Contributed by Nimish Dubey
Camera lovers – professional and amateur – in India have never quite had it so good. In recent times, just about every camera manufacturer seems to be working overtime on upping the zoom and megapixel count of their cameras while keeping the price at relatively sane levels. The latest superzoom camera to hit the Indian market is the Fuji Finepix S1800, which offers a 12.2 megapixel lens with a very respectable 18x optical zoom at a frankly amazing price of Rs 14,999! [continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Camera,
Finepix S1800,
Fuji,
photography
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Contributed by Nimish Dubey
They may have taken the world by storm, but we think that touchscreens – be they on phones, computers, tablets, satnavs or cameras – are not really travel-friendly. Don’t get us wrong – it is not as if we dislike touchscreens. If anything, we think products like the iPhone and iPad are amazing. However, we doubt if we would be taking one along on an extended trip. No, this is not an impulse but a well-thought-out opinion. Here, then is the case against touchscreens when it comes to travel. [continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Android,
iPad,
iPhone,
Touchscreens
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Contributed by Nimish Dubey
Letting people know where you are has become easier thanks to just about every device and social networking service in town getting GPS or some kind of location-sensing feature. However, most location-displaying options tend to be designed to display your location to a whole community for as long as you have the feature running and inevitably involve a few downloads and/or logins. What if you wanted to show just a select number of people where you are and that too for just a limited amount of time, without them having to download any app or even log in to a sute? For instance, what if you wanted to tell just a group of your friends about where you were from say, noon to 3 pm? Well, as techies love to say these days, there’s an app for that too. And it is called Glympse. [continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Glympse,
Location-sharing
GPS or Global Positioning System is a means for finding the accurate position of a person/device through a receiver anywhere on the Earth. GPS provides a Latitude/Longitude for position that can be used in a wide variety of applications from Navigation to getting Yellow Page Information in a neighborhood.
GPS is owned and operated by the US Military and was opened in the 80’s for civilian commercial use and is free of cost to use for anyone who has a GPS receiver. [continue reading…]
Tagged as:
GPS,
Navigation
The life of a travel writer and photographer often hangs by a thread. One mishap, and all the hard work can morph into undecipherable bits and bytes. I am talking about all the photographs taken and features written – a labour of love and costing a lot of money to put together. What does one do?
Back up all data on the go. Even if one is using a reliable and sturdy Mac like in my case. The option is an easy one, right? Go to Nehru Place (Delhi’s wholesale computer market), buy a regular internal hard drive meant for desktops, put it into an external casing with a USB connection and you are done. Easy? Yes. Cheap? Doesn’t get cheaper. Reliable? I am not betting my career on it. [continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Backup,
Hard Drive,
Memory,
Seagate,
Technology
If you are out a travel trip, and enjoy taking snaps, have you ever encountered situations where you have run out of battery or memory just when those great moments and sights were waiting to be recorded? Or did you lose your camera or memory sticks with all the great photos you were waiting to show off when you got home?
Here are some tips from personal experience to keep the smiles intact:
- The obvious – carry extras: This is the easy one: Carry extra memory and battery. But you did not need this article to tell you this. But still think about it.
- Take Back-Ups: Another obvious: If you are carrying a laptop, download images whenever you can. If you are not planning on carrying your laptop, but are travelling by a personal vehicle, carrying the computer may be worth the extra baggage. Better than spending on extra memory.
- Back-up on CDs at a cyber café: This is what I did on Mcleodganj once: Most cyber cafes, especially in tourist locations, have facilities to download images and burn them on a CD for a nominal sum usually under Rs. 50 for a CD. They usually have all kinds of card readers, but it is always a good idea to carry the USB cable you got with your camera to read directly from your camera. No, you don’t need any drivers or software to read the card. Make sure you open and check the images recorded on the CD to ensure they are fine before deleting the same on the memory stick. But many remote or poorly connected places may not have such facilities.
- CD Back-up as insurance if you lose the camera: Even if you have enough memory, taking a CD back-up when you can may help in case you lose your camera or memory cards.
- Upload to Flickr: The best insurance for your snaps are uploading them on to a photo sharing site like Flickr, or any other server space you have. You may need high speed internet access for it though, available only in limited areas.
- Charge batteries even when you don’t need to: If you used the camera since the last recharge, put it on charge again even when you don’t need to yet. Electric supply at many of the places you stay can be erratic, and you may not be able to charge when you really need to.
- Carry your charger with you: If it is not too bulky, carry you charger with you when you are out for day excursions. You may need to get some juice flowing while taking a break for tea or a meal somewhere.
Happy clicking!!
Tagged as:
Back-up,
Battery,
Camera,
Memory,
Technology
The following post is a column I wrote for the Hindustan Times, a leading daily in India. You can access its web version by clicking here. It has a strong Indian context to it though.
Rohini Sharma wanted to go on a family holiday over the Easter weekend to Lansdowne, a hill station in Uttarakhand. The family was all set to go with accommodation tentatively booked at the Retreat Anand at this charming, colonial hill station, when the plan was changed to stay instead at the Bird House in Dehradun. Why? Because reviews and images posted on the Internet by other travellers did not paint a pretty picture of Lansdowne.
Instances like these are becoming more a norm than an exception as travel planning enters the Web 2.0 era. The Internet is full of reviews and opinions posted by travellers, and many people are using these as a key reference source when planning any trips. Such User Generated Content (UGC) is being seen as mostly credible and trustworthy, with the ‘authoritative’ voice of a professional writer no longer the last word when it comes to deciding one’s holiday. Continue reading this trend story
Tagged as:
travel,
ugc,
user generated content
Contributed by Nimish Dubey
