2016 – Doubly Exposed!

When I was wondering how to represent this year through my photographs which will also be depicting the important events in my life, I stuck upon the idea of picking up events and making them into a single photograph using double exposure and image overlays. Not all of them are good, but I liked the idea so stuck with it.

I used Zoner Photo Studio, Pixlr, DPP to get these results.

First, let me start with travel,

Chennai: (a photograph of the roof of one of the biggest malls in Chennai & the popular Kabaleeshwarar Temple, my first visit to these places)

Munnar: I visited Munnar twice in 2016, so picked two photographs from those trips and created this one. 

London & Ireland: I visited London and Ireland (Cork mainly) in May. So I decided to club them together 😉 

Brighton & Hampi: One is a sea side city and the other an archaeological city and of course they are in two different countries too. But I thought these two went well together. What do you think?

Now to the events:

Supermoon and Marudhamalai Temple: I wanted to sneak in the super moon photograph and found that the night photograph of this historic temple in Coimbatore made a good canvas for the same.

My engagement and marriage 😉 The place where Mr M proposed and my favorite photograph of our marriage (just the rings of course) along with the famous Khalil Gibran’s quotes made for a nice event photograph. Don’t you think so?

Departure and Arrival: A photograph of one of my friend’s son playing with one of my throw cushion when they visited me for my send off party along with the bouquet my husband got for my arrival in UK. 

And finally, my first Christmas with Mr M: A Photograph of the choir we attended and the Winter Wonderland fair photograph combined. 

That pretty much sums it all 😉 It took me around 1 hour to get them sorted out. Some of them could have been much better. But given the time crunch, I decided to just go with the first cut.

I know that people are just waiting for 2016 to get over asap. It hasn’t been a good year in general, but I am glad that I was blessed with good events in this year and I am thankful for that. And I sincerely pray and hope that the good times continue in 2017 and that it brings with it hope, good health, peace, and positivity in the New Year for one and all.

Stay Safe! Happy Blogging! Happy New Year!

It will be happier…

WordPress review was a good measurement, but I couldn’t add much to it. So here is my personal review.

Baralikadu still reigns. After all these years (That post was posted on Feb 2013…) it is still the first in the search terms and always get the max views on my blog. Never would I have thought of that when I posted those photographs of a very small and quaint place near my hometown (Coimbatore). I guess I should start charging the folks at Baralikadu some commission if my post is earning them visits 🙂

This year I crossed 1500 followers…Yay!!! Thank you all!!! And hearty welcome to all the new people who have joined this journey! Hope you find my blog(s) interesting and entertaining 🙂

I finally made my blog an ‘awards free blog’ ( more out of laziness than anything else) but then as I say on my picture (down below the page if you scroll down)

“No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.” Thanks for being part of my blogging journey.

and the best award for me is your time!

Took part in a couple of new prompts, apart from the ones I was already participating.

Finally got around to complete my Cambodia and Bali tour report a couple of days before on my travel blog. Failed to do one for my US trip I did this year (i.e. 2015) , but will finish it in a week.

On a personal level, I had to send off three of my friends to different places (and countries) for better opportunities (and I hate send offs even though I am very happy for them), was a witness to two of my gay friends marriage (can’t say how happy I was for them and I was their official photographer too , yay!!!), did two international trips this year (as opposed to one every year), ticked Sky Diving from my imaginary to-do list, got my tattoo done, tried my hands at dating and found someone too, spent more than I earned ;), worked out harder and got around to fix some of my long term health issues (will write about one particular issue in detail later) and on my way to fix a few more things for a healthier life style, took it easy at work (had to balance it somewhere), made some new friends, got a little bit more confident of self…well, that is all I think 🙂

With that, good bye 2015 and Hi there 2016! , Welcome!

Wishing you all a Very Happy and Joyful New Year. May your dreams come true and you stay happy, content, and hopeful. 

Take care and see you all next year! Happy Blogging! 🙂

2015 – A travel flashback

YouTube already published its ‘YouTube Rewind‘ (and for the record, I wasn’t very impressed with it, at least when compared to last year’s) and then there was Facebook’s ‘2015 Year in Review‘.

DJ Earworm has the 2015 mashup already ready. Daniel Kim’s part 1  and part 2 videos are ready.

And then I was wondering what am I actually waiting for ? Why don’t I start with the compilation of my travel photographs for this year. I tried making a video using Stupeflix , but for some reason, it didn’t come out well. So I just reverted back to the slideshow version of the photographs here, which showcases the photograph in a better resolution. Got around to selecting 30 photographs from I-dont-know-how-many photographs I took over the year. Jeez, it isn’t easy at all, to pick and choose a couple of them to represent a place you have been to. But then here they are. Let me know what you think.

Now, this truly makes me feel that we are almost too close to the end of this year.  Can’t wait for the new year , which brings with it more opportunities to travel to possibly new places and to click more and better photographs 🙂

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It has arrived

Finally, the book I had printed with the pictures of my European Holiday, the one I had posted about earlier, has arrived safely. I was so so happy to receive it yesterday from my friend who just returned. I am not sure if the older link still works. But here is the new one which was printed. According to my friend who read and reviewed it page by page, there were lot of grammatical mistakes (as I had expected and I did feel bad about it) but as a general consensus I got the feedback that the photos especially the monochrome ones looked real good in print. The other feedback received was that the color photographs looked half-toned. And the font, the one that I had chosen did not look that great in print. I had received that comment in that post and I had modified it but for some reason that wasn’t uploaded correctly. I wonder why. Since it is just a 20 page material, I chose two pictures from each of the 10 places I visited last year to make it a concise memoir. Moreover I really really wanted to see how it would work in printed book format, because I have an idea and wanted to know if it is feasible. Yippee!!! I am so glad. This is how it looks like in print.  I almost felt like giving thanks to mother Earth.   

My Blurb Book – For review

Ever since I did that solo European Tour last year and collected a whole lot of photographs, I have had this urge to have a book printed with it as a memoir. Not a coffee table kind of thing, but something as a pat on my back (is that narcissistic ?) for the first step that I took, which is always the toughest one for me. That tour was a huge confidence booster for me and I will forever be grateful for all those who were there in that group because they made me feel at home and I really really enjoyed their company as much as I did those places. It was also the tour where I covered one of the 7 wonders of the world or rather one of the new 7 wonders of the world , the Roman Colosseum. Today, after so many discarded efforts, I finally completed that 20 page book with selected photographs for each place visited as part of that tour. I tried my hands at Book Wright tool from Blurb and got it done today. The link is given below. I am not planning to sell it, obviously, but am definitely planning to print it for my personal use. It would be of great help if you could review the same (all pages are shown in the preview) and let me know your view, comments or corrections (my English , especially my grammar isn’t that good). Somehow the font I used looks good when I see it in the software, but in the preview, unless it is viewed full screen, isn’t very clear. I might have to rethink about the font.

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/4868751/dba077863d8982a0c62b24fdc39a9652a82cb694