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The first day in Colombo

The Bangkok International airport was awesome. The peculiar design of the horizontal stretch and the 3 floors, with all the glass structures, makes it absolutely stunning. Maybe there would be more beautiful airports, but this was the first most beautiful I ever saw. After getting stamped the on-arrival visa, which cost 1000 Baht (1 Baht = 1.5 INR) , and exchanging some rupees to Baht from the exchange counter, we moved out of the airport, where the Thai guide, Mr. Bas, was waiting for us with our bus.

Two days were allocated in Pattaya, to where we were heading. It was around 2 – 2.5 hr journey from Bangkok airport to Pattaya. The highway was absolutely the highway, with long stretches, with only the tolls in between and just green land on the sideways for a very long time. Read the rest of this entry »

In Webscape Tidbits Part 7, let us see some tools and utilities along with what all you can do with your photos!

Photo fun effects

Okay, you have so many photos of Christmas and New Year holidays. Now what? How about some digital processing? Adding some photo effects? Sounds cool, huh? Good, now check out the websites below to start with!

The first common task done by people is to upload their photos straight to Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, Orkut and Facebook. But before sharing pictures, why not have some fun?

If you had liked the Photofun post, then here are few more to play with your photos: Read the rest of this entry »

The flower show in Bangalore Lalbagh gardens started last week. Over the weekend, having nothing else to do, we went over to click them. I mean the flowers. Yes, photography has been getting on my nerves every time I see my photographs and the experiments.

To those residing in Bangalore from a quite long time, this flower show may not be a new thing. I have been to other flower shows too, like in Thiruvananthapuram at Kerala, but flowers are always refreshing.

The entry fee is maximum Rs.40/- for adults. I saw huge numbers like Rs.150 and Rs.200 in the price listing for the car parking, though I am not sure, whether its true! Thankfully, we went on bike which can be easily parked for just Rs.5! There was no special fees for camera, which provided great opportunity for many photographers. There were tripods, and huge big, wide, or whatever lenses stuck near the huge varieties of flowers. Read the rest of this entry »

During Christmas holidays, we had been to Goa. It looked its best with all the Xmas colors of red, green, white and yellow.

The beaches were extremely beautiful. We were in Goa for around 4 days. So we could cover most of the beaches in North Goa. The Goa tourism and its beaches have been written by many and I suppose descriptions are not that required. Initially I thought of writing the travelogue, but then so much is written about the beaches of Goa n all. So thought of just sharing the pictures.

The happy news for me is that the random photos I took, came surprisingly well than I expected. Below are some of the few : Read the rest of this entry »

The photofunia.com site enables you to blend your images on various ready-made photos. A sample one is given below.

All are catchy photos with special effects which will boost your spirits high. The website uses mostly face detection algorithms to cut out your face alone from the image you supply from your computer/pc. It also enables to save to Imageshack for easy usage in internet sites or save as Avatar to use in forums and as thumbnails or to save the entire image to your desktop and that too for free!!!

I love taking photos. Rather I guess I love admiring nature. The sky, the flowers, the angles, the view points, the animals and wildlife, the colors, the portraits, the macro’s, the photo effects…

Long back, I had bought my first digital camera, canon a400 to feed my hobby called photograpy. There was the web forums where in I could showcase my pictures to obtain comments and feedback from talented amateur photographers and that too in layman terms. In those days, the DeviantArt site was popular for photographers and I didn’t knew about Flickr at all. I could find there are more professional people using Flickr these days.

After my cold deal with Flickr, I have been uploading most of my photos in Picasaweb. I have now almost 4 to 5 public albums in addtion to the DeviantArt. It includes the time pass photo sessions along with the Mysore snaps. So here we go.

Read the rest of this entry »

Long back in November, Yahoo decided to shake me off by closing its Yahoo photos. I had stored so many photos in it, ranging from my experiments to my portraits! It left me with few options to transfer my photos, and being the bright net addict and knowledgeable that I am, I chose flickr.

Since then, I had loaded and loaded more into it, using the mass uploader option of flickr.com. Initially I was having hard time, knowing about sets, collections, and groups, but slowly as any hardworker conquering and completing its assigned task, I mastered them (er.. did I… yet??!!).

Then came the catch! I was notified that what I was experiencing over the weeks were just a trial version of the paid version of flickr which was about to expire in few days! And I was not about to pay hundreds just to show case my photos. I was not an official photographer!

The limited version created a hell lot of probs, one of which was the archive!!! They archive automatically the older photos and I was not able to see or edit retrieve it back!! What the hell was it! They were like capturing my precious photos in a deceitful way and asking ransom now to give it back!??? They should have mentioned it, rather Yahoo should have mentioned all these details when they help out their customers in transferring the photos to other third party agents!!!

I have stopped using it, and I am transferring my photos to other places (as of now its picasaweb.. don’t know when its going to deceive me now! ) slowly, and trying to recover the old ones from the archive of flickr!!! Phew man! what a task!!!