The Death of Yash Gupta

The third post in the series of posts I wrote on 5th March

I just finished handing in my portfolio on the 3rd March, tuesday two days ago. But it seems like it's been such a long time. 

The time I was working on my portfolio was the only time I wasn’t thinking about dying. Because I really wanted to finish it, or just because I didn’t have enough time to think about anything else at all?

Incident #1

I handed in my portfolio on Tuesday. I was sleeping most of the day through Wednesday morning. Didn’t have anything to eat since 5 am on Tuesday morning to about 11 or 12 am Wednesday morning. I was in bed when the fire alarm in the building went off. I didn’t know if it was a drill or a real fire. I was on the 5th floor. Evacuating would have taken a fair bit of time. However, even though I was wide awake, nothing prompted me to get up and check it out. I didn’t even give it a second thought and turned a deaf ear to it. The fact that I am still alive means it was just a fire alarm test.

Incident#2

I was walking to the Skills Training Center down the street where I have my Wednesday night English class. I was going to give a test tonight. And I was walking confidently and fearlessly. I wasn’t afraid of the traffic. Even though I didn’t jump any stop signal, I had a close call when a car was swiftly turning into the driveway of McDonalds, but I wasn’t startled for a second even. I continued at my regular pace. Reckless woman driver, I thought. Continued walking when suddenly, I realized what I had just done.

But during the portfolio, I was very careful on the road and also very scared. I didn’t want to die without having finished the portfolio. I had an agenda. I was the man with a plan; albeit a very short term plan. 


I was so happy before I handed it in. Now, I don’t know what, where or when I am doing. I feel like I’ve already written my will and I am about ready to decease.

Disclaimer: All names, places and events (and disclaimers) mentioned in this post are false. Any resemblance to anyone anywhere is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

Mind map

Mind map for painting
Originally uploaded by yashrg

We were told to do this painting for our class based on the words that signify someone important in your life.

My house and the photos I took there.

Wires to wirelessly network your home

DSC02139
Originally uploaded by pixlux.de

This is ridiculous. I don't know where this was taken. They obviously need to hire more people who know about networking and fire those electricians.

Nikon D40 from Henry's Outlet store toronto

nokiN
Originally uploaded by yashrg

After my parents finally gave me permission to buy a new camera, I wasn't going to wait another second for my parents to change their mind. But as my luck would have it, Futureshop was out of stock on the camera! So I started looking elsewhere. I finally found this model on Henry's.com . It was listed for $349. (Body only). And Since I didn't find a column for the lenses, I decided I better just go to the store to choose and pick the lens to go with the body.

Finding it wasn't a problem at all. I walked from the union station down Bay street, and then turned right when I reached queen street. Its located on 69 Queen street East. The store is huge. They have such a wide collection of stuff that I felt like a kid in a candy store. Binoculars, Old film cameras, Old Lenses, Digital cameras, (new)Lenses, even computers and ipod accessories. The store looked kinda busy at first, so I went around looking at the bargain bins. If I wanted to, I could pick out like little tidbits for almost everyone back home.

The salesman assisting me was really nice and helpful. I think his name was paul. I asked about the nikon D40 and canon digital rebel XT and corresponding lenses. When they tell you the prices of the body and lens separately, it sounds low. But the costs add up. In my case, the nikon D40 and lens was gonna be 449. I ended up paying a little more for the lens as opposed to when the lens is bundled with the camera. But it was still cheaper. Mom is expecting me to buy a camera on $519 without taxes.

With tax, my purchase went up to 560. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, that I also bought a memory card. 4 gigs. That's enough for over 500 Raw photographs from my 6 megapixel baby. After I had paid, I asked paul to show me how to put the lens on and basic functions. I was just itching to use my camera. He said the battery might not be charged, but it WAS. I also opened the SD card and shot some pictures in the store. But it was really misty outside, and might be drizzling. So I had it put back into the box.

But I missed my Go train. So I went outside the station and since it wasn't raining, took some photos. Just getting to know the camera better. I was surprised at how much I had actually figured out. But I was nowhere near being able to shoot fast at full manual. And I didn't want to miss the next train. So I went back inside. In oakville, I went to mickey's place, but apparently noone was home. Well, I will just have to go to my place and have all the fun by myself! LOL.

Thank you papa, mummy for letting me buy this.

Flickr Find: Jai Hind

jai hind
Originally uploaded by SHREYA...lYf Iz rOcKiN!!!jZ nJoYiN eV

This genius photograph was taken by Shreya. And I was really surprised to find that there was only one other comment on it. This picture deserves some awards.

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

OMG! These people make everything sound SO convincing! love it!

Flickr upload from lightroom!

Looking up!
Originally uploaded by yashrg

Today, I ran into a silly little problem while uploading images to flickr. I saw that the keywords that I had applied to my photo, showed up as one long keyword, enclosed in quotes. So I Ventured out to find lightroom groups on flickr and ask my question. I joined two groups, one called presetting lightroom, and second, just Adobe lightroom. I haven't gotten around to exploring presetting lightroom yet, but Adobe lightroom is a HUGE group! (I haven't figured out how to add links to the blog post from flickr or else I'd have linked the groups!)

And in the discussion, 'flickr export from lightroom, I found out a great new way to upload my photos photos directly from Lightroom! Well, its a two step process, so involves going through flickr uploader too, but its faster than manually exporting your photos from lightroom and then uploading them to flickr. I previously used pictureSync, which I admit is not a very bad workflow either, but It only provides limited functionality in its free mode, and expects you to pay for the full version.

The process involves installing flickr uploadr that you can download for free from the flickr website, and creating an alias. (or shortcut if you're on windows) Put the alias inside the home or user/library/application support/adobe/lightroom/export action/ folder ( for windows should be something similar...) then in lightroom, go to file>export or right click on a photo or selection of photos, and go to export>export... In the export dialog box, scroll down to post processing, and select flickr uploadr. and save this preset as flickr or flickr upload. Now whevever you use export>flickr, it will export the image, and start flickr uploadr!

You now just need to select the preferred options inside flickr uploadr and away you go! I've noticed the tags transfer over properly, and the filename is what it will use as title. I heard on some of the discussions that in certain cases, it will look for title in the the itpc data. I don't always title all my photos in lightroom, so I can't say anything for sure. But this has really changed my flickr life, and I'm really happy!

And they couldn't be saved...

Are bhai rasta kyu rok ke rakha hai?
Originally uploaded by yashrg

It was a really sad day for me and all my friends who knew him. Even though he wasn't exactly my type, I was fine with hanging with him for the time I was at sujta's place. A lot of times there would be music that not everybody liked, but he still kept quiet and played. There were times when he would start acting up when we forced him to run the intensive applications like photoshop instead of just working with paint. Sujata was the one that cared about him the most.

Then one day, him and sujata were travelling together, and sujata got lost and acted careless for one moment and it was over. It was not intentional, I know. Just one of the many silly mistakes that we all make. Maybe not as much as sujata, but we do. (case in point, the time when sujata came to meet me in the intercontinental hotel mumbai) But anyways, back to the story, she was careless for a few moments(yes, again) and he was snatched. GONE! She tried looking for him but she couldn't find him. I know she mourned and grieved harder and longer than any of us. After all, he was like her....no, lets stop.

And besides the financial reason, the bigger setback was because all the memories we had in him, all the photos all the videos all the art we did together, was gone. Just vanished in thin air. But, luckily, I still have these photos that sujata sent me. but the others couldn't be saved. I wish she had backed them up

ROM is the place to be!

Crystal at dusk
Originally uploaded by End User

This is the first time I'm posting a picture taken by someone other than me on my blog. Just because I didn't have a camera when I went to the rom on saturday and sunday! Apart from being totally breathtaking, it also doesn't cost me anything to go there over and over again now because I've already gotten a student membership. So I'm hoping, some day when I get my own camera, I will come up with beautiful photographs like this one too.

Cute anshul

Anshul
Originally uploaded by yashrg

I wanted to announce that I recently closed down my yahoo photos account and migrated all my photos to flickr. And as I did that, I got a three months free pro account which I intend to fully utilize! I might even go ahead and purchase a year's pro membership!

Found out a flickr secret

what cartoons!
Originally uploaded by yashrg

This is actually a kind of backdoor for the free users to be able to look at their full resolution images. I was looking through the old photographs of creative i college because I wanted pranav's picture for reference. I was trying to draw profile or 3 quarters views of him, and was not quite successful. So I clicked on one of the photos of the class decoration contest, which I remembered I had uploaded in full resolution!

Earlier, when I was not using the all sizes greasemonkey script, I had tried going into the all sizes page for that photo, and I only saw the large size as the biggest. But lately, I've had the script installed on my browser, so today, I clicked on all sizes, and the all sizes+ options appeared, and I clicked on original, and view image. I was pleasantly surprised to see the whole 3024x2016 image load up! I went wow This is amazing!

So for all u free users, if you don't have to upload a lot of images in a month, you can post your high res images on flickr, and always have access to them through this script!

Disco Lights in Explore

Disco Lights
Originally uploaded by yashrg.

I am so happy, because its after a really long time that one of my photos has shown up in flickr's explore pages. It reached a high of 313. It only appeared after I deleted it from many group pools and brought down the number of groups to 10. And it wouldn't have been if it wasn't for greenmonster. so a big thanks goes out to her.

Arrow

Arrow
Originally uploaded by yashrg.

One of the photos I'm chaging the upload date so that other better 200 photos stay in my photostream. the light arrow.

A cool photo browser

got this at pictobrowser. all my photos tagged with macro.