Inspiring Photographers
How to run a professional photography business
It's A Small World After All, Nikon's contest for microphotographers
Digital Journalist has two articles with accompanying photographs from religious festivals in India – Ashura In Bangalore and The Jain Festival
What's your slogan? Place yours in the comments section below and you will be entered to win a free Tiffinbox T-shirt. Serious.
Here is my annual call to you all to spread the word about Tiffinbox. I would appreciate it if you subscribe to my RSS feed. Of course, visiting the site gives you the added bonus that makes it easy to view some of the multimedia I post here. So, do stop by from time to time or every day.
Design Changes
Across several platforms, screen sizes and browsers, I found viewing the post titles and date to be a major hazzard to my eyes. You may now notice that the post titles and the date are a whole lot more legible. Next up will be a bit of a nip-n-tuck of the long lists that envelope the central column of this site. They have become much too unwieldy and I am not even sure if anyone bothers to scroll down to check out all the options available to them. So, I am going to be “hiding” the links in a drop-down menu. You will have to click, hold down the arrow and then select whatever interests you.
Those of you who do receive the RSS feed via Feedblitz will now see that the email comes from Seshu's Pipal Productions. The subject line should read [Tiffinboxers]. You will also see the Tiffinbox mascot on the top. The feed also features something I love – a short string of links right on top that summarize all the new posts on the site.
How To Become A Tiffinboxer?
To become a Tiffinboxer is easy – simply forward the Tiffinbox website address [http://www.tiffinbox.org] to at least 15 of your friends and email me when you have done so. Let's follow the honor code on this one. I'll randomly choose people who email me at tiffinbox [at] pipalproductions [dot] com and send them a fancy shmancy silk-screened Tiffinbox t-shirt. Trust me, you will look very hip wearing one. I'll soon post a photo of yours truly wearing one to show you what one looks like.
Serving It Up
Tiffinbox is a labor of love. No doubt about that. But it costs money to manage. While I don't want to make it a habit of extending my begging bowl out to you, it would be great to have my server and other costs covered. For instance, I am heading to Boston at the end of April to learn about podcasting. That costs money. I know a lot of people get a morsel or two out of this Tiffinbox and I would really appreciate it if you could pitch in. Even if it is $1 per month, I'll accept it gratefully. I promise to use your donation wisely and responsibly. To make it easier for you to pitch in, I have created a DropCash page here.
Advertising on Tiffinbox
If any of you know of an organization or a business that would like to advertise on this site, please have them contact me. I welcome all legitimate and reasonable offers that I can easily (and aesthetically) accommodate on the site.
Let's Connect
It's truly fantastic to hear from all of you – a great mix of folks, some of whom I have known a long time and some others whom I haven't yet had a chance to meet in person. May that day arrive soon when we can get together and perhaps share a warm meal. I would like that very much.
So, who is a Tiffinboxer?
Well, if you made it all the way down here, the clear answer is – YOU. So, thank you!
The image above was originally uploaded by datempest.
There is a sense of mystery here. Looking at this image one never knows what this action truly represents; keeping a secret or is the subject asking us to shut up?
While the image suffers in quality – the artifacts and digital noise are aplenty, the raw feel to this image in fact adds to the ambience. Graphically, the image is split between left and right, from darkness to light. In that sense one gets a sense of hope (assuming of course one reads a photograph from left to right just as most of us read text from left to right).
Nikita Mehta, the photographer, hasn't posted anything recently and I wonder why.
I'll often post images here that are interesting, curious and even spectacular. Would you also like to have your images showcased on this blog? If so, join my Flickr community group also called Tiffinbox. Thoughts, suggestions, opinions always welcome, so please leave your comments below.
This post is sponsored by Seshu's Pipal Productions – Wedding Photojournalism At Its Best: Elegant. Memorable. Real.
Shivani Vora writes in The New York Times about a new trend in dining among us desis – having home-cooked meals delivered to us at our work desks. “Dubba-wallahs” are nothing new to folks living and working in Mumbai where the art and science and business of delivering food has been perfected that the enterprise is often considered a case-study in some of the top US business schools.
What's happening here is this – we want our sabzi and paraatas just the way mom used to make 'em. The demand is definitely there because we have little time to cook and Indian restaurants tend to shovel out the same stuff at us with little or no regard to quality. Quite frankly, Indian restaurants are really only targeted towards non-Indians.
Services like Annadaata are a terrific niche market but it is also a lot of hard work. And you sure don't want to get your orders mixed up. Imagine an irate vegetarian staring down some mutton koorma. It could get very ugly, very quickly.
Thanks to Sendhil Revuluri for sending me a link to this story. If you find desi-oriented articles on the web, please feel free to email me at tiffinbox [at] pipalproductions [dot] com.
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) with special guests Zakir Hussain, Pauline Oliveros, and So Percussion will perform on Tuesday April 4, at Princeton University's Richardson Auditorium.
PLOrk is a new ensemble of 15 laptop'ers, each seated on a pillow with a 6-channel hemispherical speaker and a variety of control devices. This premiere performance at 8 p.m. will include works by Paul Lansky, Brad Garton, Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn, Dan Trueman, Scott Smallwood, Seth Cluett, Perry Cook and Ge Wang, with special guest performances by renowned tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, accordian legend Pauline Oliveros, and the hot percussion quartet So Percussion [who will be processing Hussain in real-time].
More information is available here. On a tangent, notice the students are all using Apple Macintosh computers.