes down. Sometimes you do good, sometimes you do bad. But who would’ve thought cows knew?

This is something i (virtuallyundone ) got done on my hands. If u can spot a ‘j’, dont congratulate urself. Oh.... And this post comes from his mo-cam again…

Dropped in at vatsa’s place last week, to say hello to his parents. They had this lovely plant reaching out to the skylight.

I tried several times, but somehow the plant seemed lifeless without a bit of the skylight showing.

A wall creeper for eye-candy. Makes excellent eye-candy too.

And then the creeper breaks surface, sends roots digging for support, collects water. Water explores porous brick, discovers the other side, makes itself a storehouse. Old friend Mr. Fungus comes to visit and stays to found a colony. The party is running in full swing.

In a few years, the wall will be destroyed by its own decoration.

I am making this post from jace‘s login and this pic comes from his mo-cam.

Innovative use of scripts.

Speaking English keeps the city clean?