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Wrapping Up Year Two 22 August 2010

Dust swirled every­where in the wake of a pile of dusty foolscap paper meet­ing the floor — the per­fect con­coc­tion for a good, long sneeze-a-thon for the rest of the day. I waited, expect­ing the worst. Nothing.

I sighed, relieved; and at the stack in front of me wait­ing to be sorted. I gave pro­cras­ti­na­tion the fin­ger and started rum­mag­ing through what’s to throw and what’s still needed — sorted in four piles. Numbers, formulas, work­ings — must be Math 3. Free-body dia­grams, graphs and excel sheets — off to the Machine Dynam­ics 2 pile. Before long, I was speed­ing through the pile of notes, tuto­ri­als and lab sheets I shoved under the study table the day I fin­ished my final exams con­clud­ing Year Two — two months ago.

Every­thing writ­ten on those papers now felt dis­tant. Every time I paused a lit­tle longer to exam­ine the scrib­bles of work­ings and cir­cuits, mem­o­ries I didn’t want to asso­ciate with again come float­ing back. Long, cold and silent nights spent cram­ming for the finals into the wee hours of the morn­ing; whole after­noons spent on one or two math prob­lems; walk­ing into the exam­i­na­tion hall the next morn­ing drowsy, ner­vous, and grossly under-prepared; and then that wave of utter ter­ror as I look down at the ques­tions blankly, head drip­ping pro­fusely in cold sweat.

Life­less dig­its and grades on my com­puter screen stared back at me three weeks later, mir­ror­ing the utter dis­ap­point­ment that was my Semes­ter Four final exam­i­na­tion results. Star­ing at them was me, equally lifeless. Suffice to say, I was look­ing at my worst results yet, two years into my degree.

As the dust set­tled, I began to see how this might just be a fit­ting con­clu­sion to Year Two. A hard slap in the face was what I needed to kick me out of over-confidence and under-preparedness. Because my final two years in degree demands of no such recklessness. With Year Three kick­ing off tomor­row with a whole new slew of intim­i­dat­ing sub­jects, only time will tell if this high-price of a les­son was worthwhile.

Hit­ting the bot­tom of the stack, I labelled and stacked the use­ful notes back together before shelv­ing them prop­erly with the rest of the pre­vi­ous semester’s notes. The floor where I was work­ing on was empty once again as I picked up the last pile of notes — the ones to be thrown. I watched as the pile descended into our to-be-recycled paper box, stir­ring up another plume of dust.

This time I smiled, as I shelved all my wor­ries and uncer­tain­ties of the past, shift­ing my gaze towards Year Three.

by ember in Life, Varsity on 22nd August, 2010 at 11pm, 10 days ago.

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Guiltily Inactive 30 April 2010

I looked up. Star­ing at my Machine Dynam­ics 2 lecturer’s ever so vivid body lan­guage as he tried — fran­ti­cally — to liven up a class­room full of stu­dents wear­ing that unmis­tak­able wtfarey­outalkingabout expression.

Words find them­selves hard to stick in one piece as they escape his mouth rid­ing on a heavy Middle-eastern accent. Incomprehensible syl­la­bles col­lapse into hyp­notic mur­murs that mutes the world into a muf­fled silence as I resorted to lip-read his 350-WPM bullet-train of sen­tences. All the awhile draw­ing my dreamy gaze onto every silent flap, sway and whirl of his arms.

I shifted my focus to the pro­jec­tion screen in front of the class that’s sup­posed to show fig­ures and for­mu­las and notes but noth­ing came into clar­ity. I squinted, but my weary eyes did the oppo­site — the world around warped into blur­ri­ness as my eye­lids fell shut at the opportunity.

Large. Blank. Void. Noth­ing.

The mid-term break right now does lit­tle to slow down what I feel is our tough­est semes­ter yet. Yes, it’s been a whole half of a semes­ter since I wrote any­thing or uploaded any pho­tos. Speak­ing of which, I guess I have been tak­ing my lib­er­a­tion off Project 365 a lit­tle too heavily.

End­less piles of assign­ment, tuto­r­ial and lab work dic­tates fir­ing up Adobe Light­room an unnec­es­sary luxury. What more click­ing around with my dSLR. Not that I feel great about it. I left behind read­ers of my now-dormant pho­to­blog and if I may say so, a fol­low­ing on Flickr that accom­pa­nied me through my 365 jour­ney. Danbo’s lying beside my lap­top enveloped in a thin but unmis­tak­able layer of dust. Comments such as the one ejana left on my 365 finale shot broke my heart.

My inner shut­ter­bug wants more than any­thing to get out.

But as they always say: desper­ate times, des­per­ate mea­sures.

by ember in Life, Photography, Varsity on 30th April, 2010 at 10pm, 4 months, 4 days ago.

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Project 365: A Look Back 24 February 2010

23,000 pho­tos weigh­ing 75 Giga­bytes, 2,400 Flickr and blog com­ments, 32 Flickr explores, 2 cam­pus semes­ters, 3 term breaks, 27 days of hia­tus plus three hun­dred and sixty-five days later, my Project 365 is a wrap. What a jour­ney it has been!

I started this project with­out much expec­ta­tions, with only the desire to observe the lim­its of pho­tog­ra­phy with a dSLR. I was brim­ming with excite­ment with my new dSLR cam­era then — though I wasn’t new to pho­tog­ra­phy – but what bet­ter way to do that than to dive head-first into this project?

Fast for­ward a year later, as I hit the upload but­ton on my final shot; hit­ting the red ‘X’ on Pho­to­shop and then clos­ing my Project 365 folder, I felt a rush of joy that accom­pa­nies the sense of lib­er­a­tion. An immense weight dragged off my back. Noth­ing was more grat­i­fy­ing than see­ing the auto-generated com­ple­tion counter on my pho­to­blog show­ing a proud, ‘100% done!’ I blinked, for a moment, this is it?

Then the sad­ness sets in. The shoot-process-upload rou­tine has become a rit­ual I per­form every day to please the 365 gods I’ve devoted myself to for a whole year. Project 365 has become a part of my life. I wake up wor­ry­ing about what to shoot; space out in lec­tures think­ing of a setup and go to bed relieved that I have the day’s shot done and uploaded. Now a mere click puts all that behind in a blink of an eye.

This is going to take some get­ting used to, I thought.

Emoness aside, the project is by far, the length­i­est self-motivated long-term endeav­our I’ve ever suc­cess­fully com­pleted in my life. That’s why it’s gonna deserve a good, hard look back on how I did it and the obsta­cles that plagued it’s entire duration.

Get­ting that shot

Tak­ing my cam­era every­where I go

When I started Project 365, I knew I had to bring my cam­era every­where I go. Tug­ging my cam­era around dur­ing out­ings are okay, the real obsta­cle was when I had to inevitably bring it to cam­pus — daily. The last thing I wanted was being labelled a show-off who just can’t help show­ing off his shiny new dSLR every sin­gle day. And let’s face it – a dSLR, even the tiny 1000D – isn’t as unob­tru­sive. The moment you yank it out, a good num­ber of peo­ple within eye­shot would def­i­nitely look your way. There are times you’d wish to have a big ban­ner above your ahead bear­ing the words, ‘I’m on Project 365! Suemeifyoucanttakeit.’

So yes, I brought my cam­era with me to cam­pus every sin­gle day for the past year. It spends most of the day tum­bling around in my back­pack, only see­ing day­light when I’m with my close friends – who’re fully aware of my project – when I see a shot or feel com­fort­able enough to whip my cam­era out.

The cre­ative spark

Main­tain­ing a Project 365 stream requires a daily dose of cre­ativ­ity I didn’t have. While there are days chock full of activ­i­ties and events that ends up in a post-processing night­mare, more often than not there were those bor­ing and unin­spir­ing days that beg of you to give up.

The first thing I’d do when the clock strikes – lit­er­ally – at the eleventh-hour, is to quickly browse through Flickr’s Explore pho­tos. Granted, not all Explore pho­tos are great ones. Com­puter algo­rithms can only do so much to com­pile a col­lec­tion of ‘good’ pho­tos every day from the Flickr archive, but there are quite a few legit­i­mately good shots out there daily that might give just that spark.

Then there’s the 100-steps chal­lenge. The idea is to drag your­self and your cam­era out­doors, walk a hun­dred steps and start tak­ing pho­tos of any­thing at the end of your path. I don’t fol­low the hundred-steps rule that strictly, but I often find myself tak­ing strolls in the gar­den snap­ping high and low so I can be done with the day’s photo. There are also days after classes where I take a detour some­where for a short solo pho­towalk that can be very reward­ing at times.

Danbo saves the day!

Some­where in the 200’s into the project, I decided to get myself Danbo, an action fig­ure from the manga, Yot­sub&! I don’t think I’ve for­mally intro­duced Danbo yet, so here goes. In the manga, Danbo is actu­ally a robot cos­tume made of card­board and was donned by Miura to enter­tain a curi­ous Yot­suba. Despite appear­ing only very briefly (a sin­gle chap­ter, to be exact), the robot with geo­met­ri­cal fea­tures stole the hearts of many.

There’s a rea­son why I thought Danbo would be help­ful to my Project. I was intrigued by how expres­sive — or the lack thereof — Danbo can be. Tilt his head up, he can express any­thing from being dreamy to excite­ment. Swing his head back down, he’ll appear down­right sad or just sim­ply, afraid. And that sort of flex­i­bil­ity is espe­cially use­ful when you have to shoot some­thing daily. =)

The Work­flow

A typ­i­cal 365 shot you see posted takes an arm and a leg to pro­duce. Tak­ing the shot itself is just the begin­ning — the real headache starts in the dig­i­tal dark­room. The pho­tos go through rig­or­ous pol­ish­ing work in Light­room, of which the best of the best are sub­jected to a strin­gent selec­tion process before the last photo stand­ing is deliv­ered to you.

Seri­ously though, there are gen­er­ally two types of shots I do in my 365 — snap­shots and set-ups. Snap­shots are usu­ally quick takes of life as it flies by, like that quick moment as a child hands out tit­bits to a mon­key; or can­did pho­tos of my friends in the labs. Set-ups are exactly what it means, ideas and sub­jects that are set-up in advance allow­ing me to explore dif­fer­ent angles and vari­a­tions in the process.

I use Light­room for cat­a­logu­ing and post-processing of my pho­tos. Pho­tos would nor­mally go through adjust­ments such as white-balance, expo­sure cor­rec­tion, split ton­ing and curves to name a few. Can­di­dates for post­ing are then exported in full size and thrown into Pho­to­shop, where sharp­en­ing, brush­ing and any other pixel-level edit­ing are necessary.

The final shot for the day is then exported from Pho­to­shop and uploaded to Flickr via the very use­ful Flickr Uploadr. While I throw the photo into Uploadr, I’ll do the write-up for the Pho­to­blog post and grab the photo URL from Flickr as it fin­ishes upload­ing. The moment I hit Pub­lish, the photo would be up fresh on both Flickr and my photoblog.

Read the rest of this entry »

by ember in Internet, Life, Photography on 24th February, 2010 at 10am, 6 months, 10 days ago.

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