Story of my Wedding ring

In Dec 2009, I was busy shopping for my Wedding. I had got the suits and dhoti's I needed. Only thing that was pending was the Wedding ring. I'm not a fan of gold or jewellary but decided that I will be wearing the wedding ring more often. My requirements were, I wanted to get a simple circular ring and wanted to emboss characters in it.

We started the hunt in Chennai. Most shops here did have a circular ring but did not have custom character embossing in them. Few of them were only able to carve the name in the ring, that was machine done so only standard character fonts were available. Finally my mom suggested to try Kirthilal, Coimbatore. After speaking with the sales guy there I was introduced to an elderly man. Soon the sales guy started gesturing that I wanted a circular ring. Yes, the elderly man was physically challenged (he could not speak and hear), though he had excellent lip reading skills and a god's hand in drawing. He has worked as a jewellary designer close to 18 years. I then gestured to him what my requirements were, he then drew a three dimension of the ring alone. Whola! Perfect. I was then asked to write the text that I wanted in it, I wrote them in small case. He then made small touch up and redrew the ring again in 3d with the name in it. That was all, my ring got delivered precisely as I had asked for.

Well, that was the story of my ring. What is yours?

It was our second wedding Anniversary! Happy Anniversary to us! :-)

House rants

Abirami recently got her four wheeler drivers license after rigorous training at the driving school. So every time we loan the Zen from my inlaws place for a ride, I would ask her to drive. She would politely decline the offer by saying roads are too crowed or not in a mood to drive.

One day we were driving some where outside and I slowed down near a speed breaker. I asked,
Vijesh (Me): Abi, which gear would you goto to slow down at these speed breaker?
Abirami (She): Hmmm, First gear.
Me: You can slow down to second gear, that would be enough, I think.
She: Oh ok. Most of the times I drive in first gear.
Me: Ohhh! (I looked amused)
She: Then I will drive in second and third gear at times.
She: But will never goto fourth gear!
Me: Why is that?
She: I get confused. Instead of the fourth gear, I will put the reverse gear.
Me: Astonished I looked and said, "Abi, I will drive when we go out."

End of Summer! Almost

My wife handed me the mobile, on the line is a common friend. After less than a minute in the conversation she asked, "Why no update in the blog? What are you doing these days!" I paused for a second to think, but was not able to make up a convincing answer. Yes gone are those days for active blogging. I just hopped the list in the blogroll to find almost 75% of them seldom write it anymore.

Myself, Getting into the groove of Chennai life. My first real summer in Chennai after I relocated. Few bike rides on the weekends can be more draining that work days. So I seldom take it on longer rides. Spending long hours with the O-General air conditioner is the only relief. Even my laptop reboots automatically after the cpu fan spinning its life out to keep the processor cool. Living on real fluids this time (yeah! I'm not in bangalore to have more than one meaning to it). Hopefully some showers come in soon or atleast I met dept should stop making predictions.

Otherwise, went to an IPL match, got a ManU jersey (courtesy: UK return Karthi), coding in Java after a break and no improvements in weight loss effort.

Oh yeah, I don know how I missed it - Light Story. Visit the facebook page too.

Bokeh Experiments - How To

Seasons greetings everyone.

After my earlier post of Instant miniature studio many had left comments saying it was useful. Thanks for your comments and feedback. With Christmas and the new year aproaching, here is an interesting walk through to make your photographs more interesting this season. This time we are going to play around with the bokeh.

Its fairly simple to get a bokeh like the below one. You need to keep the lens in a low aperture like f/1.8 and with some back ground light. 

But what do to when you want to make it more interesting like the one below? 

Here is how to do it. You can easily try it at home. You will need:

1. Camera and a low aperture lens (50 mm f/1.8)

2. Chart paper, preferably black.

3. Compass and Scale.

4. Paper cutting knife and scissors. 

Measure the diameter of your lens or simply go with the measurement of your filter that you got for the lens. Use that measurement to make circular rings in the chart paper using the compass and scissors. Make sure the ring exactly fits in the lens (one would need to remove any lens filters attached, for this experiment). Now draw shapes(hearts, square, clove, anything) in the center of the circular paper ring and make sure the shapes are exactly at the center. Use the paper cutting knife to cut out the shape that was drawn.

Now it's almost done, fit the circular rings in front of your lens and start clicking. Enjoy the custom bokeh shapes. 

Technical mumbo-jumbo or How It Actually works:
Technically the shape of the bokeh is controlled by the shape of the aperture. Ideally the aperture is made of multiple blades to form a near circular shape. As the number of blades differ from lens to lens, by keeping a high f-number like f/5.6 the bokeh produced might be polygon in shape. Here since the light entering the lens is controlled by a custom shape which overrides the default circular ring of the aperture, it gives the bokeh a custom shape. This said, it is left to each one's creativity to decide the shape and the kind of picture to use these techniques on. 

P.S. It was fun to use the compass after eight years, last I used it was in the Engineering drawing class in the first semester of college.