music everywhere i go

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Every decade or so, I have a period of time – anywhere from a few months to a couple of years – where just about every interest I have is set aside for music. I’m not sure how or why this happens, but I become a sponge for sonic accomplishment almost to the exclusion of everything else.

I’m in such a phase right now, and I’m lucky to be in New York, because live music is accessible to a degree that few places on Earth can offer – at least as far as the genres in which I’m interested are concerned. I recently had the opportunity to see Femi Kuti live @ Irving Plaza. I also saw Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten perform as part of their Thunder tour – a possibly unsurpassable experience for me as a bass player. I’ve listened through the entire Led Zeppelin catalogue, in sequence, several dozen times. And now I’m practically deconstructing Raising Sand, the T Bone Burnett-produced collaboration between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

Sometimes I wish I’d practiced writing a bit more. I could listen to music and watch performances and write about that, comfortable in the shadow of far greater examples of humanity than I.

st. nick’s

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Saturday, May 9th, 2009

If you’re ever short of something to do in Manhattan, head up to St. Nick’s Jazz Pub any night of the week for some blistering sound. I saw Donald Smith and Aaron James there last night. It was awe-inspiring. I was alternating between giving up bass lessons altogether and going straight home to practice all weekend long. No cover, super friendly place, and just an all around fantastic experience. Do it.

conor’s trip around the world

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Have just updated Conor’s link (see Blogroll) to point to his new blog about his trip around the world. Wouldn’t we all just like to quit our jobs and travel for a year… Well, kudos to him for actually doing it. It makes for good reading, so if you’re into travel, definitely head on over and check it out.

tricked out xp interface

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Sunday, January 11th, 2009

I like my Windows XP. But let’s face it: it’s been around a really long time, and the default themes are a bit dated. There’s plenty of software out there to modify the look and feel of Windows XP, but I’ve invariably discovered issues that caused me to uninstall it in the end.

All the more reason that I was happy to find a new theme, courtesy of Microsoft. A download link replete with screenshots can be found here. Needless to say, I don’t use the default wallpaper; the theme looks great with this one:

Orange Chaos (courtesy of InterfaceLIFT.com)

Orange Chaos

Get it at InterfaceLIFT.com.

Oh, and if you use Firefox, there’s a reasonably well matched skin to boot called Abstract Zune.

thumbnails are back

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Finally found the WPG2 link in the new WP interface. It told me that I needed to reactive the “Image Block” plug-in in Gallery2. I did that, and everything is working like a charm.

missing thumbnails in blog posts

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Sunday, January 11th, 2009

If you’re wondering why you’re seeing a lot of “* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated*” errors in blog posts where thumbnails from my gallery should be, it’s because I upgraded WordPress from 2.6.5 to 2.7.

This situation is actually better than the whole bunch of other errors that showed up right after the upgrade, pointing to various line errors in various config and php files. I tried deactivating and reactivating the WPG2 plug-in, which replaced the detailed line errors with the “* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *” message. Smooth.

When it comes to the WordPress WPG2 plug-in, upgrading WordPress is a crapshoot every single time. I just hope that a new version is released soon that doesn’t require me to go back to every single blog entry with Gallery2 thumbnail references & recreate them (something I had to do the last time around).

adobe lightroom 2.2 vs. canon digital photo professional 3.4

utsav | Photography, Product Comments & Reviews | Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

It’s face-off time: Adobe Lightroom (LR) vs. Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP). Rrrraaahhhhh!!!

Background: I started shooting exclusively in RAW…not that long ago. Perhaps a year ago. The first “real” set of photographs I shot purposefully in RAW were those from my January 2009 trip to Costa Rica. These were post-processed entirely using Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 3.2 software. Canon supplies the software and upgrades free of charge when you purchase one of their dSLRs; I’m not sure if this is true for their entry level dSLRs, but both a Windows and a MacIntosh version were available out-of-the-box with my purchase of the Canon EOS 20D about five years ago.

Let me say from the outset that I’m not a pro photographer. I’m not even a semi-pro. I’m probably more of a gadget whore wannabe than anything else. I tend to realize this only after I’ve invested lots of time and money in sophisticated technology that then feels entirely misplaced in my hands because I rarely exercise even 1% of its full potential. This probably explains both my intial decision to cheap out on purpose-built RAW processing software and my subsequent desire to prove Lightroom-using friends with similar photographic proficiency wrong about their own choice of software.

Back to the present: In my first attempt to do something neat with my recently acquired off-camera flash kit, I obtained fairly dismal results. This is one of the better shots:

Original Test Shot - Small Size

I know, not particularly impressive. The strobe was set to 1/4, but even when I went lower, I still got that distracting glow you see on the right and an ugly shadow off of the lower portion of the mask. I suspect that this was due to the positioning of my shoot-through umbrella and the lack of a reflector to deal with the shadow, but this didn’t hit me until after I saw the images on my computer’s display. Hey, you learn by trying.

Since I was already on my computer by the time I realized what was going on, I wanted to see if the shot could be salvaged by post-processing and thought this would be a great time to compare DPP and LR. I had experience with the former and simply upgraded from 3.2 to the latest 3.4 release that Canon had posted on their website. I also downloaded a trial version of LR 2.2, which had been released recently along with Canon-specific camera profiles and a bunch of functionality that came out in the 2.0 release that I thought would make for a nice comparison of the two products. I should also mention that I recently purchased a copy of “The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers” by Scott Kelby, more as a way to see if I could do in DPP what my friends were claiming to be unique to LR than because I actually wanted to know the ins and outs of Lightroom.

As you can see, I was proved wrong:

Adobe Lightroom 2.2 - Small Size
Canon Digital Photo Professional 3.4 - Small Size

The overpriced, $300 software performed much better than the free stuff. IMO, this was in large part due to the much more granular controls that LR provides over DPP. In the case of this particular shot, the “Recovery” slider totally saved the day w.r.t. the strobe-through-umbrella glow, while the “Vibrance” slider helped to bring out the rich colors without oversaturating the image the way the “Saturation” slider would have done. With a bit more digging, I could probably have found a way to deal with the shadow, too.

So why do I think that $300 is overpriced? Because I see the value of Lightroom to be locked up largely in the Develop module. The Library module is a “nice to have” option but more sophisticated than what I need, given my relatively low output compared to that of a professional photographer. And the Slideshow, Print and Web modules? The first two are a total waste in my case, and I use Gallery2, so I don’t have any use for the Web module. I would much prefer to pay $60 or $80 (or possibly $100) for the Develop module and have the others available for optional purchase. $300, however, seems a bit much for what I do. I just wish I’d done this comparison a few months earlier, when I was still a student; I could have purchased an academic license for one third of the cost of a full-priced license.

You live, you learn. The gallery that includes the full size JPEGs can be found here.

dumber than monkey boy

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Wow. I didn’t think it was possible for the Republican party to find someone dumber than George W. Bush. They did:

Sarah Palin & Katie Couric, Part One

Sarah Palin & Katie Couric, Part Two

Monkey Boy, move over. Here comes Monkey Girl!

If the real thing isn’t hilarious enough, head over to nbc.com and check out the Tina Fey & Amy Poehler SNL skits. Brilliant!

point of origin

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Better days…

seven years

utsav | Utsav's Ramblings | Thursday, September 11th, 2008

7 was a lucky number for me. Looking at this image, today I’m tempted to say I don’t feel so lucky. Seeing, feeling & quite literally breathing that day, I have to tell – force – myself, remind myself, that life is circular: every end is a beginning. Still: seven years on, why do I feel that this was a beginning of an end?

Next Page »

Powered by WordPress | Theme by Roy Tanck