Happy New Year 2018

2017 is done and we are moving on.  The last 8 days saw us visit local places with the BIL's family. My two nieces made photography fun again for me! 

They would randomly come ask me to take pictures in the studio and make funny face poses!

Our plan was to go to the Golden Gate Bridge vista point. However we were not allowed to enter. It was buses only. So we decided to see the bridge from the other side. There also parking was impossible. So we ended up getting flagged to go further and further away from the bridge and next thing we know, we are at a visitor center and there is a beautiful lagoon and a beach with was within eye sight. It said 0.8 miles one way and a mild hike, so off we went. There was a distinct possibility that the little ones might ask to be "lifted" and carried on the way back, but that did not happen. They walked the entire trail and back.

We spent a good 2 hours there and took pictures!

I should have dressed better though. Caught some virus. The rest of 30th and 31st has been spent drinking cough syrup and sleeping. Finally managed to edit the pictures now.. 

We also had the studio set up in the house.. that meant pictures and pictures and more pictures anytime the kids wanted..

we even switched to a black background to test out some shots..

2018 is going to be a busy year for us. My hope is that we all be in better health next year. 

I had the best year health wise for 2017 but managed to mess it up in the last two days! While it is easy to bias an entire year based on the last few days, I did thoroughly enjoy 2017. 

Thankful to my BIL and family for visiting us over the break. When you have little kids running around the house, it lights up the place! 

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!

A social facial experiment

It has been a month since I deleted the folder on my iPhone that said "social" and also deleted the entire history and autologin for all sites on my laptop.

The accounts are all there, but with two easy steps I cut off the urge to go click on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin etc. 

This is not the first time I have tried this, probably the longest in recent years though..

Still kept blogging and am reasonably sure that deleting the cross post into Facebook/Google Plus for the posts made sure no one actually read any of my posts! Blogging is pretty much dead and other platforms have taken over. Those of us who still blog, do it for their own reasons. . . 

The world is doing what it is doing, my work kept me more busy than usual and I managed to do another 60 challenge, the first time in summer, against all odds. The absense of social media helped. 

Still had to check gmail and everyday would be getting emails from FB and Linkedin etc. saying "have you seen so and so's comment on so and so's picture?", "we miss you. please come back and login" etc. etc. Even my mom was not that concerned when I stopped calling her during my Ph.D qualifying exams in those days!

Given no one was going to see my face in pictures over this month absence, I decided to stop shaving. Everytime I try to grow a beard, there will be so much negativity from parents, inlaws, friends, not to mention San and the kids trying every trick in the book to get me to shave.. the pouting, the "dont kiss me with that beard" routine .. 

Also given the travel to Asia every three weeks, my face has to resemble my passport picture or I am sure there will be some "extra checks". Thought there would be a longer break between travels this time, but that was not meant to be. 

The beard growing was going reasonably well, till this morning. You see there is an activation energy for beard growing. It takes at least 21 days for me to get the beard looking like a real beard instead of patch facial hair. Once it crosses that point, there is some chance of making it with continued maintenance. It is my face, but apparently I have no rights to it per wife and kids! 

This morning I had to shave it off. It was a good experiment while it lasted. It is interesting to watch how people react to this.

Most people at work thought I was mourning something or someone. 

Most people at Yoga said "look different. it kind of suits you, but learn to trim it"

Most friends who saw me said "mid life crisis?" followed by "this too shall pass" or something to that effect.

Then there was one person who assumed I was a muslim because of the beard. That one was interesting in a funny way.

Asked Jr. to take a few snaps, with and without the beard this morning...

Apparently I look a lot better without the beard and look younger per the little one. I am allowed to kiss the family again and that is a big plus point! 

Now it is back to the routine. It is time to login to Facebook again and see who has been born, who has died, who has changed marital status, who has gone where etc.

Will be like visiting Chennai after three years!