MIT’s Digital Food Printer Creates Nutritious Meals

Cornucopias’ printing process begins with an array of food canisters filled with the “cook’s” foods of choice. After a meal selection has been made using the device’s multi-touch translucent screen, users are able to see their meal being assembled while simultaneously manipulating real-time parameters, such as calories or carbohydrate content. Each ingredient is then piped into a mixer and then very precisely extruded, allowing for very exact and elaborate combinations of food.
Once each ingredient has been dropped, the food is then heated or cooled by Cornucopia’s chamber or via the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head. In fact, the ability to hyper-localize heating and create rapid temperature changes also allows for the creation of meals with flavors and textures that would be impossible to replicate with present-day cooking methods 
While we can’t vouch for the final taste, the printer does benefit from a compact shape and provides the user with ultimate control over the origin, quality, and nutritional value of every meal, with no packaging or excess food waste — a prospect which could appeal to locations or organizations struggling with ways to provide adequate and well-balanced meals to their populace.

{Ref: http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/01/20/mits-digital-food-printer-creates-nutritious-meals/}

Clouds passing over Sid's Balcony

Clouds passing over Sid's Balcony
Originally uploaded by Tarun Parmar

The weather was superb today and sparse white clouds passing through the blue sky. I thought of experiment with the Time Lapse and took about 500 shots with 10 - 15 second intervals from Sids balcony. Blended all the shots in Windows Movie Maker with picture duration of 0.125 seconds and transition duration of 0.25 seconds making it a 5 second video. I has plans to take more shot but unfortunately forgot my tripod in Rochester.

If New York were a small planet

Polar Panoramas : 
A panorama captures great width, but a Polar Panorama adds an interesting twist to your photos. I will help you learn how to create these funky-looking panoramas. These are also called "Stereographic Projection", you can learn more about the mathematics about it on Wikipedia. Also, I have sometimes seen people call it "Tiny Planets".

What is Panorama?
Panorama is a hugely wide-angled photo which is created by joining a number of photographs together. This kind of photograph gives you a view which has a span as wide as that seen by the human eye.

What is a Polar Panorama?
A Polar Panorama can make a panoramic view appear to be a separate planet. The “Polar Panorama Effect” is one of my favorite ways to process photos into unique pieces of art. It takes a panoramic (or landscape) photo and uses the Polar Coordinates filter of Photoshop CS or The Gimp to create a circular image that seems to wrap the panorama around a planet.

How do I create Polar Panoramas?
Step 1: Resize and rotate. The first thing you need to do is prepare the image for the Polar filter. You do this by stretching the height of the image so that the image is a perfect square.

Selective Coloring

I find that selective coloring of an image can be useful to highlight a particular item or to suppress a 'messy' background. I also like to use the technique create a black and white photograph with only key elements retaining their color.

Open the image in Photoshop. I've chosen this photo of a tiny flower taken in a Zoo at

Cincinnati. I am trying to show you the before and after of that shot. The one right below is the original.

                                 Before

It's very simple 3 step process.
1st Step:
Click on 'Quick Selection Tool (W)' and select any area of the picture you want to select. Like in above shot I selected the flower in center.

Creative use of Depth of Field (DoF)

Control of depth-of-field is one of the most creative tools photographers and DSLRs have.  
But what exactly is depth-of-field?
In the most basic terms, it's the distance in front of and beyond the subject that appears to be in focus.


Choose your subject—that rose flower in your garden, for example—and focus on it. Depending on what you decide now, you can make the grass in front of that bush sharp or soft; likewise, the fence behind the bush.
Choose to let the foreground and background go soft and you've effectively isolated your subject and called specific attention to it. Choose to have the foreground and background sharp, and the rose bush becomes an element in the overall scene.
The key to using depth-of-field to isolate or blend your subject is lens aperture. Wide apertures, such as f/2.8 or f/3.5, provide shallow depth-of-field: your subject is sharp, but little else is.

Kishika, My Niece

A Tiny Flower

Narrow apertures, like f/16 or f/22, provide a much greater depth-of-field, so that the territory in front of and behind the subject will be in focus. I haven't shot anything like that yet but, I have shot enough landscapes where you want to get everything in focus.

Sunrise at Liberty International Airport, Newark, NJ

 War Memorial at Washington DC

Simply, the smaller the number, the shallower the depth-of-field; the greater the number, the greater the depth-of-field.