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The Dilettante

dil.et.tante n. a person who dabbles in a subject for his own enjoyment (Oxford dictionary)

Here's my first real attempt at a weblog and we'll see how it goes. Much thanks are due to my buddy Ramesh for encouraging me to write this.

While I do ocasionally come up with ideas, I wonder if anyone would be interested in routinely reading my blabber. I'll try to keep this blog focussed on photography but it may get out of hand and spill into my opinion about anything that happens to briefly pass by my ever digressing, distracted mind.

I don't know how often I'll update this blog, lazy as I am. One thing I do want to try is to stay away from personal diary like stuff, which may not be useful for anybody anyways. I'll try to write stuff that is mildly amusing or entertaining, if not useful for the reader. I'll post pictures if they're good enough for sharing and add to a permanent gallery of images. Maybe this can to evolve into a column on photography, somewhat like Mike Johnston's SMP column or Frank Van Riper's column in the Washington Post. However, I can hardly claim the kind of experience or expertise either of them has.

Somehow I've been hooked on books since I was a kid (If I have to leave a bookstore or library after an hour, I'm usually not happy about it). Much of my time while inside is spent looking through books than reading them. I also had a early fascination with photography but I was not serious about it until a couple of years ago. So reading photography books was a natural culmination of the two pastimes. Recently, I've bought several dozen books because flipping through the pictures at the bookstores wasn't enough. Also, I have another dozen checked out from the Dallas Public Library at any given time. As for my own photography, I manage to take a few good pictures here and there but know I have a ways to go before my photographs can move to the art level. Anyways, I always keep my aspirations high.

I also spend a lot of time surfing the web, so I may share a link whenever I find something worth reading. Web surfing to while away time is quite like flipping books in a library without reading in any detail and I have cultivated both rather useless habits to a high degree. I've lost endless hours reading and looking at pictures on photo.net and have chased this category of the internet down with hyperlinks to the point that finding something in my bookmarks folder is almost as hard as finding it on Google.

I'll put stuff here sometimes with good intention and sometimes just to get it out of my system. Hopefully, this will go on and maybe you will like it enough to come back and see what I've been upto lately. Please do email me on what you liked or didn't like and you can be assured I'll take the critique well.

So far, I've stuck to the 35mm format, mostly using SLR cameras. Here's a list of the kind of pictures I like to take:

1. Life/Street/Portraits (I don't know what exactly to call this)
2. Huge landscapes which give a feeling of the real thing (yeah, I'm shooting slides here)
3. Color photography, if color adds to the picture

I'm not enthusiastic about learning to develop or make prints myself, so I'm just using labs. I think the most fun for me is when I'm actually taking the picture and I want to spend most of my spare time doing just that.

I'd rather stay away from cropping and want to keep digital manipulation out of most of my photography. Like most photographers, I have my formed my opinions about digital photography and digital cameras, but we'll leave that for another day.

So then, ... , until whenever ... hope y'all have a jolly good time !!

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