Joy Dutta’s blog

Being in the still photography domain for over 5 years, I decided it was absolute time to check out the world of motion pictures. I love great movies with a solid story and always wanted to make a short one myself. I have recently watched some movies carefully and researched on the basics of editing. It is time put all the dreams in action, along the lines of both documentaries and short films.

The jump to videography could take longer if not for Alena, a budding actress with boundless enthusiasm in movies. She inspired me so much over a couple sessions of chat that it made the final push for me.

I have been eyeing on the 3ccd prosumer camcorders but decided to first try out a cheaper option. Picked a mint Sony DCR-SR200 40GB HDD camcorder for 370 bucks at half its new price, almost the same I paid on a Hi-8 tape version 2 years back for family.

Time to be a filmmaker.

I do not normally post about other blogs, but I will make an exception for this: http://shaunlunt.typepad.com/shootings/

Flying all alone to Alaska, in a single propeller super cub, with incredible photographs - there is nothing else that can give so much feeling of peace. I am a long distance motorcyclist, and I know how to be jealous of this guy. He is having an experience that is easily the n-th power of what I can get riding a motorcycle in those places. And I have to stick to the land, and only upto what can be remotely called a road.

Way to go Shaun, you are the new God to me.

Yeah, my life somehow found a rhythm after a while. Been distracted by a lot of things, and it took time to organize and let things fall in place. I am back to pursuing my original passions in full steam - riding and photography. Well, I wish I could ride far and do some serious travel photography but I would rather wait till my wife is here. For now I am just making images of people, especially children, the most challenging and rewarding subjects I will ever find. I am also loving the use of Photoshop CS3 on my mac, and a bit of InDesign as well.

Did a shoot yesterday at a beautiful house in Belmont hills. Loved the place.

Another shoot tomorrow at Moss beach, in Half moon bay. Should be a great 80-mile ride.

I finally decided to go with a dedicated domain for my professional photography career. My other site www.joydutta.com will still exist, for this blog and riding related stuff. Bought the domain from nameboy.com, and boy, are they fast ! Within 2 minutes of registration and payment my site went live. I shifted the content from my existing site to the new one in just a minute, thanks to rsync.

I never knew making a publishable book is well within my current resources. I had been planning to get a heavy duty mac desktop primarily for design work. After working on a macbook pro, I know that all I need to master is Adobe Photoshop and InDesign before I can make really professional stuff out of my photos.

I didn’t know about blurb.com and its Booksmart software for mac till Francesco showed me the light. Thanks buddy !

I had to make a practice book, and what is better than making one devoted to the SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) !

A few happy hours of labor, and the result brought me a big grin. A perfect end result in my quest for a photography workflow.

Trying to be a pro photographer eventually needed me to make my own cards. An hour with gimp later I came up with a picture I can never be tired of, plus this picture is featured in my professional site as well. I am feeling quite satisfied about it. Wanted this setup for a long while and it is complete now. I am getting more motivated to go out and shoot so I can keep improving my portfolio.

Long way to go still, though.

As the cliche goes, I am finally going “pro”. Just wanted to see what the professional side of photography has to offer. Waited long enough to gather a few portfolio-grade images and thanks to my recent sessions on portraits and headshots of few models, I am ready by now.

As I find out, it is fierce competition out there. Since money is not my sole focus in this, I am determined to find out what my skills are worth in the market. Business cards are in short order. Several TFCD sessions done so far have been very productive.

I am looking forward to photograph people, especially weddings and children. They are both hard to do well and highly rewarding. Hoping for a productive 2008 in my new adventure.

http://photography.joydutta.com

After a while of photographing friends and family, it was time for some serious glamour shoot. I put up a CL ad last night as a photographer available for TFP/TFCD (Time For Print/CD) sessions. Quite unexpectedly, a model emailed me in the morning and fixed up the shoot at Linda Mar beach in the afternoon. It was a lovely ride down to the beach and with 70F, it was swarming with surfers. Sheila did very well with her little experience. When we got tired of the blues, we visited a nearby park for some greens. Overall, a productive day for me.

A major part of my photography workflow is backing up the newer image files. It has been a little slow and cumbersome so far as I was using the unix “diff” program to find out which directories/files need to be copied to the usb hard drive. It was tremendously slow to show the changes on stdout before I could run the copy commands in batches.

I was finally fed up and ran some searches when the unix “rsync” program showed up. Voila. It runs a gazillion times faster than “diff -r” and also allows me to dry run. Plus, I don’t have to run the copy commands separately.

I just did this to backup my local photo directory: (hdd is a symlink to the usb hard drive)

rsync -avzn ./photography/ ./hdd/photography/

Followed by removing the “n” switch and running the command again. Gotta love working with *nix.

This time I had a real photographic trip to San Francisco. The prime reason I am always hesitant to visit the most beautiful American city is the sudden temperature drop of a few degrees in 40 miles, coming from Sunnyvale. Last couple of times I went alone, ended up fighting the cold and finding my way in the never-ending puzzle of one-way streets. Having someone reading the GPS and telling directions was a great help yesterday.

I got a few of the classic scenes I always wanted to capture. What made me most satisfied is the golden gate view from the high point across the bridge before sunset. The tripod was of tremendous help, and I wonder how I got along without using it.

Pics: SF - Mar 07