Why I love my job – reason #4: DESIGN

Posted on: | May 18, 2011 | Posted by: Dhiraj | View Comments

The Story of Photographer of the Year

Posted on: | May 11, 2011 | Posted by: Peeyush | View Comments

“Which Camera should I buy” – A learner’s perspective by Kshitiz Anand

Posted on: | March 29, 2011 | Posted by: Canvera | View Comments

Guest Post by Photographer Kshitiz Anand

“Buying a Nikon does not make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner“ – Anonymous.

The question that I get asked a lot by the participants of my workshops and people who attend my photography talks is ‘Which camera should I buy?’ What’s even more surprising is that a lot of the folks already have a good compact camera and still want to upgrade to a DSLR just for the heck of it, and bring along with them a common disbelief that one needs to have a DSLR to learn photography.

Blame it on the falling prices of Digital SLR camera to now an affordable price range and now almost everyone wants to get it.

I have often believed that it’s the mind composes the photograph, it’s the eye that takes a photograph, the camera is just a medium to capture the photograph for future reference and help you relive the moment later. The point I am trying to make is that in order to learn photography, and I mean the art of photography, the decision about the camera should be the last on the mind.
When learning photography, there are three fundamental things (though not in any particular order) that one needs to keep in mind first.

First and foremost is the ‘Composition’.
This is something that I hold in high regard when I have to judge a photograph. In order to understand composition, it helps to read up the classical rules of one third-two third, the keeping the horizontal straight, leading lines etc. Those that is easily findable and easy to understand and use it. If there were one thing that I would like to stress upon, it would be compositions. And in my opinion, the compositions should be kept simple.

Secondly is the ‘Light Condition’.
Photography, as the name itself says is all about light. Understand the available light is the next important thing. The advice I give to my students is to understand natural light first. It’s not a bad idea to decide not to use Flash also for a while.

Third is the ‘Moment’ in which it was captured.
The beauty of photography is that you are able to freeze a piece of time. Like Bresson says, “Of all forms of expression, photography is the only one which seizes the instant in its flight.” Whether it is an event that you are capturing, or a moment with nature, it is all about the timing.
The challenge for a good photographer thus is to ensure that they are able to compose properly within that short span of time, using the available light for that the exact fleeting moment.

I do however agree that the using a SLR camera gives you more options at hand and one can experiment. Personally I have seen many photographs that have been taken by the simplest of cameras and still stand out amongst the rest. I have nothing against people buying expensive cameras. It’s just that I often advise people who want to learn photography to practice these three fundamentals for a considerable amount of time before taking the jump and investing in something that could take the interest to a totally new level.
Like in the words of a Bresson, “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst“.
Happy Shooting!

(The views mentioned in the post above are entirely personal)

Kshitiz behind the lens:

About The Author:

Kshitiz Anand is a Social Documentary Photographer and a Design Entrepreneur based in Bangalore. Amongst his critically acclaimed projects have been the ‘Promotion of Child education in Bihar’ and the ‘25 years of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy’. He conducts photography workshops across India and is often invited for talks at events.
He can be contacted on Facebook and Twitter

Websites : www.kshitizanand.com & www.happyhorizonstudios.com

* If you are a photographer and would like to do a guest post for Canvera Blog, please drop a mail to blog [at] canvera.com

Why I love my job – reason #3: Craft of on-demand book publishing

Posted on: | March 15, 2011 | Posted by: Dhiraj | View Comments

As a lot of you know one of the key printed products Canvera does are high-end coffee-table-books/photobooks. I was very lucky to be part of the core R&D team at Shutterfly when photobooks were first introduced into the market. If you step back and think about pre-internet you will come to appreciate how difficult (prohibitively expensive) it would be to create a single printed copy of a a book. In traditional book publishing, plates are created, printers are setup, clients approve proofs etc. In other words there is a huge fixed cost before even the first copy is printed.

With the advent of the internet the cost of doing the setup was almost pushed to zero (reduced primarily to computation power on servers) as the creation was pushed to the end consumer. And combined with the automation in manufacturing this allowed one-off copies of books to be made. Think of it: we today produce books that typically will only ever have one copy printed! The ultimate in just-in-time mass-customized manufacturing.

Once a book is created in a soft copy format, it is pushed to a production facility which includes printers (in Canvera’s case at least two types get involved for each book – Digital Offset for printing the inside of the book and Wide Format for the cover) and different types of binding and finishing equipment. At Canvera (and most other on-demand publishers) the goal is to ship the book within 1 or 2 days. So everything has to work in sync. There are a number of things that make Photobooks very complex to produce. These include:

1. How to handle single page re-prints (due to a host of issues that get caught by QA) and efficiently getting them back in to the production flow; keep in mind that each sheet is unique and there is only one place in one book where it fits
2. How to manage different paper types, cover types (printed, leather etc), sizes, windows, packaging types etc etc. Companies like to offer many choices to the end customer, but with that comes significant operational complexity
3. Matching different pieces of the final product correctly without manual checks, e.g. making sure that the right cover is put on top of the right book!
4. And last but not the least as I explained in my post on Colour, making sure that there is a consistency of output. This is important not just for reprints done during a single production run but since many times we find customers using the same images on different types of products the output must be consistent over a long period of time

All in all, on-demand book publishing for photo related content is a technology and process enabled craft and it does make it exciting to have this core competency within the company.

Why the name “Canvera”?

Posted on: | March 8, 2011 | Posted by: Dhiraj | View Comments

Well, firstly “.com” was available! That’s always good

But more than that in the one year Peeyush and I took to raise money we talked a lot about our experiences and where we thought technology in general and Digital Imaging (Photography & Video) in particular were going.

What we are seeing today is that across categories, technology is allowing consumers to be who they are and is unleashing the long tail of creativity and personal expression. Today platforms provide the “standardized” toolset and let consumers & service providers “configure” them in ways they please. That’s the future that is being built today by a whole host of small and big companies in every field – a transition from traditional aspirational brands to platforms. And we felt that it should be no different for a Photography/Imaging company.

So we hunted around for words that meant “platform” and Peeyush finally entered “platform” on this site. Go ahead, enter it and you will see a word that looks close to Canvera (which was just an easier to pronounce variation of what you see there).

There, now you know!

Getting Candid: Arjun Mahajan on Wedding Photography

Posted on: | March 2, 2011 | Posted by: Canvera | View Comments

Arjun’s Tryst With the Camera

A generation gap between parents and their offspring is but natural. So also the desire for Stage photography versus Candid imagery at the wedding. The youngsters go for the “natural” thing while the parents want all the uncles and aunts covered onstage.

I went through a wedding almost 4 years ago. The images captured there have never made it online because we both felt that they were too artificial. Graduating to the DSLR spawned a desire to capture weddings for what they really are – fun, frolic, tradition, tears, coming together, moving on – a host of emotions that can’t be posed for.

This is easier said than done though. It’s akin to being a press photographer with the outlook of an artistic story teller. There’s so much happening at any given point in time that the individual tends to get overwhelmed. It’s important to keep your bearings on a course that defines how it all comes together as a complete story.

Someone else writes the script and directs the show as well. My job is to be around (all the time) and show you the story that unfolds. I try and avoid frontal shots or direct eye contact (with that familiar – please look here and smile… cheese). The third person narrative is part of the candid photographers arsenal. Another weapon is a slightly longer telephoto lens that keeps me out of the firing line but gives me the range to shoot from afar. People are so much better at being themselves minus the camera guy in the frame of reference. Look for the little things and those moments between the posed photography/rituals when the couple heave that sigh of relief. Watch their eyes and see them connect. Those moments that are worth diamonds.

I’ve never asked my friends (we’re always friends by the time the wedding day comes up) to pose for the camera and we’re all the happier for it.

All said and done, weddings range from a few hours to a week as far as timelines go. The video is something for the record (to see who ate the most). The images are what you sit down with on a rainy sunday afternoon, ten years down the line and cuddle up with your spouse as you remember… and smile.

The Canvera Technology Engine

Posted on: | February 20, 2011 | Posted by: Peeyush | View Comments

In my previous post, I had stated the mission of Canvera Technology; to bring out technology enabled products and services that allow people to preserve and cherish their memories in innovative and exciting ways. In this post, I would like to shed some light on the engine that makes it all possible, and how this engine is shaping up. Also a sneak peek at a new online product that we are close to releasing.

Canvera is powered by 6 software product lines. Some of these are back end systems that help our internal workflow to churn out hundreds of personalized products everyday,  some include core imaging technologies that makes it possible to delivery the quality and SLA day in and day out, and some are products that our customers use to design, collaborate and order.

Technology Architecture

Before getting into these product lines, it would be appropriate to introduce the Technology Architecture (see diagram to the right) that brings all these product lines together, that also shows how we think about developing systems and products, the key players in the ecosystem and the technology paradigms we embrace.

Canvera Labs: This system does the pixel crunching on all the images that we receive. Since majority of our customers are professional photographers, each order typically contains 1.5-2 Gigabytes of data (in images). This system does the colour correction, calibration to our printing systems, and manages different parts of the order through their production and eventually bring them back together to package and ship them.

Canvera iConsole: As the name suggests, this system is used as the primary console by all Canvera Employees. If this system is down for 10 mins, our business stops for that time. This is the mission critical system for us. It handles end to end order processing, payments and reconciliation, and provides a role based dashboard for all users.

Canvera Pro Designer: This Desktop Software allows users to design personalized products like Coffee Table Books and Calendars. Users can choose to use pre-designed templates to design a product in minutes, or can completely customize the products according to their taste. This also support online ordering of the product from within the software. This is available on Windows only as of now…unfortunately we have not been able to prioritize the Mac (OS X) version yet.

Canvera Preview: This web based online system allows our customers to collaborate with their clients on one hand, and designers on the other. Designed products can be previewed online and comments/feedback can be provided directly to the designer, thus significantly reducing the pain and time to design a personalized product. In fact, this product was instrumental in brining many of our (offline) customers online.

Canvera.com web ordering system:   This is a central portal for customers where they can manage orders, track shipments and create and share online galleries. Currently, basic print ordering is also supported thru this portal. In the next few months, we intend to roll out the next generation of canvera.com, which is very exciting. I will write more about it when we are close to releasing it.

The sixth product line is the most exciting, partly because its the newest product that we are developing, but more so because we don’t believe such a product exists anywhere in the world. This product will enable regular consumers to get what many of us long for, but are often not able to get due to its complexity and technology involved. This product would also provide creative professionals a platform to bring their creativity to masses. More on this product line after its release. Stay tuned.

This hopefully provides some insight into the amount of technology required to deliver world class products consistently, and sheds some light on how Canvera as an imaging technology company is looking to bring innovative products and services to the market.

Why I love my job – reason#2: Technology

Posted on: | February 11, 2011 | Posted by: Dhiraj | View Comments

Continuing the series: Peeyush gave a comprehensive view on Canvera’s technology in his last post, so I won’t go over it except to say that it is truly an exciting time with an explosion of input and output mechanisms all connected over the net. The future is hard to predict but I love that we are participating in building it in a very a meaningful way.

Let me just  leave you with a few links about the history of photography:

• Starts with Kodak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak and the invention of Silver Halide technology in the mid-to-late 1800s. In fact from this invention the basic technology for the next 150 years pretty much remained the same with constant improvements to quality, usability and applications. Every time a picture was taken, Kodak/Fuji etc got paid. Chemical engineers/scientists ruled the roost during this period. For  a history on Photofinishing, check out the book Out of the Darkroom by Peter Knaack (disclaimer: Peter sits on our board of directors)

• The advent of consumer digital photography &  internet in the late 90s completely wreaked havoc with this and is best reflected in Kodak’s stock price (from $8o-ish in the late 90s to under $5 now!). And the interesting part is that the seeds of digital were sowed in 1975 within Kodak, see this article

• And recently Kodak discontinued Kodachrome – a film that has been around since 1935 as the preferred film for professionals and in fact made it to pop culture through a song by Paul Simon. Discontinuation of Kodachrome really marked a watershed moment in the devastation caused by the film-to-digital transition. Check out this nice retrospective on Kodachrome by CBS news

Today Facebook is the largest photography company in the world, a company that did not exist 7 years ago!!

It truly is an amazing time to be be part of this industry and trying to build technology solutions to service the changing consumption and distribution patterns. And I love it!

The Heart and Soul of Canvera Technology

Posted on: | February 7, 2011 | Posted by: Peeyush | View Comments

I often feel blessed to be around in times when so much innovation is going on, specially in technology. Most successful businesses today use technology as key differentiator. Over the last 16 years, I have personally been in the middle of software technology evolution. My first project was on mainframes, followed by databases, serious enterprise applications, Internet services, and now Web x.0, social media and mobile platforms. Similarly, tremendous amount of innovation and progress has occurred in digital imaging, media, computing, bio technology, travel and aviation, you name it.

When Dhiraj and I started Canvera, the most exciting thing for me was the opportunity to use technology to revolutionize the way people could preserve and enjoy their memories. And the journey has never been more exciting. Be it enabling photographers to manage their workflow and collaboration better, enabling designers to collaborate with their clients online sitting 1000s of KMs away, or transform the images captured into stunning printed or electronic forms. This has been and will be the mission of Canvera’s technology.

Since we started a little over 3 years ago, a lot has changed (for the better I think) in the world of technology. To begin with, an average human now has access to a decent (mobile phone) camera and has the capability to instantaneously share images and videos. Internet has moved from being a source of information and commerce controlled by a few companies to enabling the average person to create content, collaborate and transact with each other. Computing, personal data, media are now in the Cloud. The line between mobile devices and computers has never been thinner, and in fact seriously overlapping with the advent of tablets. Disruption is happening in media consumption where platforms like Google TV, Apple TV and providers like Netflix are changing the rules of the game. And we happen to be in the middle of all these crazy things happening at a very fast pace. In the not so distant future, we hope to leverage some of these technology paradigms and platforms to bring new and innovative products and services to the market, that will hopefully provide people more exciting ways to preserve and enjoy the moments they have cherished in their lives.

Why I love my job – reason #1 (of N): Colour Science

Posted on: | January 31, 2011 | Posted by: Dhiraj | View Comments

In Dec this year I will complete 20 years working in the field of imaging – the first 9 years were spent in academia and the last 10 years in the industry. I can say unequivocally that I love what I do and it is probably THE main reason I’ve managed to stay within this domain. The  business of imaging/photography brings together so many diverse disciplines that there is never a dull moment and a constant need to keep learning.  So in this series of posts I am going to talk about the various components of this business. In no particular order they are:

• Colour Science
• Technology
• On-demand, mass-customized manufacturing
• Design
• Sales
• Marketing
• Art & Craft of Photography
• <Mystery reason #1>
• <Mystery reason #2>

In this post let me talk a little about colour science. This is a very tough problem since photography today means viewing pictures on all kinds of (uncalibrated) monitors (PC, laptop, camera, phone etc) and printing them on many different devices with varying technologies (laser, inkjet, silver halide, liquid toner, thermal, etc). In my opinion the problem has been exacerbated by the “colour industry” by not providing practical tools and systems that work in real world situations. The purist colour scientists have often architected for the perfect world not paying heed to performance, reliability and repeatability of colour management process in real world situations.

In addition, colour management and colour enhancement often get clubbed together and the tools meant to provide accuracy of colour are misused to enhance the picture and vice-versa. It is like a dog chasing its tail. In the world of film, all enhancement and reproduction were done through chemicals – chemicals in the film and chemicals used for producing print. Different types of film provided different enhancements (some provided more saturation, some more contrast etc). In the digital world all of this can be done on a per picture basis with very little control on the multitude of output device making this problem very complex.

At Canvera we try to keep things very simple. We break up the image colour management to ENHANCEMENTS and ACCURACY.

Image Enhancement

We have a default colour enhancement algorithm that does an image-adaptive mild touch-up to the brightness, contrast and colours of the pictures. We have multiple different settings and at times, based on the preference of a client ,we can make one of the other settings default for a given client (kind of like choosing a different film), including completely turning off the enhancements.

Accuracy of Colour reproduction

This starts with calibrating our monitors to sRGB colour. We use the X-Rite Display 2 to calibrate all our monitors, especially the ones used by our designers when they design photobooks and web pages.

i1 Display 2

On the printing side we calibrate all our printers (liquid toner, silver halide & injket) to sRGB so that no matter how many printers we have and who operates them all of them will produce the same colours at all times (there are limits to this, but that gets too technical). We use X-Rite i1iO to monitor and calibrate printers.

X-rite i1iO

In our ideal world, all our clients would calibrate their monitors to sRGB (at a first order of approximation the monitor tends to look much darker than the typical settings of a monitor) and preview them properly before sending. Of course we don’t live in an ideal world so we have provided some basic tools. What we can guarantee on the print side is that for the same input we will always produce the same output. That way we can focus on the monitors and devices on which our clients and designers view and modify pictures.

Colour is a complex issue and I am sure we’ll write about it more. If there is anything in particular about Canvera’s way of working with colour or about colour science in general that you’d like to know more about please feel free to drop us a note.