Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In an era, where old media is either unwilling or unable to adapt to the Age of the Internet, Getty, the world’s largest photo agency, made a refreshing (and sensible) change. They just made over 35 million of their photos free for use on the Net, subject to some terms that show that we finally have a media company that “gets” the Internet! You might be wondering what’s the big deal with that? Weren’t we already doing what Megan Garber describes anyway: “If you find a photo, via Google Image Search or some such, that you want to publish on your blog (or tweet out to your followers, or use as your Instagram profile pic, or what have you), there is an extremely simple way to accomplish this: Download or screencap the image. Upload it. Boom. The Internet has shared its riches with you once again.” Except that it has always been illegal (depending on which image you used): “If you have engaged in this process with an image that happens to be from Getty, the massive digital p...

Photos of space always blew me away. They looked awesome! And they got even better when telescopes like Hubble were placed in space thereby avoiding the dust and the atmospheric distortions that earth-bound telescopes suffer from. Take a look at these pics below to see what I mean: But after a while, such pics lose a bit of their charm because there are so many of them on the Net and also because you start to remember that the colours on the pics are computer generated ones. Which is when I started appreciating the informative pics. Like take supernovas. When they explode, they are said to emit the light comparable to the entire galaxy they are a part of. That’s a bit hard to believe, isn’t it? Surely they are exaggerating. And then I saw this pic: See that light at the center of the pic? That’s the light of about ten billion stars at the center of the galaxy. Now see that light at the bottom left corner? That’s a supernova! As bright as ten billion stars,...

Ever since our daughter came into our lives, I started taking a lot of photos of her. Pretty soon, I got bored of them and started playing around with photo editing tools on the phone. Like applying all those Instagram filters. When I tired of them, I found other free phone apps like Be Funky, PicsArt, AfterFocus and ColorSplash that provided other features/effects. Soon enough I began to feel that the phone is too inconvenient to do serious (aka realistic) editing because of its small size. And so I found equivalent PC based tools, like GIMP. The PC tools offer a lot finer control compared to the phone: that in turn allows for a lot better special effects. Like this colour with black & white pic: Recently, one of my friends showed me a tool (Photoscape) that makes it easier than ever before to clone parts of one photo onto another (Of course, even then you need practice and patience, but still, this tool allowed me to do a whole lot of things not possible before).  Like tak...