Welcome

About me

Thanks for stopping by…. I hope you find some useful information on my Sony Alpha 700 blog.

I’m an engineer living in Virginia. I work with the human factors aspects of military systems. I moved from Illinois in Spring 2006 to work in the DC area. I started working at a facility in Westminster, MD and I recently moved to Spotsylvania, near Fredericksburg, VA.  I commute from Spotsylvania to Dahlgren, VA everyday, so I get to drive along rural roads and rolling countryside, and it’s a far change from driving on Edens Expressway (I-94) in Chicagoland.

My interests are design philosophy, systems engineering, information architecture and human systems integration. Non-professionally, I love gardening, photography (ok, ok, picture taking – I’m no artist), operatic music and collecting old books. When I lived in Chicagoland, I was surrounded by creative folk – Jenn Meyer, who heads Ajenda Interactive Media and teaches at Wheaton, Chris Messley who studied Photography at Rochester and is a creative director in New York City, Doug McGoldrick, who is an artist and professional photographer, Adream Blair who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and Linda Gardner, who taught me to stop looking at things from a logic based engineering perspective – and that a systems approach to life is emotionally bankrupt.

Chris Messley knew about my interest in photography, and was always ready to point me in the right direction, and he gave me valuable advice, tips and even his precious Barbara Upton book and encouraged me to keep experimenting. Photography is perhaps the best medium for an engineer to begin the search for his creative side since it has a technological component that is at once familiar and reassuring. There is the physics of light, the geometry of the lens, the design and engineering of the various mechanisms and transports of the camera body, and of course, the structure and chemistry of film and it’s processing.

It is very easy to get caught up in the technical details though, and there are hundreds of enthusiasts out there on the online forums who spend hours debating the merits of one camera or lens over other, or the resolution of this lens over that one instead of actually going out there and taking some pictures. In the end, what do lens coatings and motor drives and lines per inch matter? All they can do is manipulate photons and excite chemical emulsions to form images -they do not see or experience life as it is happening. I remind myself of that everyday.

When I am not working, reading or photographing things, I am occasionally guilty of posting rambling thoughts online about opera, gardening, engineering and of course, photography. Most weekends, I can usually be found outdoors hiking and playing with my little daughter Sunny, or haunting used bookstores drooling over fine vintage books I cannot afford.

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text and images © 2007 ajoy muralidhar. all product names, websites, brands and technical data referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners. thank you for visiting alphamagic