The path of life will take us to different directions but we all start from the same point. Sometimes we see that starting point and sometimes we see a path taken. This gives us a chance to learn twice.

Nature will never forget the pain we inflict on it, lets hope it forgives.

(Are you hearing this BP?!)

PS, Feel free to share this to BP or friends :)

This weekend I finally managed to get the chance to take some highly requested photos by my girlfriend. She finds my photos way to depressing and wanted to see some more colourful and happy photos. So as I dropped her of in Chinatown before heading to a park in Manchester I saw this bunch of veteran soldiers at a monument just next to Chinatown. Having a very understanding girlfriend she waited in the car as I parked on a double line and I ran over to see what was going on.

To be honest I’m still not sure what was going on there but I found a good spot and shot off some pictures. As I didn’t want to disturb the ceremony I kept to my side line spot but failed to realize that some microphones was in my way and killed some really nice shots of people putting down flowers by the monument. That’s what you get as a amateur.

Got off maybe 20 photos and then ran back to the car when my girlfriend nicely was waiting and then I left for the park.

I love these types of moments where you spot something unexpected and just make a mad dash to document it and then continue on your way. Feels much better then long planed shots.

Nagar Kirtan Manchester 2010

Me and my girlfriend was out walking around in City Center this Sunday to see if there was anything of intrest that we could spend our hard earned money on.

As usual I brought my camera just in case I found something to take a picture of. After a while we decided to go seperate ways so I wouldn’t bother her in her shopping and I would get a pizza that I was soooo looking forward to.

I headed down past town hall were I saw a rather big gathering of people. At the same time I saw some cars arrive with a bride and two wedding photographers. I assumed that the crowed was there for the wedding even though I was suppriced that they totally ignored the arrival of the bride but instead just focused on the catering van that was there.

After a few shots I lost intrest and the pizza started to call my name again. I continued down the street and just after a few meters I heard a loud drumming and some police bikes. Thinking it was a demonstration of some sort I headed down the street and found a massive crowed dressed in orange and with a massive float on a truck.

What I found was a sikh religious walk they do every year called Nagar Kitran (Walk of angels if I remember correctly) and they were to stop by four tempels and the town hall.

I totally forgot about the pizza but instead stalked them for over 3 hours and god knows how many miles ending up with over 600 photos. I even had to dump my memory card onto the laptop half way since I filled the 8GB very quickly.

They were very kind and gave drinks, candy and food at every stop we made. I also got to know a few people walking there taking pictures just like me and we helped each other to find nice angles and predict the massive crowds next move.

All together a very nice day even if my feet beg to differ. More pictures of this walk will come up on my flickr account very soon.

Photo by muha

I’m currently developing an app that will retrive an updated database from our web server and replace the local one at given intervals. Now, since we don’t want to download 3MB of database over EDGE we bzip2 the file and then later unpack it on the phone. For this I need to use pure C to access the file with the bzip2 library.

I’ve been fighting with opening the downloaded file with fopen() for some strange reason. It keept telling me that the file didn’t exist even though the exact path given to NSData worked fine. So after lots of digging around I found that NSString had a function called [NSString fileSystemRepresentation]. This will give you a “file system-specific representation of the receiver”.  And this worked just great. File opened perfectly. I did some printouts of the paths and there was no difference so I’m not sure why one works and the other don’t. Hope this helps some one out there :)

Harbour Twin Tower

A nice sunny day in manchester and I finally found a good angle of the twin cranes in Salford.

Homeless Temptation

A photo I took of a, I assume, homeless man sitting by the cash machines asking for money. I see the logic in being there but also a fatal flaw in it. People usually are there to get money cause they don’t have any at the moment and not many I know give £10 or more to homeless people. But he was quite entertaining and the girl really seem to enjoy talking with him for the brief time she was there.

Original Vintage Hilton 2010

Vintage Hilton 2010

More Photoshop practice. Again I brought a discarded photo back and fooled around with it abit to make it a bit more interesting. This time I used different texture that I found here. The one I ended up using was the last one on the page since it really gave the buildings on the side a rough look while the Hilton Hotel becomes more futuristic in my eyes.

But the texture itself wasn’t good enough by itself since the photo had a very orange look to it due to the streetlight that was on that night. I sorted that out by dropping down the saturation a smudge and the I also used the Color Balance to move it more into the blue. Last thing I did was to boost the green quite a lot just to make does green windows shine through and gave the whole photo a nice green glow making me think of The Matrix. This image make me also think of Bladerunner for some reason. Maybe because of the imperfect futuristic look. Not sure.

Doing this exercise have given me quite a few ideas of

photos I want to do. So I guess this actually was a very good way to get me to look at things differently. I will continue with this for a while more just to see what more I can find when I dig around in my own head