Call me obsessive..

It has been a hectic week at work but the good news is the cold is gone in spite of skipping Yoga the entire week. Finally managed to go back to Yoga today after an entire week of long distance driving, 18 hour work days and beating a cold.

The kids have recovered completely as well and that is good. 

In the middle of all this, dedicated 90 minutes every night to parallel process work and Photoshop to get 70+ HDR images of the Joshua Tree National Park trip. That was 210+ images condensed into 70 images. Most of the images are a composite of 3 images (a normal, over exposed and underexposed image) to grab component details in bright areas from underexposed image and details in the dark areas from the overexposed image!

Are you with me so far? No?

See the picture below the way PHotoshop does it. I give it three images with -2, 0 and +2 eV and it does the initial superposition. Then I get to work with the slider bars to create the right image, i.e., the way I thought my eye saw it at that time!

Do you see how the sky details are clear in the darker picture, the tree details are clearer in the brighter picture and they have to be ported over into the picture in the middle? 

That way you can see it the way your eye sees it!

Finally the photos are done and have been uploaded into two Galleries. One is the HDR Gallery and the other one is the people photos. 

Have not found a way to get comments into the individual photos yet. Will work on that tomorrow!

The little one who sits on my lap during the editing process encourages me to go overboard on the synthetic HDR look. That is why the previous post had an artificial look for the trees. Guess she wants every thing to look like Dr. Seuss land in Universal studios.. psychedelic colors, too much vibrance, over saturation, less detail.. etc.

Daddy is more into photorealistic HDR. So most of the snaps fall into that category!

Hope all of you enjoy the Photos.

Joshua Trees

We spent the long weekend at Joshua Tree National Park. Why would the weary Narayanan family to to a desert in 100 degree heat? Well, we have seen most of the other parks and the one park which is new to the family and to the parents is this one. 

So off we went and spent almost two full days there. The flora and fauna in this place is unique and so are the rock formations. 

Walking around Joshua Tree national park is like walking around Jurassic park! So surreal that the Photoshop HDR pluggin actually does justice to what it really looks like. 

The tips of the cactus glow in the morning and evening sunlight. The rocks and boulders seem to have been picked and placed to perfection. The Joshua trees seem planted in formation and do not look very natural. There is an eerie lifelessness and the occasional movement of a desert squirrel or lizard that reminds you of the hidden life in this unique desert forest. 

We made it to a few hikes and made it back in one piece without the parents or kids going through any major events! That was a big plus. 

There are more than 500 photos (all combo photos in HDR) which need a lot of processing time. After driving for a good 8 hours this is what I could manage to post tonight as a sample.. 

Yes! Did shoot the caterpillar in with exposure bracketing using a feature that comes in handy on the Manfrotto tripod (widen the legs to make the camera come real close to the ground.. you can even put the camera upside down on this tripod) using the 50mm Macro lens. The real caterpillar is 1 inch long! The kids spotted a whole bunch of caterpillars on the ground when we went to take photos at one of the scenic spots and it turned into a HDR attempt.. 

Seriously, this is how this place really looks as the sun casts shadows on the trees and cactus on the floor. The rocks actually look like this as well in the setting sun! 

More to come in the next few days as more editing time is found.

We had a great time with the parents, kids and cousins. The trip was not without its nervous and lucky moments. I got a cactus ball between my heel and sandals and it was a painful experience extracting the thorns out. We very near ran out of gas and did not notice trying to chase the sun as it set through the mountain ranges and barely made it out to the park entrance before the reserve ran out! 

Strongly recommend this place to photo enthusiasts. Please do try to go in April when the oasis have water in them and the cactus and Joshua trees are blooming!

The art of letting go...

That by the way is...

what goes by the name of "Camel Pose" or "Ustrasana" in the Bikram Yoga class. Granted I photoshopped it way past my normal limits but the fact that Jr took the HDR snaps and my dad volunteered to hold a white Dhoti behind me to take this photograph meant that yours truly should put in at least a little more effor tinto making this photo memorable for the family!

What has all this to do with the "letting go"?

Anyone who knows me (even through the blog) probably can figure out by now that once my mind is set on doing something, I will keep trying till I figure it out to my satisfaction. Maybe I am obsessive compulsive to a greater degree than a normal person but not enough to be called OCD?! Do not know but it is not easy for me to let go of things. A shortcoming that has helped and hurt me in my personal and professional life. A trait that I consciously work on to match the situation at hand.

Yoga is one of the places where this helped and hurt me. Again this is "me" that has to do with the helping and hurting part and not the "yoga". It is very fashionable these days to bash or trash Bikram Yoga or Bikram Choudury but if I ever get to see that man in person, will prostrate myself at his feet for giving me a second chance in life. That said...

The day we went for our first yoga class, we did not know that we would get hooked to this thing the way we did. It has been a year and a half and my MIL and me still go attend at least 4 classes a week. She attends 5 or 6! Again, see what I mean by letting go?

Why would your attendance matter? What if you went there every day and just sat there most of the time? What if you had 50% attendance but you gave it your 100% every one of those 90 minutes in that hot room? What if..  ? What if..  ?

Well, I did go 250+ days in the first year and thought it was something to be proud of. I also knew that exactly one year into this practice my waist sized dropped an obvious 4+ inches, my weight went down by 17+ pounds and my average sick days came down from 10 a month to less than 3 a month and overall felt happy or at least had the ability to feel less sad in situations where my formal self would have gone into a depression of sorts.

The last six months have seen a drop in attendance. Best I have managed is 5 times  a week and that was 3 weeks out of the last 20 or so weeks. The rest of the weeks have seen 3 or 4 days attendance on a regular basis. This was mainly because of trips to Austin, adjusting to eating times (you don't want to eat anything 2 hours before a yoga class), sickness picked up from sharing the air with a bunch of people in the confines of airplanes and hanging out in airports which should probably rate at the top for the worlds most unhygeinic places.

Still give it my very best in every class and do watch for my limitations. These days I do sit down every now and then to get my breathing back under control, even if I am in the first row. A yogi's got to do what a yogi's got to do, right?  If you cannot breathe right, no point in doing the pose. There is NO benefit.

In the process of adjusting to the reduced attendance (which people tell me doesn't matter) and being a more tamed and timid self than the hardcore type A personality who would push himself just past his limits on every pose, there has been a new found realization.

Yoga is not about being flexible or strong or balancing the two. Yoga is not just about marrying your heart and your lungs. Yoga is not just about having your body one with your mind and breathing.

Yoga is about being comforable with where you are.

If you can blank out your mind between poses to catch your breath in the dead body pose when the instructor says in a soothing voice "Relax your body, relax your mind, let your body settle down into the ground with the help of gravity, let your spine touch the floor from your neck to your tailbone so you can recharge your body for the next pose", then it should be possible to do this with your mind everytime you are unhappy with yourself for not pushing yourself past your limits!

For the longest time tried to "focus" on something while doing the poses and found it to be incredibly difficult. Now there is a new trick. Try to completely defocus everything. Squint your eyes a little bit like you are trying to find the hidden picture in a "steregraphic image" and having everything around you become dull, including the teachers voice to a bare minimum and that seems to help a lot.

Yoga is about "letting go"!

Letting go of the inhibition to wipe your sweat, letting go of everything in your mind so you can completely defocus from everything, letting go of your worst fears (which mostly involve falling down to the ground in those moments). . .

Actually went and talked to one of the teachers who has been teaching for 10+ years and told her "I used to ace these poses and now I seem to have gone backward and at the same time there are poses which were so difficult for me where there has definitely been an improvement. Also seem to have less energy these days so don't know if it is my work or the yoga".

She looked at me for a few seconds, paused and said "Happens to all of us. We all have our good days and our bad days. Also different parts of our bodies adjust over time. Your muscles that were once weak are now strong and that means relatively the strongest muscles that you used to get by class so far are not the strongest anymore. They need to improve new. Just keep doing what you can and you will find out what you can do with your body and mind!"

The simplicity of her logic and her sincerity made me realize that Yoga's greatest benefit is learning to accept your limitations and work with them!

These days I go into the room with no expectations, do what I can, sit down when I cannot and try my best the next day without any misgivings from the past experience.

Do not know if mentality will translate to a more peaceful personal and professional life, time will tell...

ps. Reposting this because all the formating in the previous version of this post was messed up on the WYSIWYG editor. Couldn't let go! As you can tell.. I still have issues with letting go!