Combining Fireworks

The above picture is composed from a array of seven captures of fireworks taken at Columbus, Indiana on July2nd, 2010.

Having seen similar images with an array of fireworks, but never having actually witnessed such a spectacle, I decided to try to create the effect by myself on GIMP.

I had a set of images of fireworks (used seven of those here), all decent looking but nothing outstanding. Initially I cropped all the images down only to the useful section (read light streaks). The background was nearly black for all the images but had a slight tint of the color of the fireworks due to the smoke surrounding the fireworks. This tint would have made it obvious that individual images were added to form one big image. Hence to remove this tint, I did a bucket fill of black for the entire background, creating a uniform background for all the images.

I created a new image in GIMP with a black color and followed it with a random arrangement of the seven individual fireworks images, each on a separate layer.  I decided to cut-off parts of two of the images to give it a more realistic feel

Following this operation I had eight layers, and changed the layer mode to addition to get the brightest parts of each image, which gave me a beautiful collage of fireworks. Flattened the image and added my watermark and saved the image.

A fairly simple process with great results!

Standing Tall

Saw this beautiful scene at Holland State Park at Holland, MI. Could barely see any water of lake Michigan due to the very heavy fog. It was quite windy and cold, but quite sunny as well. Kind of a mixture of all elements of weather! Saw this tree while taking a walk on the pristine beach. With barely a soul in sight, it looks unreal.

The original picture looked quite washed out due to the heavy fog + bright sun (the fog started right at the shore, behind the tree). Duplicated the layer and changed the blending mode to soft light to increase the saturation.

Playing with Orton

Took this picture at the Tulip Time Festival in Holland, Michigan. The one red tulip stood out from a long row of yellow/white tulips.

Decided to try out the Orton effect to give the photo a dreamy feel to it because that is how the place actually felt with its big tulip fields. Instead of having a base layer of sharp, over-exposed tulip, I decided to use the normally exposed picture. This gave me greater saturation which gave the picture a much better feel!

Improving Infrastructure

Living here in the United States after having spend almost 22 years of my life in Bombay (I still cannot bring myself to call it Mumbai) was quite a different experience. Here people say there is a lot of “traffic” when there are more than 10 cars going in the same direction. Comparatively in India, such a situation would be a dream come true, at any point of the day. Even small cities have buildings that are taller than most skyscrapers in Bombay. But the thing that hits me the most is the cleanliness of the roads here. Even the roads in the most run-down of areas are cleaner than most places I have been to India.

While we are seeing a plethora of new buildings coming up throughout the length and breadth of Bombay, rarely have we seen a project being implemented at such a pace for building new roads or flyovers, while the existing infrastructure keeps on crumbling. A number of the flyovers took years and years to get constructed due to huge delays, the Bandra-Worli sealink has been under construction for a while now. I remember going to my engineering college (almost 6 years back) in Bandra and looking at the constructed sections (I deter from using the words “construction going on” because i rarely saw that). While this constant delay has been troublesome and little can be done about it, the motorists are facing much larger delays because the present network of roads that we have in place are not functioning as well as they are supposed to. Given the number of potholes and congestion present on the roads, it is difficult to maintain a good speed to ensure the fast movement of traffic.

I would liken this situation to that of many of the other public sector undertakings. Many of them were struggling and were incurring huge losses, but the moment they were privatised they transformed from bulky slow-moving, babu-dominated workplaces to lean, profit making ventures. The difference here was the urge of the private sector to make a profit and the fear of failure that pushed them to become more competitive. This is never the case for government companies where one has a job for life immaterial of the performance of the company and hence they tend to be lax when it comes to work and lag behind when it comes to work ethic.

Currently the BMC is responsible for the maintainence of all roads in the city. The typical government job equals job security takes effect here. Rarely do we see the sweepers on the roads cleaning taking effort to clean the roads they are paid to. Minor maintainence work on the roads is subcontracted out and these people are in no way accountable, they often fill potholes with gravel and claim they did their work. If we can bring the residents to be participate more actively in this situation, then it will be possible to bring more accountability into the whole system.

I would suggest the one idea out of this conundrum is to start something akin to the privatization of roads. Currently the work of repairing roads and filling potholes is mostly sub-contracted out by the BMC. Rather than stop at that, why not sub-contract the entire year long maintainence of the road ? It will surely drive the contractors to keep the roads clean if there is sufficient financial incentive in keeping the roads clean and fines for falling below certain quality standards. And most importantly rather than some BMC official who will easily fall for a bribe, the residents themselves be the judge for the quality of the road.

We have seen similar successful implementation in the form of ALMs(Advanced Locality Management) which involved committees of residents to maintain the cleanliness on the streets where they reside. However it is a full time that job and they ALMs were not given enough freedom to work, the ALMs primarily concentrated on keeping the streets clean, and their effort was commendable. But it is a model that has not been successfully implemented on a large scale. Plus as with any other organization involving humans, politics come into play. A single contractor working on such a project would keep the work befert of politics.

The residents of the streets could be surveyed keep a tab on the working on the contractors to keep them accountable. Few contractors can be hired as a pilot project and depending on the results they could be awarded more streets to maintain depending on what the residents of the streets they have previously managed have to say about them.

GOOD Morning

Due to the amount of studies to completed while preparing for exams, I barely found time to sleep. One of the positives out of the deprivation of was sleep was I was able to witness one of the most beautiful sights since coming to Indy.

What a beautiful morning it was !!! A cloudless sky with an amazing transition of colors, as my day of reckoning (exams) dawned!

Yeah I did PS it a bit because the response of the CCD of my canon was not good enough to capture the true colors of the early morning sunlight. But heck, it was just to make the representation more accurate! Although I did go a bit overboard while editing it.