Let not your Light be Darkness

Being asked for advice brings with it an onerous sense of responsibility. A person trusts you enough to trust your judgment and makes a decision partly based on your thoughts, your insight, your way of thinking. If they do follow your advice and make certain decisions, does it follow that you are accountable for your words. With your limited experience and probably one sided view of the situation it is very likely that your advice is not very high quality.

Its not a big deal when the advice relates to 'What book should I read?' or 'What camera should I buy?' but sometimes it is. A very big deal indeed.

The Comic Book Experiment

Playing around with photos has rapidly become the thing I do when I have to kill time. While exploring the uncharted corners of Photoshop has its own appeal, sometimes I turn to the web to look for tutorials on a particular effect. While lacking the resources (RAM and creativity) to turn out something really breathtaking, once in a while it does all click together.

On one such stroll around the various sites that I frequent, I came across a tutorial to give a 'comic book' effect to photos. Looked quite interesting and more importantly did not involve any local touching up. Also, after the NC trip, I had some portrait photos to play around with. Some of them waiting for thought bubbles! So, this was the first attempt.

Helped along by the fact that I had a receptive subject whose response was 'Awesome!', I tried it on another one of the NC pictures. The look on their respective faces is priceless and Shrinath had commented on it at the time. So, picked out a random Nobel Economics Prize acceptance speech for Akshay and the result was...

After these ones, I trawled through my entire collection of photos to get some Vivek photos. Vivek is often my target (he still remembers his youtube appearance) and fortunately, he is quite sporty about the whole thing. Always a target of ribbing for his 'targetting' skills, I went along the same lines.

Then there was this, a totally innocent picture taken during the fateful Montauk trip where the four of them are just staring at the ocean.

Meanwhile a friend was so taken by this idea that he came over and talked to me about how we should have a connecting story over 3 panels, like a Calvin strip. However, for this we would need people posing and a storyline thought out in advance. Just browsing through old photos wouldn't do. The day after that, I went to New York for the Photo Trip and this was on my mind. Took a few photos of Shekar that I was able to patch into a sketchy storyline (so to say).

So went the comic book experiment. Still on the lookout for pictures or situations that deserve a thought bubble or two ...