I finally decided to go with a dedicated domain for my professional photography career. My other site www.joydutta.com will still exist, for this blog and riding related stuff. Bought the domain from nameboy.com, and boy, are they fast ! Within 2 minutes of registration and payment my site went live. I shifted the content from my existing site to the new one in just a minute, thanks to rsync.

My first serious attempt in oil painting on canva-paper turned out a pleasant surprise. What an amazing medium and workability. Love the fact that I can paint right out of the tube and one color can go over another easier than in watercolor. Painting in watercolor, in comparison, seems like a minimalist approach, and quite a lot different than oil, with its own charm. I guess I will keep working on both mediums.

Yeah, my life somehow found a rhythm after a while. Been distracted by a lot of things, and it took time to organize and let things fall in place. I am back to pursuing my original passions in full steam - riding and photography. Well, I wish I could ride far and do some serious travel photography but I would rather wait till my wife is here. For now I am just making images of people, especially children, the most challenging and rewarding subjects I will ever find. I am also loving the use of Photoshop CS3 on my mac, and a bit of InDesign as well.

Did a shoot yesterday at a beautiful house in Belmont hills. Loved the place.

Another shoot tomorrow at Moss beach, in Half moon bay. Should be a great 80-mile ride.

As the cliche goes, I am finally going “pro”. Just wanted to see what the professional side of photography has to offer. Waited long enough to gather a few portfolio-grade images and thanks to my recent sessions on portraits and headshots of few models, I am ready by now.

As I find out, it is fierce competition out there. Since money is not my sole focus in this, I am determined to find out what my skills are worth in the market. Business cards are in short order. Several TFCD sessions done so far have been very productive.

I am looking forward to photograph people, especially weddings and children. They are both hard to do well and highly rewarding. Hoping for a productive 2008 in my new adventure.

http://photography.joydutta.com

I have been using javascript extensively at work for over 2 years, and YUI for the most part of it. Even a few days back I didn’t know about jQuery. I was building my professional photography website and was discussing designs with my good friend and photographer Francesco. When I was done, our sites resembled a lot and Francesco suddenly got the urge to renovate his professional portfolio. He had been using jQuery at work, and in just a day he put up a gallery with top-of-the-line look and feel with soothing effects. I could not believe something existed that was much better than YUI so we compared code fragments. The conciseness and power of jQuery language blew me over, especially the $() selector. I added some cool effects on my site in a very short time and realized I could not do that with such simplicity had I used YUI.

I did not stop at that. I renovated my main website last Sunday, with a few hours of labor, mostly spent in GIMP to make some cool icons to go hand in hand with the magic of jQuery. I am very happy with it now and planning to do more changes to the site soon.

Big thanks to Francesco for opening this wonderful javascript world to me.

My first serious attempt in oil painting on canva-paper turned out a pleasant surprise. What an amazing medium and workability. Love the fact that I can paint right out of the tube and one color can go over another easier than in watercolor. Painting in watercolor, in comparison, seems like a minimalist approach, and quite a lot different than oil, with its own charm. I guess I will keep working on both mediums.