Some bushes outside our room at the Royal Village. There is a lot of sunlight and they have an interesting look. Contrast them with a palm leaf image and the bicycle image to get a feel for the different types of plants I encountered.
Bushesroom
See this lonely rusty bicycle. It is imbedded in a lot of plants. The trick here was to focus on the bicycle and not only on the plants that are growing through it.
I had to concentrate to find the bicycle.
This photograph has been taken close to sunset. The idea is to catch the ripples on the water. I was above on a jetty. This is a classic illustration of being able to capture something using vision and not touch. I could have touched the water but I would have got whet and I could not have recorded my experience in a form that could have been easily conveyed.
Negative video may help in detecting the ripples better. They are quite small in the soundscape. Watch for the higher pitched entries.
Ripples
This is an image and soundscape of the royal village hotel in Goa. There are plants, and parts of the building.
Royalvillage
I recently attended a workshop on alternative photography in Goa conducted by the center for alternative photography. A friend and I were the only blind participants in the workshop. The workshop is meant for sighted people. The workshop trained us to use pinhole cameras as opposed to digital cameras. Therefore, we were back to technology that was used probably in the previous century. You had no eyepiece, no flash no autofocus and no zoom. The cameras were cardboard boxes and we were using something called photo paper.
We also used cameras made out of matchboxes. They consisted of a matchbox that had a hole for the aperture. The inner tray of the matchbox had been hollowed out. There was one loaded canister of film on the left and an empty canister of film on the right. The canisters had roles of paper protruding from them. These were joined such that as you turn the filled canister, part of the film would roll onto the empty canister. There was a small piece of cardboard which I could move up and down to block and unblock the aperture.
The vOICe came in extremely handy. I was able to see what I was trying to photograph. So, I would first see what I was going to photograph using my mobile phone, then, pick up the camera, and do the needful. The trick of course was that I had to get the camera in the same position. Also, moving that piece of cardboard was a challenge but that was more because of my partially formed left palm than anything else. My instructors were extremely interested in the vOICe and, I took a good many digital shots. I have the same shots captured by the pinhole cameras. My subsequent posts will contain some of these pictures. The pinhole versions will be uploaded later.
I also had a chance to do developing in a dark room. I was wearing the video glasses at that time. There is light that emanates from these glasses so they cannot be used in a dark room.
I took the vOICe out to the shopping mall (The Select City Walk) once again. This time, I made two changes to the configuration of my netbook. I set the power scheme to maximum performance and I used a program switch speed for windows xp to set it to maximize the performance of the netbook’s CPU. I made these changes after a discussion with Peter as a test. What was happening was that the vOICe would stop giving me input. It almost seemed to hang. Mind you, my netbook is an Asus eee pc with 512MB of ram running Windows XP pro sp2. The problem remains as in there are times when the vOICe stops giving me any output or, sometimes when it is giving me output and I try to access it’s menus, I cannot do so. Jaws v9 works ok but the vOICe seems to slow down.
However, the maximizing of the CPU’s usage helped though the battery was exhausted after about 2 hours.
1. I found it easier to distinguish doorways.
2. The tiles on the wall were clearly visible.
3. I could tell when we were looking at columns and pillars.
4. I had an aha moment when I saw a rectangular speaker. The rectangle was like the one in exercise mode. The same applies to circular speakers that were mounted on shelves.
5. I had a look at a lot of curios and other items including toy cars. The toy cars soundscapes reminded nme of what I used to see when using the vOICe on the road. This was logical.
6. We went to a restaurant and there was a buffet lunch. I tried looking at different food items but they all seemed to look the same.
7. I found a strange glass that had a short stem and a large bowl like structure where the water was filled. Think of it like a vine glass with a short stem and a very large glass. I sensed it as a flattish circle more like a bowl so I was unable to find it visually until my dad explained the shape of the glass to me.
8. looking at people was interesting. They often blocked the light and are quite squishy.
Pranav
