If you like to tinker around with your camera but are not “into” photography to really figure out what all those manual settings affect, then this one’s for you. Have you always wondered what those weird fractions like f/2.8, f/5.6 meant (they are the aperture values or f-stops), or what that ISO 200 showing up on your camera viewfinder was all about. And how do those shutter speeds matter anyway - 1/125, 1/60 and so on.
So if you shoot on the automatic mode, then believe it or not, all these play together to create the right photo for you, and your camera sensor does all the hard work behind the scenes. But when you really want to create a photograph that is “hatke” - for eg. that dreamy portrait of your loved one with a fuzzy background, or a freeze frame photo of water splashing, well then you’ll need to get your hands dirty with these numbers. So here’s a really effective way to learn those nuances - the SimCam. This virtual camera will programmatically reproduce the effects of those camera settings on a pre-set image. You can compare how two different settings will change the final output. Its a surprisingly good learning tool as you see the results side by side. Check it out and be a pro with those nifty controls!
July 7th, 2008
Posted by Animesh
You probably may not have noticed as these were very short and far between, but if you were affected then sincere apologies! We think we’ve fixed the problem and it shouldn’t happen again. Geek talk follows.
We goofed up a bit, here’s how - When we recently had to reinstall our OS on the production server, we somehow managed to switch our Debian apt-get repositories from etch to sid (the unstable version). And guess what.. we unknowingly installed a bunch of unstable libraries, ImageMagick included. And we suspect that the latest ImageMagick (from the unstable branch) has been crashing when trying to apply an unsharp mask to very large images. We use JMagick to connect to ImageMagick, which we realize may not be the brightest of ideas, because if ImageMagick seg-faults, it takes down the JVM with it :(. Have reverted to the stable versions now.. so hopefully things will be normal. I think we’ll have to start work on an alternate solution to get rid of JMagick.
July 5th, 2008
Posted by Animesh
Whenever a new service or product launches - especially a consumer product, there is a span of time the creators have to spend explaining to people just exactly what they do, before they can start selling it to them.
We guys still get blank stares when we mention online photo printing, personalised calendars or custom mugs. I would love to get to a stage where there is instant recognition when one mentions these.
So how is this instant recognition achieved? One great contributor to that is competition. Your competition, to start with just ensures there are more people explaining the same thing often in different ways, and then someone with more marketing moolah will take such awareness mainstream.
Which is why I want to thank Canon. I recently came across this billboard for Canon’s latest home printer called the Wonder Box. And hear hear! They aren’t selling great page throughput, <super high number> print resolution or some other arcane jing bang. They are selling one important use - that you can use the wonder box to make personalised calendars, greeting cards, photobooks and t-shirts!
Of course, you can already make all these cool personalised products at itasveer (some in the works).
(Click to enlarge)
Which also brings us to another question: Home Printers. Do you think home printers have a got a chance in this niche personalisation market? Would you rather use a home printer instead of an online service? Let us know in the comments.
June 20th, 2008
Posted by Ashish
Hi everyone.. we’re really sorry for being out for so long (close to 30 hrs). It was completely unexpected and happened because of a mistake.. don’t even ask how! But we always have backups so all data was intact. And we haven’t seen the orders coming in for so many hours because of that, so pour them in, and we’ll take a peaceful sleep for a while :)
June 18th, 2008
Posted by Animesh
I’ve been wanting to post this for long but a lot has been going on and just couldn’t find the time to sit down and write. So here we go -
Turning two recently, this is the gift we had in store for ourselves. We just moved to a dedicated workspace, from an apartment cum office one. The new office is actually Ashish’s basement and it has more space than we’ll ever need in the near future. Its also surprisingly cool in the summers so it might cut down on the power bill :)
For those of you who’re wondering where’s all the printing equipment, here’s a look at the top secret printer that powers everything at itasveer. Its the all in one printer that we’ve developed with insane amounts of r&d.
No I’m kidding :P. This is actually one of the first failed attempts at making our own t-shirt printer. We’ve already ruined 4 printers and yet to see success, so the project is stalled till we have more funds to waste. Donations will be welcome, lifetime supply of t-shirts to anyone who finances further development.. no kidding this time :)
Now news on the development front.
We’re getting ready to start photobooks, they’ll take a couple of months to appear on itasveer, but if you’ve got any requests then drop in with an email and you can be the first beta customers to receive and give us some feedback on the product. We’ll offer some real discounted rates till it goes live online to all preview customers :). For those of you wondering what a photobook is, have a look here for photos tagged as photobooks on flickr.
Also, summers are here so we got a few internship requests, and we’re happy to have working with us Sanyam Goyal who’s a second year CS under-grad at IIT-Mumbai. He has a “in-need-of-a-desperate-update” half finished personal webpage here, but he fares much better in programming stuff, so he’s built our first demo integration with the print API we recently finished. And now he’ll be trying to solve the upload problem that many of you face with a better uploader (more on these projects later).
Thats some of the news for the past one and a half months.. and thanks all of you for the wishes! Lots of good stuff coming your way.. so stay tuned. Cheers.
June 2nd, 2008
Posted by Animesh
Today is itasveer’s second birthday! It’s been an exhilarating 2 years, from taking our first baby steps into the printing business to gaining confidence and vision to create a truly valuable service. A big thank you to all our customers who’ve been around to appreciate us and have helped us take the right decisions with their feedback.
Let me share with you whats happening with us and what is coming up:
- We’re going to launch many more products like wall calendars, photobooks, even bigger posters and much more. I’d say roughly at the pace of a product a month.
- We’ve also just finished work on the first version of the itasveer API. This will enable us to power printing through other websites too. We’ll keep you posted on that.
- And we just added 4 new members to our team, and we’re 8 of us now! We decided to hire look-a-likes so we can have half the week off without being noticed :D
The itasveer team: “We’re two!”
So expect twice the fun and creativity, and wish us luck! Feel free to drop in with comments about your raves and rants. We’re always listening :)
April 15th, 2008
Posted by Animesh
On 15th April, itasveer will be two years old - it has been a long and eventful journey and we will share some things with you on that day, but in the meantime - we are going to celebrate with abandon!
That means you will get fantastic prices across our product range. For starters, you can buy 4″x6″ prints at Rs. 2.90 only - That’s probably the lowest price for this size across the country.
For those who like the bigger picture, there are 5″x7″ prints at Rs. 6.90 only and upto Rs. 200 off on poster sized prints (12″x18″ to 20″x30″) - that means you can buy a huge 20″x30″ print for Rs. 399 only!
For those salivating for our cool personalised products - they can pick up Calendars for Rs. 399, Mugs for Rs. 249 and get upto Rs. 150 off on Photo Collages! The detailed price list is here.
All these prices will be applied automatically - you do not need to enter any discount codes.
So shop away - bring your photos home or send them to your dear ones, as prints or personalised products!
April 3rd, 2008
Posted by Ashish
Being the geeks that we are, what better way to play holi than to do it on our favourite social network! And we invite you all to take part - we just launched our facebook Holi app 4 days ago and man it sure is getting popular. We already have over five thousand people playing holi on it.
Here’s a sampling of the ways in which you can play Holi with your friends there -
Dauda dauda ke rang lagao, Keechad me letao, Rangeela bhoot bana do, Nahane ke baad phir se rang laga do, Bhaang pilao, Daanton pe rang se manjan kar do and lots more. Do share your top tactics for Holi (we all have a few ingenious ones under our sleeves don’t we!) and we’ll add them to the list.. just drop in a comment :)
होली है!!
PS. Holi discounts are on. 20% off sitewide and free shipping on all orders above Rs. 100 - use the coupon code ‘HOLIHAI‘.
Edit: We’ve been robbed. Facebook just updated our user count and its down to a more humane 700 users. Happiness was short lived :((. And one would assume that this data would be correct, but we just looked up and found that many more developers have also noticed huge discrepancies in facebook’s reporting of app data.
Update: So the final count reached about 4000 users on Holi. Not bad I’d say :)
March 17th, 2008
Posted by Animesh
In the last post you got a preview of what we are calling the “Pyaar ki Car” (if any of you can come up with a different name - feel free to send in your suggestions), and this is what it’s looking like right now.
I’m sure some of you are curious as to how the car was made. So here’s a comic book story.
(So all you guys out there who want to pimp up your car - get in touch with us and we will send you to the right people).
And that’s not all, this car will be doing the rounds of Delhi till the 14th of Feb. If you send us a pic of the car (taken on or before 14th Feb), you get a personalised calendar from itasveer.com absolutely free! Ain’t that cool? Just send in the pics to contact[at]itasveer[dot]com with Pyaar ki Car’ in the subject line.
PS: Kaby (Mohit Gupta) is one of our friends who came up with this idea, and has helped us out throughout the process. He is a mechanical engineer, but has recently left the corporate life to pursue his passion - Music. He has even volunteered to drive the car around for the first few days - so women, keep your eyes open and status single - for Mohit might just be round the corner to serenade you.
February 11th, 2008
Posted by Ashish
Couldn’t resist posting this. Look what we made! Its our “sawari” for this Valentine’s day. Sorry about the crappy composition!! Catch this on the streets of Delhi starting tomorrow :) And its not finished yet, more bling to be added to it tomorrow.. watch this space.
February 9th, 2008
Posted by Animesh
Previous Posts
