West Palisades Trail
Monday, November 9th, 2009 | Photography | No Comments
This is a short and beautiful trail in the city limits. There are also couple of places where you can stop for fishing.
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Raven Cliff Falls Trails
Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | Photography | No Comments
Raven Cliff Falls trail is close to 2.5 miles long trail that follows the Dodd Creek and can be completed under 2 hrs.
There is a beatiful waterfall at the end of the trail. Here are couple of pictures from Raven Cliff Falls and the route to the trail.
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San Diego
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
Here is a selection of pictures from San Diego.
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Russian Short Stories
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Book Review | No Comments
Author, Harry Christian Schweikert, provides a collection of short stories that belong to well-known Russian authors such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevski, Gogol, Pushkin and etc. The book starts with a short history of story telling and the place of short stories in the Russian Literature. This short introduction sets the stage and puts everything into perspective before reading the stories.
The stories are generally about life and human conditions of low or middle class Russians despite the fact that most of the writers were a member of the upper class. ‘Three Arshins of Land’ is my favorite story in the book due to its simplicity in language and the moral purpose.
This book is free and can be downloaded from Google Books.
Destin Florida
Monday, September 28th, 2009 | Photography, Travel | No Comments
Here is couple of pictures from Destin, FL where we stayed during the weekend for a fishing trip.
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Park City
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | Travel | No Comments
Here are couple of photos from Park City, Utah.
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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | Book Review | No Comments
In his previous book ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ Jared Diamond analyzes the reasons behind the variability in the rate of growth among different human societies. Similar to aforementioned book, the author uses the comparative method to dissect the causes behind the collapse of human societies. Author states the dilemma in the first chapter by utilizing the problems that current day Montanans are facing. He describes the changing mix of the residents and how Montana’s natural sources are depleting so quickly. Several other cases are presented throughout the book to illustrate how societies thrived or collapsed based on their strategies to manage their natural resources.
Diamond focuses on the big picture and attempts to explain how individual decisions can impact the destiny of the whole society in broad brush strokes. At the end of the book, a chapter is dedicated to suggestions that might improve the current state of our society. Although the book is a little long and repetitive at certain points, I recommend this book.
Guns, Germ and Steel by Jared Diamond
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | Book Review | No Comments
One of the most debated topics in the human history is why and how some human societies formed advanced civilization earlier than other socities and dominated them. Jared Diamond tries to answer this question by utilizing arguments built on geography, natural sources and climate differences in his book ‘Guns, Germ and Steel: The Fates of Human Socities’ .His main argument depends on the fact that the number of crops and animals that can be domesticated in Fertile Crescent is greater than any other place on the earth. Hence, the food production and ability to feed non-farming population lead to early development of government and military. On the other hand, technological and social advancements reached to the other regions of Euroasia quickly due to the fact that the variability of climate on thelong east west axis of Euroasia was small. Final piece of the argument constructed by Diamonds is that Europe had the just the right amount of separation between societies which in return triggered the high innovation rate.
Although the arguments presented by the author are very compelling, it is hard to ignore all other factors that contribute to the formation and rise of a society. I definitely recommend this book in order to learn more about history of civilization and the contribution of geographical elements.
The Creators – Daniel J Boorstin
Saturday, August 8th, 2009 | Book Review | No Comments
Shortly after completing the first book of the series ‘The Discoverers’, I decided to read the second book of the series, namely ‘The Creators’. Author, Daniel J Boorstin, surveyed the history of architecture, dance, music, painting, writing, and etc. The main purpose of the book is to cover the key milestones in the history of art rather than providing a detailed categorization. Readers looking for a comprehensive art history will be disappointed due to omission of important people. On the other hand, there are few points where the information provided in the book was misleading in my opinion. All aside, this book is a good starting point to understand how and why the history of art has shaped in the way it is.
Photogrpahy Process Flow
Saturday, August 8th, 2009 | Photography | No Comments
I have been a fan of photography for a long time. My first SLR was Canon AE-1 Programming. See Wikipedia for more information on Canon AE-1. Although I had a lot of fun taking photos with the SLRs, the time required to develop photos as well as the cost of developing discouraged me to continually use my AE-1. At that point an alternative might have been purchasing a Digital SLR, but DSLRs were just introduced and very expensive. For this reason, I opted out for a compact digital camera.
Still, I had an itch to get my hands on a DSLR. After two weeks of investigation I purchased a Nikon D90 kit based on the reviews on several websites. Although I was first concerned with the extensive list of settings that are available in the camera, the manual as well as ‘Digital Field Guide – Nikon D90’ written by Dennis Thomas made the transition from a point and shot camera to a DSLR smooth.
Next, I am going to describe my workflow as well as software that I use in the process:
- Downloading: I generally shoot in NEF which is the Nikon version of RAW image format and use Nikon Transfer to download them. Although there are several other tools that can be used, Nikon Transfer is one of the most flexible tools in the market. Key features that I frequently use can be listed as:
- Embedding metadata such as keywords, copyright information, etc.,
- Choosing primary destination, backup destination as well as online upload to Nikon website,
- Grouping thumbnails to make selection easier.
- Sorting: After downloading the pictures, I group them into three sets. I assign the pictures that I like most to the first set further process in Capture NX2. I will go into details in other post. These are stored in NEF format as well as in a smaller JPEG format for quick publishing or distribution. Second set generally consists of average photos that I would like to keep. No processing is done on this set and directly stored in JPEG format. Last set of photos are discarded without storing.
- Storing: All the files are stored under folders that correspond to the city and year photos are taken. Every week or month the photos are backed up to a DVD.