Software tricks that compensate for hardware

If you hear about software compensating for hardware be it in imaging, networking, security, etc. etc. take it very seriously. 

Got to witness it firsthand over the weekend. We were at a friends place and one of our friends who works at Apple, whips out an iPhone8 and says "let me show you the portrait mode on this one". She takes a photo of me and with a single swipe on the icons in the bottom she was able to adjust the lighting on the portrait, AFTER the photo was taken. The background was also blacked out instantly and precisely.

It is interesting to note that Apps have figured out how to identify your face and put bunny ears on them, glasses and hats on your image and move them dynamically as you move your face. That is already 2016! as pointed out by my other friends. So the face and body recognition has come a long way. The speed and precision with which it is being done is what is amazing and scary! 

It takes me (and I do this with practiced ease) 3-4 minutes to cut an outline and create portait shots by blacking or whiting out the background. I use the smart cut tool in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and do a layer by cut followed by a solid layer and reordering the layers. 

The key issue is that the smart cut is only as precise as I can do it manually. My rush and crude job in the picture below shows that I did not get the boundaries right on my head line or right ear, which is because the background color blends with skin color or fuzzy boundaries are hard to delineate. The option is to gradually increase opacity between the layers. It can be done and it will take another few mintutes and can be automated.

How do you adjust the lighting post picture?! Think the iPhone8 is taking a page out of the Lytro book and doing multiple exposure shots (kind of like HDR but by adjusting focus) or is adding image sensor tricks to deliberately over expose or underexpose a group of pixels after it identifies the face prior to taking the pictures and is then able to play with this in the post processing. Dont know what kind of AI went into this, but whatever it is, very impressive!

Note that when I do smart cut and add a black layer, there is no lighting effect. I can also recreate part of the effect by creating a custom Vignette option. But I cannot change the local lighting on my face. It will always match the original. 

The "smart cut" being done with software is what is incredible. This is going to put portrait studio kits out of business. 

The SLR camera and lenses are temporarily safe. It still takes a good zoom to capture pictures of moving subjects against a plain backdrop and CS5 to adjust it. Maybe when you import the photos into an iPhone8 those photographs will be edited with a button click. Photoshop options and customized macros are going to be folded into the iPhone. You dont need those anymore soon..

One idea that I had was this.. Build a housing for an iPhone where the phone's camera focuses on an internal white board inside the box which replaces the plane of the full frame sensor in an SLR. You directly put your 2000$ lens on to this small box and the phone connects to an EF lens, telescope, binocular etc. etc. 

In the mean time photography enthusiasts like me will still lug around a heavy bag... 

Technology is moving very fast. Faster than a common person with respect to that technology field is improving. I am in hardware and see a scary progress in software. A software person is probably seeing the same thing in hardware space. The collective improvement is something neither one can anticipate or expect. . . it beats the average expectation by a wide margin!  The happy go lucky average users (all of us) don't see the larger picture of where this is going!

Navarathri Golu - 2017

We are currently celebrating Navarathri (nine-nights) and the Golu visits that come with the celebration. 

The women and girls (and their drivers by induction) are dressed nicely. 

There is high octane fuel.. err Sundal to feed the traveling beauties and chaufers.. 

Some fine singing by the kids in front of the doll displays and 

the doll displays themselves.. a thing we look forward to in this household. 

For those of you who are new to this blog, here is the background. South Indians celebrate Navarathri (Dushera, Durga Pooja in other parts of India) with elaborate doll displays on a staircase pattern (padi) and make some yummy treats with various legumes on 9 nights of the festival. They invite ladies and kids to visit their house, they sing in front of the deities, eat the snacks and are off to visit other folks. The ninth day is a prayer to the godess of learning, Saraswathi and the tenth day is celebrated as the day of Victory (Vijaya- Dasami).

In most houses where there has been a death in the family that year, they skip the display in their house and visit other folks. In some rare cases, where families found that the first year they kept the display as a newly wed family correlated to a death of a closed one, and I use the term correlate with a lot of hate given my applied math background... they watch cautiously. 

My grandmother apparently lost three kids to three years when she tried to keep the golu and decided that keeping the golu was not auspicious for the family. Since then (60 odd years ago), there has been no golu in this house on any paternal desencents. Any woman who gets married to a guy in this family, is promptly brainwashed irrespective of her education level and is told "not to tempt fate by keeping a golu". 

Let's just say that everytime I piss a flamingo dies. Unfotunately piss I have to. Out of respect for my elders (let's call it that) I am just happy visiting golus and taking photos of my cuties in different dresses. . . and of course documenting the golus from bay area which are frozen in time.. the Golus in Chennai seem to have morphed into some advanced concepts in terms of themes, dolls and partying! 

This is typical of any immigrant community that evolves on one side and supresses evolution on other fronts to keep things "authentic".. 

This year we managed one family portrait..

and visited 10 or so Golus over the weekend. I will miss the rest of the golus because of work. It is what it is.. Have asked Jr. to take some nice pictures of golus they attend and show me and I can add it to the slideshow below..

This year I also got to take pictures of the Dasavatharam set (10 avatars of Vishnu) from different Golus (where it was possible to take a picture). Given the circular golus and a shallow depth of focus, some golus were a challenge to capture.. next thing I know, we might need drones to take ariel views of the golu and add videos. Golugraphy has to make its technological advances, no?!

Talking of technology, the kids are taking their science projects and making the Golus interesting. We were witness to a volcano demonstration as part of a golu. Every visitor gets to see the volcano. Just think of how much fun Golus are becoming! 

Here they are...

Given that kids place the dolls and there is sometimes breakage in transit, it is impressive that the golus make it with all 10 avatars. Sometimes folks place it in the wrong sequence while majority place it right. Have written about this in a FB post before.. but there is a logic to this. My grandpa taught me that the 10 avatars of Vishnu is our forefathers way of teaching us evolution. The puranas that talk about the 10 avatars pre-date Darwin by 100's of years. 

The idea is :

life started in the ocean.. the first avatar is fish

Life moved to amphibians .. second one is a tortoise

Then it came to be ground feeding land animals .. third one is a boar

Then came a predator .. Vishnu as a Lion

Then came a pygmy or dwarf .. Vamana

Then it is all homo sapien transformations with a man who is mentally unstable (but physically a man as we know it) - parashurama (violent man)

followed by Rama - man with ideals

then Balarama -- a man with a plough (he has now settled and has figured out how to tame rivers and do agriculture.. non nomadic man)

then Krishna (god who does anything he has to to win and in the process sets up the downfall of man)

Finally Kalki, the doomsday avatar of Vishnu who finishes off what Krishna started. (Last year I had made fun by saying Trump is Kalki and regret that.. he won as I predicted and given where we are.. he might actually be the 10th avatar of Vishnu.. given God comes in all shapes, sizes and colors..even orange)

It is interesting to see how sometimes we miss the bigger picture or the hidden lessons! 

As usual, look forward to next years's Golus.. 

Sunsets..

Given a choice, I would go with my family to the coast and take sunset pictures. But recently that has not been possible with travel. There are amazing sunsets no matter where I am.. so here are some sunsets taken with the iPhone from car rides from airports to hotels, which invariably happen during sunsets!

These were all taken over last two months from moving vehicles.

There were also taken with the iPhone but didnt have to deal with movement..

Sometimes the best camera you have is the one in in your hand!

Once in a lifetime.. or maybe twice

As a child I vaguely remember going through a total solar eclipse as a kid of 8 or 9 in India. The local priest had said that the eclipse was specifically bad for my birth star of "rohini" and I had to be kind of quarantined.. or maybe it was my brother that got quarantined and I was in by association. Total solar eclipses meant folks stayed indoors and the ones whose birth star got a hit stayed 16 stories underground.. no I am kidding. They also stay indoors but get to cover their forehead with darbai grass (which apparently can absorb harmful radiation).. 

That was in those days. Last month I got another chance in this lifetime to "see" a solar eclipse that was spectacular. I had plans to even drive somwhere to see the totality, but my office did not plan for it. We had a meeting set for 10-noon. As a photographer, even if not Oregon, at least I wanted to go to some local mountaintop, set up the camera and go for some kind of time lapse composite shot. On a whim I took my camera bag with me.

When I went to work, we were in for a nice surprise. All of us got solar eclipse goggles and we were watching it from the parking lot. I just set up the camera in my office and took shots through the window.

everything looked unreal for those two hours. the colors on the trees and cars were so vivid ! 

Threw in all ND filters one on top of the other (ND2, ND4 and ND8) and it was still not enough! The sun is very powerful.. so I waited for clouds to cover the sun partially and got some shots! 

but the one above was with my iPhone! one of my colleagues pulled out his Huawei phone and got some amazing shots. That thing had a leica camera on it with shutter speed and aperture controls! I could not match those with the iPhone.. the 5D mark ii with a 70-200 and 2x extender.. that got some decent shots..

Was very happy to be able to see this. It was also a nice experience sharing this viewing with colleagues. Bunch of geeks enjoying an eclipse together!

Who knows, maybe time and space will be in my favor and will get to see an eclipse in totality in some part of the world sometime!

Was worried that in spite of the ND filters the lens would have been damaged. So far it seems to be okay on subsequent portrait shots!

A star is born..

For the longest time, this niece of mine really had no competition when it came to being my favorite! 

So you can imagine my surprise, seeing her be all grown up and emote so well at her Arangetram in Chennai two months ago, not to mention do a solo on stage for two hours to a packed audience in a city that is not her own.

Had just landed in Chennai the previous day and thanks to AirAsia, my entire lens kit was a mess and I did not even want to put everything back together. Throughout her dance performance, was missing my camera. Then I managed to get it cleaned and fixed in Mumbai.

They say life is all about second chances. Second chance I did get last evening, when she did a solo performance for all her bay area friends and family, most of whom, did not make it to Chennai. This time, I had my camera.

She did an amazing performance again! More than her performance, I was so happy to see her respect her teacher the way she did. That is something you simply cannot teach a child with ease in the US of A. It comes naturally to kids in India from a culture standpoint. It does not come naturally to kids here. Even Indian parents here suddenly start seeing teachers as service providers. Guess that whole "maata, pita, guru, deivam" (mom, dad, teacher then god) thing disappears in a uber capitalist system! 

The way she talked about her teacher was what impressed me the most. She did a great job dancing, and I did take lots of pictures. I will post only three here.. 

1. with the star of the show!

2. to put it in current teen speak, "she simply slayed it"

3. If she can hold poses like this, chances are she is already a Yogi! 

Looking forward to many more performances. It is not easy to do this without a significant time commitment from the kid, teacher and parents.

Given the number of friends who are having their kids do Arangetrams (getting on stage to do a solo), the Indian dance art forms are definitely thriving in the US! 

Had happy tears watching this kid make us all proud, for the second time!