Susarla.com

2007-07-16 to 2007-07-19
We drove to Kansas City,MO along with my mentor Dr. Hu to attend Workforce Innovation 2007. We were almost approaching Kansas City and i saw the sky changing its beautiful colors. I always loved to watch how many colors change in just those few minutes during dusk, finally now i get a chance to capture its beauty. In few minutes the sky would have just changed to just black.

Checked in and settled down for the night. After attending the first day of conference my wife and i headed over to County Club Plaza which was just a mile away. This plaza is basically a collection of about 150 shops and dozens of fine restaurants, what else could you ask for :). Here is a collection of some pictures taken there.

After getting to know about shutter speed from my previous shoot (fireworks) i started exploring ISO and WB in this shoot combining at different apertures. Ken Rockwell has been my motivator in capturing high saturation pictures, making colors jump.

After few hours of reading and figuring out optimal settings for shooting fireworks i headed out to test my skill this evening to fireworks show at Bellevue church. We will be in Atlanta for the big show on the 4th at Lenox Square. It was a good test run picked up some techniques. Never the less it was lot of fun to shoot. You can look at the fireworks album here in raw. These pictures are “as shot”.

Back from Atlanta
Successfully back from my trip to Atlanta. Came in a record time from ATL airport to home driveway 6 hrs 15 min. Very hectic trip but had to be done. I am glad everything went smooth in the trip. The main reason was to see off my in-laws who were flying from ATL to HYD. The best part is we all could make it for the fireworks at Lenox Square. This is my first time there. After testing waters shooting fireworks in Memphis, this was a great opportunity for me. Straight after checkin we made it to Lenox park by about 8.40pm, the fireworks were scheduled for 9.40pm. Thanks to some great tips i found online i chose to take MARTA instead of driving myself. This helped us save a lot of time, we could not only reach pretty fast but coming back to hotel was not bad at all. There was a huge crowd a great festive season. After making sure my rest of the family members are settled down i started setting up my camera before i lost the last few rays of sun. Here are my settings that i locked for the rest of the eve:

Camera: Nikon D80 on tripod
Lens: 18-50mm f3.5-5.6G
ISO: 100
Aperture: f/8
Shutter speed: Bulb – for an unrecorded length of time
Date: 4th of July, 2007
Place: Lenox Square, Atlanta, GA

Once i got the camera focused i put the eye cover and was all set for the show to begin. Yes, the setup was on a tripod dont even think of doing otherwise. I would also recommend to get a remote i had a ML-L3. This helped me to just click away as i was watching. Also remote gives you ability to control your exposure if you want multiple exposure vs single shot. Here is a resource was very helpful for me to achieve this. See my album pictures are raw “as-is”. In the interest of faster download the only thing i did with the pictures is to resize for web. Check out my album and have fun. Thanks for stopping by. If you need me to expand more on my shoot please let me know (leave a comment).

Finally it arrives, i was like a little kid trying to figure out all stuff right away. I then realized that i have to charge the battery and it takes 3 hours …oh god another wait!! Once the battery was ready to roll i couldnt wait any longer and started clicking away. Here is a picture that i liked in the random clicks.

Off to shoot some fireworks….

For all you people who love buying gadgets and are cannot wait to tear open the package of a new “toy” that you just bought for which you have been waiting for Years/Months/days. You know who you are!! The last three days have been the longest days when i was waiting for my D80 that i order online. After a (VERY) long wait in shopping, researching the product evaluating prorities i finally got my first Digital SLR a Nikon D80. I should thank my wife who has been extremely supportive during this time and encourgaed me to buy one.

I was always interested in photography. The first SLR was a Zenith 12 that my dad bought it when i was 10 years old. I used it until i was 14 when i lost if for good. Ever since the hunger for an SLR camera was present but life had to take its course until now. I started re-exploring my interest in photography since 2006. If you seen my previous postings i tried to be little bit creative with what i had on hand (Nikon Coolpix S4). I also started reading and learning more about the mechanics of taking a picture. Photography is both an Art and Science. One should not only have an artistic eye to look at a scene and imagine how it would look as a picture but also should have enough knowledge about how the machine, lens optics, lighting, etc would work to make it all happen. Photography is not about duplicating nature or duplicating what a human eye would see, but it is also about enchacing some of the aspects and highlighting some facts.

Thanks for stopping by my site and reading my posts. I plan to publish some of my experiements with the D80 soon(as soon as i get around the controls 🙂 ). Keep checking..as i eagerly wait for the UPS guy to deliver my package.

Suresh Susarla is Program Manager at the Workforce ADL Co-Lab at the University of Memphis. As a system architect and developer, his experience includes databases and authoring tools for intelligent tutoring environments, customizing applications using databases and statistical analysis on data collections, and creating dynamic websites. He participated in projects in artificial intelligence, complex dynamic systems, neural networks and modeling and development of authoring tools for intelligent tutoring environments. He has published and presented his works in various national and international conferences on Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

Mr. Susarla is responsible for enterprise vision and planning, establishing collaborative relationships with institutions (for-profit and non-profit), marketing and public relations, project management and planning for various grants. Mr. Susarla establishes and maintains partnerships with regional workforce, especially their training departments, to help them with adopting eLearning standards such as SCORM. Mr. Susarla is actively involved in business development and networking with the local community. He co-organizes the Workforce eLearning Resource Network (WERN), a unique forum for regional organizations engaged in workforce training to keep abreast of eLearning technologies and strategies for their implementation.

Mr. Susarla graduated from The University of Memphis with a Master’s degree in Business Administration with an Information Systems major. He has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Andhra University, India. His technical expertise includes web programming, PHP, MySQL and SQL Server database administration, and Windows server administration.

I had these on pinned to my cubicle for a long time. Couple of years back i lost the list and almost forgot about these, the other day i bumped into the list and here it:

1. That’s weird…
2. It’s never done that before.
3. It worked yesterday.
4. How is that possible?
5. It must be a hardware problem.
6. What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?
7. There is something funky in your data.
8. I haven’t touched that module in weeks!
9. You must have the wrong version.
10. It’s just some unlucky coincidence.
11. I can’t test everything!
12. THIS can’t be the source of THAT.
13. It works, but it hasn’t been tested.
14. Somebody must have changed my code.
15. Did you check for a virus on your system?
16. Even though it doesn’t work, how does it feel?
17. You can’t use that version on your system.
18. Why do you want to do it that way?
19. Where were you when the program blew up?
20. It works on my machine

Here is another set of pictures of buildings and some intersting landmarks. These where taken during my visit to DC attending a government meeting. All the pictures are raw, i have not done any post production to these. If you want to see full resolution pictures go here

Ronald Regan Building
This is in one of the entrances of the Regan building


Washington Memorial
I wish i had my tripod and little more time when i took this shot. This picture was actually taken as i was walking. I perticularly liked the lighting. This time of sunset is very tricky to shoot pictures. Over all i think the picture came “OK” not my best ;).

Street Scene
Again, i wish i had some time to take this picture and compose it a little better. I took this picture just before crossing an interseciton. Wish i could some how make the budget truck dissapear :). Some things i really like about the picture are lighting and Scene. Lighting was almost close to natural. Always wanted to do some busy street scenes preferably evenings and nights. Hope i can get more changes to do this.

2006/11/1 arrived a little early than scheduled for the conference today and thought i have few minutes to spend so went back to the same street to get a shot which i missed last night. The real interesting things i find in this picture are colors. Some ares of interest i wanted to capture in here are the two beautiful tress showing their gorgeous fall colors and the majestic building in the center with a very interesting bluish, indigo sky with just a light layer of white clouds. I think the picture shows the beauty of DC and how the city is trying to preserve the natural beauty of trees and old buildings in the midst of all. Kudos to all who making this happen.

Things that i think need to be improved in this picture, i wish (again) had the time to wait and let the shadow on the building pass. But this is kind of interesting too.

Pattern…
As i was walking down the street found this interesting building with a center piece made of glass wall. Tried to capture the wall at the same time leave a piece of sky i think give a lot of meaning to the picture than just the wall!!!

Thanks for you all stopping by and many thanks for your comments. If you are interested to see the full resolution pics please visit my gallery.

These picture were taken in hotsprings, AR while i was on a vacation. Was testing the new Nikon S4.

Yet another book review…”The world is flat” by Thomas L. Friedman.
His aim, in his new book, The World Is Flat, as in his earlier, influential Lexus and the Olive Tree, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in your lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The world isn’t going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman’s breathless narrative much of its urgency, and which also saves it from the Epcot-style polyester sheen that futurists–the optimistic ones at least–are inevitably prey to.

I manged to get my hands on a audio version of this book and i have throughly enjoyed every chapter of this book.