Author: Ajmal

Picture in the brain.

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Interesting conversation with Dave Howells, advertising photographer, and ex-photojournalist as he’d love to call himself. He explains how he creates his signature frames and his experiences photographing famous people in his clientele. It’s the passion of a person towards his craft like this that puts a quintal of inspiration into you. Thanks, Becki and Chris for hosting this.

Some stuff from the conversation that I felt entertaining:

  • The earlier you get in on a job, the more input you have – one of the earliest piece of advise that he received when he started pursuing photography.
  • Advertising – clients pay for ideas. Editorials – Client pay for filling space in the newspaper or magazine.
  • He walks through his decades of experience in photography in news and media. Technologies that used to be the thing at that time pop up occasionally during the conversation (high-speed flash, for instance). Very interesting.
  • He was asked who was his favorite among the famous people whom he had photographed and he responded that his favourites aren’t famous and that everyone has a story.
  • “If I think your idea is crap, I’ll tell you it’s crap and I’ll be fairly blunt about it in a charming accent, but if it’s a brilliant idea, I’ll probably steal it“, he says.
  • “It’s not about the gear, the picture should happen in your brain long before it’s got to your fingers“
  • ” There’re a lot of photographers who photograph what people look like, but there’re only a few who take pictures of who they are!” Wow.
  • “The more you shoot, the better you get.“
  • ” Ready, fire, aim“

 

Eyes – Windows to the Heart

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The title seems to bemuse on the outset, but that’s exactly what came to my mind when I happened to read about Google’s new AI algorithm that would predict heart diseases and complications by looking (scanning) at your eyes. It’s amazing to see how machine learning implementations open up new possibilities and seemingly much capable things which we often rendered improbable in the past. In the coming years, I believe they’d partner with healthcare firms to work on even larger data sets and come up with specific pattern identifications and customized algorithms and deep learning applications that would further open up non-invasive diagnosis methods. Definitely, this is the future.

The Verge‘s James Vincent writes:

“Although the idea of looking at your eyes to judge the health of your heart sounds unusual, it draws from a body of established research. The rear interior wall of the eye (the fundus) is chock-full of blood vessels that reflect the body’s overall health. By studying their appearance with camera and microscope, doctors can infer things like an individual’s blood pressure, age, and whether or not they smoke, which are all important predictors of cardiovascular health.”

Brandon Specktor reports for Live Science.

“Whether you’re getting your eyes scanned by a trained ophthalmologist or Google AI, the biggest clues to your overall health may lie in your blood vessels.

Blood vessels can provide a valuable snapshot of your heart health, revealing clots, constrictions and other abnormalities associated with various cardiovascular diseases and conditions. But because most blood vessels in your body are hidden beneath your skin and other tissues, it can be hard for doctors to access them without potentially expensive or invasive procedures.

The large vessels on the back of your retina — the light-sensitive layer of tissues at the back of your eyes — are an exception. Retinal veins and arteries are directly visible through your pupils, meaning a simple, noninvasive eye scan can reveal whether your retinal blood vessels are constricting from hypertension, clotted with cholesterol or afflicted with various other heart-health risk factors. Doctors look at retinal scans primarily to diagnose glaucoma and diabetes-related eye disease. Increasingly, however, researchers have been using eye scans to screen for high blood pressure and all of the cardiovascular ailments that go along with it.“

Absolutely exhilarating!. I am very eccentrically inquisitive of how far they can explore the wide sea of engineering, preferably in finite element analysis or structural engineering. I already came across several firms that have software products with AI built in automating a lot of calculations for structural components used in building design and infrastructure projects based on international codes of design practice.

Igniting Dreams!

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A beautifully done tribute to late former Indian president and aerospace scientist Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Beautifully shot by Matt Shaw and directed by Senthil Kumar, the video gracefully walks through his struggles and awe-inspiring journey in 6 minutes. My father had gifted his book Wings of Fire when I was in school and I was really inspired by his firm determination and hard work in working towards a dream.

Short Summary: It’s a stormy day on a bridge over the Indian ocean, to the island of Rameswaram, a night train delivers the morning newspaper to a newspaper boy who rides out into the storm to deliver the news and is the first to read the newspaper everyday as he reads all along his morning route, under the big banyan tree and sitting on the boat while his father rowed people from the island to the mainland. One day he sees the picture of a spitfire aircraft in a newspaper article about the Supermarine Spitfire, a fighter jet used by the British in World War II. He cuts it out, makes a paper rocket out of it and makes it fly and puts it up on his wall. This newspaper image became his life’s purpose. His dream was to fly a fighter plane as a young air force pilot but he fails the Indian Air Force Pilot entrance exam after India’s independence. The young man did not give up and went back to his reading habit, that helped him overcome his fear of failure. He switched lanes to become a rocket scientist on autopilot, flying missiles and testing nuclear weapons, and rising to the highest office in the country. And when he was President of India, from 2002 to 2007, he was the Chief of all the armed forces in the country. It was finally time for his childhood dream to come true. He was flying a fighter plane, at the ripe old age of 72 years as the President of the world’s largest democracy. One of the oldest men in the world to ever fly a fighter plane, which was his childhood dream. And that’s when he wrote the famous motivational line to all children :  “Dreams are not what you see in sleep. Dreams are those that don’t let you sleep.”
The story of a newspaper boy who woke up the country. A true story to ignite the power of dreams in a billion young Indians.

‘Golden Pothos’ – Propagation Craft

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I am really fond of money plants and try to grow them in literally every container I get my hands on to an extent that Netta on getting an empty bottle from any corner of the home or from groceries, she would routinely ask me ” Here’s a bottle, wanna grow in ’em? “. If you have been reading here for long, you might recollect this earlier post wherein I had shared an illustration. Money plants have a multitude of names. You might have heard names like golden pothos, Ceylon creeper, hunter’s robe, ivy arum, money plant, silver vine, Solomon Islands ivy, and taro vine. All basically refer to the same thing.  For this post, I shall call it a money plant. It’s very easy to propagate a money plant if we know a simple technique. Initially, when I started with money plants, I used to cut them randomly at different points and they used to wane off and don’t develop roots. I would like to share an easy-peasy tip on propagating money plants effectively. I’m posting this after trying and testing with different sets of plants and it works really well. In fact,  It’s a very simple procedure. You take out a considerably large branch of an existing well-grown money plant and cut at either side of the stem at the root of each individual branch.  Take a look at the illustration below:

Cut a set of around 5-6 leave like this to grow a complete bushy set.

Carefully hold them and insert them into a clear glass bottle with clean water and leave for 4-5 weeks. You’ll find roots gradually developing and it can be either left off in water itself or can be transferred into a mud pot. You can place it just about anywhere.

Beauty

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 ❝ Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination. ❞

~W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon, and Sixpence, 1919
(Chapter XIX, spoken by the character Dirk Stroeve)


Cerebral Vent

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“The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.” – Chris Ofili

The Border of a Mind is , by vision itself,  envisaged and conceived as a studio of the mind. It’s sort of my cerebral vent to the broader spaces and a culmination of ideas and themes that I tend and love to cherish to be more of my ruminations and perspectives to remain as a fleck , if you will, in the web universe.

Living embellishments!

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Here is another slice into the ponder series of The Border of a Mind. To rehash the theme, these chapters are an effort to take our minds through subtle sub-layer things that we fail to ponder or think about in our daily routines yet which magically turn around as miracles in on itself. If you have come here before, you’d recollect about the journey of birds or the perception of our brains which we skimmed around. During my last visit to India, I saw this beautiful butterfly on a wall of a skyscraper (scroll down for the photograph). As we know, it’s very difficult to spot a butterfly these days, especially if you are living in a heavily urbanized setting.

Anyone would admire the beauty and elegance of butterflies with their color wing patterns and flights. The title of this post is attributed to the ornamental beauty in them owing to which we can’t take our eyes off them!

The incremental stages of formation of a butterfly is a masterpiece of process art. Silkworms are among the animals which lay the highest number of eggs. We are talking of about 450 to 500 eggs. Since there are way too many eggs, there are chances that these may be get scattered or even strewed by the wind. To prevent this, silkworms attach these eggs by each other by a special material it secretes (string). Caterpillars on the lookout for a nice place to have their eggs laid discover one of these “branches” of eggs, if you will and would stick their eggs with the same string. Cocoon building with the string starts at this stage. Caterpillar would turn around thousands of times and would secrete around 1500 metres of strings!. At the end of this stage, the caterpillar metamorphosizes into an elegant, beautiful butterfly turning out to be another embellishing ornament around us.

If you didn’t know, for the butterfly to fly, its body heat has to be at a certain temperature. Butterflies use amazing techniques to accomplish this. For example, one such type is the colias butterfly and it won’t be able to fly if its body temperature drops below 28-degree celsius. They then open their wings at a certain angle so that their upper sides are exposed to the sun. If it reaches 40-degree celsius, for instance, it rotates by another 90 degrees in order to receive sun’s rays horizontally. Using this methodology, they absorb little heat and accordingly regulate their body temperature. I bet you didn’t know about this thermal engineering expertise in butterflies. We must have noticed beautiful spots on the butterfly wings. Yeah, they are aesthetically breathtaking and adds a gradient, but did you know that they serve another purpose? These spots help serve the butterfly to maintain higher body temperatures and these spots are located close to the points that are to be best kept warm. These spot portions generally warm up quickly compared to other parts. The location of these spots is in such a way that the distance that needs to be covered for heat transmission is shortened. As you know, a pair of lenses can be spaces and angled properly to concentrate light at a certain spot and make the area hot. Some butterflies species such as Pieris, for instance, use the same technique. I believe, thinking deeper and delving deep into such intricacies would help us better appreciate the miraculous nature of these things. How do such magic happen around us when we are too busy to even put our thought into it. Ponder! : )

Encompassing’ art.

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“I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”
― Helena Bonham Carter

‘Manuscript-ion’!

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I have a childhood penchant of curating fountain pens. My father used to use fountain pens a lot when I was a kid and I have this childhood evocation kindled anytime I spot a classical fountain pen. Yesterday, I happened to see a well-made video on fountain pens on Gentleman’s Gazette website. The pen in the photographs here is a pen that my father used to write with during my childhood days. Recently, I started using it as my daily writing instrument and favors it over ballpoints. I do a lot of hand sketches and other technical illustrations as a part of my work and overall, fountain pens are found to be a better experience. If we ponder about it, we are living in a world we rarely write something with our hand and in this age, all of us have the same handwriting with fixed type sets in a Whatsapp message or an email. I don’t know if I’m bitten by the traditionalist bug, but in general, these days I have a feeling to have a signature and a personality to subtle things and that includes the way we pen ideas as well. Flora Watkins writes,

“Elegant, ornate and adaptable to each individual hand, nothing beats writing with a fountain pen“..Memories of inky fingers and smudged exercise books meant that the fountain pen fell out of favour for decades. However, the modern heritage pens that discerning customers seek out today are a far cry from the scratchy implements of the older generation’s schooldays.


“A pen transmits the voice of the soul.”
― Fennel Hudson, A Writer’s Year – Fennel’s Journal – No. 3

‘Tale of Compassion’

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Few days back, I happened to watch Ambili. This is not a formal review of the movie per se, but my thoughts on the overall craft. At the end of this post, I shall share a link wherein you can delve into a much detailed comprehensive review.  Ambili a beautiful, gently crafted story of compassion that I really enjoyed watching. I’m an ardent admirer of the director’s previous work Guppy, which was a well-made movie that walked through different stories and beautifully wove them through an ingenious screenplay that was nothing short of pure genius. I was impressed with the passion and zeal in that movie and the art and the overall way of making that film and have been eagerly waiting for Ambili right from the time it got announced.

Guileless like a child and ever so full of life, Ambili is beloved by everyone in his village. The story traces Ambili’s outlook towards life and of challenges others surrounding him that face him on an everyday basis.

It embraces a beautiful, subtle way of communicating compassion, love and caring through a magical blend of music and stellar visuals. The movie is set at Kattappana, a lush green place in Idukki district, Kerala. Ambili, in the movie, is a joyous, guileless character and through subtle events, the story unfolds the reservoir of love and affection packed inside him. Regardless of opportunists and other hatred towards him from people at his village, he transfigures them into an aura of unconditional love.  He is full of affection and selfless compassion towards his childhood friends Teena and her brother Bobby. After few happenings that demonstrate his affection, the story takes the byway of a road movie, wherein Bobby, who is a cyclist champ and decides to go on a solo trip on a cycle from Kerala to Kashmir, where they met during their childhood. Ambili accompanies him and we’re treated with beautiful visuals and instances of unconditional affection and caring. I’m not delving into the details much, should you plan to watch this anytime soon.

The background music is gracefully composed, the flute being predominant and hugely complements the emotional nuances in different scenes of the movie. And the way story unfolds along with the nicely woven musical interludes is so well blended that it makes you walk out with a tear or two. The music in the film is highly commendable and some of the songs of the movie would be in my playlist for quite a long time.

Some frames of the movie reminded me of Children of Heaven, The Color of Paradise and some other Persian movies known for their amazing visuals and moving art. If you’d like to read a more all-inclusive detailed and comprehensive review, I suggest this page.

This movie is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I got in love with this flick and yes, aradhike is playing in the background as I write : )