Some Tips and Tricks

Without making any excuses, let me confide in you that my writing skills are very bad. Especially my grammar. When I started following Grammarly in Twitter, because of all those fun quotes they publish, I found out that they had a Chrome extension which can help me with my posts. At least the free version (I ain’t rich to keep paying for all these tools, you know) does the basic checks and points me that something is wrong and to some extent makes sure to fix the spelling mistakes. If you buy it, I guess it will do a lot more. But then I can fix some when I know where the problem is. So, in case if you are interested, you need to click here for the Grammarly site, click here for the Chrome extension to be added (and make sure to enable it too).

Here is an image of how it actually points out the mistakes in a post (i.e. if you use chrome to type your posts, as I usually do)

 

Here is another tip, which I found out just yesterday.

If you have an android smartphone (not sure from which version of android this is applicable though, because I have the Lollipop version) and it is locked and if you want to use the flashlight for immediate purposes, you don’t have to unlock your phone to do that (which is what I used to do). You can just write V on top of the screen and lo behold the flashlight is on. Similarly type O for camera. But for this to work without unlocking your phone, you should have enabled the Gestures options in your settings. Here is a screenshot of my phone’s settings. When I found it out yesterday, had fun playing with it.

Hope these tips help you too.

Exposure and Experience

This might be a slightly different post on my experiments with photography and I would really appreciate any comments or feedback on the methods or the photographs.

When I got my Canon 70D, I was excited to try out the double exposure feature that was available in it. But I haven’t been able to use it so far. So I decided to try out something and here are the results. Prop used: a jute wall hanging (or rather small parts of it)

This one is the photograph that was taken with my camera’s feature for double exposure ‘enabled’ and I used two shots (as per the settings i.e. use two clicks or photographs to create a single doubly exposed image) for this.

I liked how it sort of created a 3D effect on either sides. I applied ‘Watercolor’ effect to it from Pixlr (a free app) and got this photograph. I tried for an artistic and a painterly look and feel but you tell me?

 

Then I wondered, how different is it actually to do it manually (i.e. do the double exposure using apps and tools) when compared to the one that is done by the camera itself. So I again took the photographs of the two sources separately this time (disabling the double exposure feature on the camera)

Used these in Pixlr to create a double exposure image (using the layering and simple copy and paste) to get this image. Does it look like a double exposed image ?

And then added the same ‘watercolor’ effect to this using Pixlr again.
I think the Camera was way smarter than me in terms of merging the images to create a double exposure image in this case, because I felt that the one I took using the Camera’s feature looked much better than the manually created one.

What is your take? Or do you think it is totally not worth the effort?