Tribute to a friend who fought and died!

He was born somewhere in Japan. I heard about him around four years back. He was stylish and the best in what he did at that time with some unique features no one else could match. After some self-debate, I decided to invite him to my life, as a friend who stays by my side no matter where I go or what I do. And he came. He did come with me no matter where I went or what I did, literally. We climbed mountains, did scuba diving, enjoyed the beauty of nature and did a lot more, together. He opened a whole new world of opportunities before me which I never knew existed. He inspired me and helped me inspire others. And he died, last month. It might be better to say I killed him, unknowingly. He didn’t give up till the last moment, he fought and died.

I am talking about nothing but my beloved camera, Canon IXY 800IS (a.k.a IXUS 800IS or SD 700IS).

Just after I bought it

Released in 2006 February, IXUS 800IS was the first point and shoot camera with the Image Stabilization (IS) feature. It was when I was looking for a new camera that I heard about the IXUS 800IS. I didn’t have to do a lot of research as I always wanted to get a Canon IXUS and also since all the reviews said IXUS 800IS was an excellent choice. And from my experience I’ve got to say, it was an excellent choice I made.
I still remember the day when I got it. It was during 2006 Onam celebrations. It has been almost 4 years and I have taken around 30,000 photos with it. Yeah, that’s a lot of photos and the CCD was showing signs of aging recently. Still, the photos I took with it are amazing. I bought the waterproof cover shortly after I bought the camera and I have taken my IXUS literally everywhere I have gone. I have photos from each and every month since I bought this it.
Last month, I and my friends went to a water theme park and that’s when it happened. As usual, I cleaned the cover and the O-ring, put silicon grease and fastened the camera inside the cover. We took some photos in water and after sometime I noticed the camera restarting periodically. Immediately I went back to the dry area and opened the cover to see it was half filled with water. I might not have closed the cover properly. I tried my best to save it, but I guess it was not my day. Even when it was half filled with water, the picture we took were of the same quality as before and I could retrieve them from the SD card later.
During the 4 years I had the camera, many things happened in my life and I have snaps of most of the memorable moments. Even after I bought my DSLR, I used IXUS just as before. Both served very different purposes for me. It really showed me what photography is about and I doubt there are any settings in the camera which I have not experimented with. I guess the time has come for me to move on. There may be a lot of high end cameras out there with awesome specs, but I really doubt whether I could find one which could truly match my beloved Canon IXY 800IS.
Here are some of the best shots (unedited) and memorable moments which originated from my IXY’s CCD,

One of the very first photos which showed me IXUS’s potential

One of my most viewed photos in flickr

A beautiful moment from my life back in 2006 - taken during our trip to Kalakayam, Trivandrum

X’mas celebrations at my old office

Underwater Self-Portrait - One of my first experiments with the underwater photography

Water-vision – This is how you will see sky if you look up under water

Fireworks – I never got enough of ‘firework’ photography

A nostalgic moment

Time standing still – Saying goodbye to one of my best friends, ever.

Family Reunion – My grandmother’s 80th birthday celebrations at my home

Vishu – A local festival

I always loved colors...

Panoramic View – I was breathless when I first saw what this camera was capable of

Another X’mas at home

Water - when time stands still

After a rainy morning

Playing hide ‘n seek

Singapore!

Making new friends – During our trip from NUS to Melaka, Malaysia

Friends forever – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Nemo and his father – it’s a totally different world down there

Me, after my first set of dives

One hell of a start – New year celebrations at Phuket, Thailand

Final moments – I think that’s when water started getting in the cover

Last shot – The last shot which my IXY 800IS took

More photos in flickr

A Complete Browser : Flock

I've always been a fan of Internet Explorer. I recently [about 6months back] started to use Mozilla Firefox. I cannot state an exact reason why I switched to Firefox. Some pages were not properly working in IE, so I thought I will try Firefox, and thats about it. Even after I switched to Firefox, there are some times when I preferred IE itself. Even with all those cool Firefox addons, I never felt I won't survive without Firefox.

Two weeks before I read about a new browser - Flock : The Social Browser [thats what the splash screen says]. The author mentioned both cons and pros, but in the end, he stated that, now its difficult for him to live without the cool features of Flock. Thats when I thought I will also give it a try. What more to say, within days, I became a fan of Flock. I don't think I can describe all the cool features of Flock here. Let me first say, its really one of the coolest [web-related] thing I've ever seen. The main thing I liked about it is, its built using Firefox code itself. So we will inherit all the things we liked about Firefox [including security feautres] plus the Flock specific features. I had customized Firefox in my way, and I was doubtful whether the change is worth. But its more than worth, I would say.

For explaining the features, I am attaching some screenshots here, out of which one shows this blog in the Blog editor...




From the first impression, it looks so flashy, right? The effective browsing area is less though, when we use all the features, but there is option to turn them off.

In the first image you can see the original Firefox features like tabbed browsing, the same Find tool bar etc. The Foxy Tunes [lower right - music] and the PicLens [top right] are 2 addons worth mentioning here. They are originally for Firefox and I wanted to blog about them separately. The third screen is of the PicLens. It shows all the images on a web page. It is really cool for Flickr users, google image searches etc. Foxy Tunes lets you control your music player from browser.

Now to the Flock specific features. You can stay connected to almost all the 'famous' social networking sites, photo sharing site, mail accounts etc. You can see the accounts bar, where I have logged in to my gmail, yahoo, flickr, youtube, blogger, picasa and del.is.ious accounts. Then, there is a media bar on the top of the browser. In the first screen, I have chosen flickr stream based on interestingness. You can select the stream based on ratings, key words etc and it supports you tube, photo bucket etc too. There is an integrated Blog editor and Photo Uploader.

In the button bar, there are buttons to display RSS feeds, Favorites, People, Web Mail accounts, Blog Editor, Photo Uploader, Web Clipboard etc on the left panel. In the second screen you can see the integrated Blog editor, friends list on the left panel, the Fast Dial - A Firefox addon [you can call it - visual book marks] etc

Even if I wrote lot of good things, there is still space for improvement. There is no support for Orkut, which is the social networking site I prefer. There is no support of Picasa stream in the Media Bar. The integrated blog editor is almost pathetic. You cannot format the text alignment [can see in this blog - no alignment and also the buttons for alignment are missing]. Then, adding an image to the blog, its difficult. I had to use the blogger editor to add the screenshots in this blog.

So thats the cons and pros which I think are worth mentioning [which I use frequently]. Over all I give this web product 9/10 score. Now its all up to you to test it. Good Luck!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

I Say No to Videos on Flickr

I am a huge fan of flickr [the photo sharing site] and photography is a part of my life. I like to keep a vivid memory of everything that happens around me and that’s how my craze for photography began I think and it dated back to my college days. But at that time, I only had a conventional camera, which uses films. You have to buy the films, take the photos and develop it which is a costly process. There was no place for errors. So my interests stayed only in moments with my friends and relatives. Even then, I have around 12-15 albums with all the memories of my college days.

Then came the digital revolution, everything was digitized. (ofcourse digital cameras existed long back also, but I couldn’t afford it) Then I saved for a digital camera and I searched for it for long time and acquired my Canon Digital IXUS 800IS, the first camera of Canon in the IXUS series with IS feature in it. Its been almost 2 years since I had it, and what more to say, I have taken more than 15000 photos in it. Now you know what I am talking about. I am looking forward for the day I will acquire an SLR.

I got the freedom to do all the experiments I want to do with a photography, I began taking pictures of everything of interest to me. I always loved the details of our nature. The beauty of leaves, the mighty clouds, the colourful sunsets, the intensity of flowers, everything was small wonders to me. And thus I got involved in photography and what do people say about happiness, it will grow when you share. I wanted to share my experience and satisfaction with others and that’s when I heard about flickr. First I thought flickr as a bit complicated, but slowly I saw the potential flickr offered. The flickr community! Also the flexibility of flickr, the things you can do with your photographs. They were not just photos anymore; I felt more than that, much more. You could share it with millions of people, you can place your photos in the world map, you can write comments, you can classify and categorize, and many more things. I became and admirer of flickr very fast. The quality with which they provide us with their services, it was superb.

But now, I have some disagreement with what they are doing now. They have added the video sharing feature in flickr. An ordinary person might wonder what I am complaining about. I have to be happy with it, ‘cos I have more features. But ask a true ‘flickerian’, you’ll know. There are groups which say, ‘We say NO to videos on flickr’ and ‘No videos on flickr’ and many administrators of groups are banning users from adding videos to their group. I feel I also have to do something about it.

Here it is… My protest to videos on flickr!

They are changing the true vision of flickr (the way I see it), by adding videos. May be people say I am afraid of change. But for sure Yahoo could have started another service like flickr video or yahoo video. But the chances of something like that to gain momentum in a short while, [competing with YouTube] are very small as compared to adding the feature to already existing, widely established, flickr. I can give you an example. What will you feel if the favorite flavor of icecream, is modified for better results by changing or adding another ingredient to it? [I know it’s a terrible example, but that’s all I could come up with when I tried to convert my feelings to words] I hope something will be done about it.

Through the eyes of a Dragonfly!!!

I love photography. I love to copy and store the instances of our lives, which we want to remember forever, or a moment which is so lovely that you want to live in it forever or a scenery which will affect your mood so much. Digital photography has made it much simpler and cheaper for all of us I think.

The first task I wanted to complete after getting a broadband connection was to organize all my photos, upload them to web and share it with everyone. For that purpose, I have chosen yahoo’s Flickr. It’s really amazing. Once if you get to know it better, it’s simply the best I think. I have been using another web service. I chose it earlier because of its simplicity. But now I realized Flicker is better than any other photo sharing services. So I thought I will transfer and organize all those photos which are uploaded previously and those I have in my local machine. But the problem was, there was around 1GB of photos [after I sorted out the ones I wanted to upload] for me to sort and upload. 526 photos, to be precise. So I spent around 36hours almost straight [4hrs of sleep in b/w] to upload and organize the photos. But when it was finished, I felt immensely satisfied. So reader, when you get time, I mean a lot of time, visit this link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thedragonflyzphotos/collections/