June 2008 Desktop Calendar Wallpaper

The calendar for this month is from Madurai Meenakshi Temple. Click on the image to get it in 1024x768.

New Equipment Acquisition - 250GB Portable Hard Drive

Some equipment bought after a long time - a sleek 250GB Portable USB Hard Drive. It is lightweight, easy to use and extremely convenient to carry around. Besides, I can even use it as a portable PC by installing an OS into it and booting from it.



Two years back or so, I had been wondering how to supplement my CF cards when I am travelling. I explored secondary memory devices but never really bought any. Indeed, prices were pretty high too in those days when a 2GB CF card would have cost more than USD100. Extended memory was expensive too. I acquired some more CF cards when the prices fell, but they still did not let me shoot at will and needed some kind of a secondary storage. Now I don't need to worry about memory, and add to that, I can (hopefully) personalize and boot from USB even if I am using a public computer when travelling.

The Dilemma of Stock

I had enrolled with a stock agency a few months back and had submitted some images. Any self respecting stock agency requires that the images be sold exclusively through them, and the photographers will not be permitted to sell those images directly.

I have been writing for a few travel magazines lately, and any submission usually accompanies a few images. This put me in a dilemma. I could provide only left out, sub-standard images to the magazines that I had not submitted to the stock agency. The magazines I write would not have been able to pay the rates fixed by the stock agency and hence selling those images via the agency was ruled out.

None of my choices were very desirable - to submit sub-standard images to the magazines or to submit sub-standard images to stock agency and provide the good ones to magazines. Finally I decided to close my account with the stock agency and asked them to do so.

It was a pain having to choose between the two, but eventually the person I was in touch with the stock agency offered me a middle ground. I am now having images removed from the stock agency, but I will continue to keep my account and submit those images that I won't be using for other purposes. That probably means I won't be able to sell much of images, but is still better than closing my account.