Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

October 13, 2022

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The grandeur of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in late Summer.

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  • photography
  • photo-story

Summer '22

September 17, 2022

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Summer scenes from California and Colorado.

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San Diego Zoo

May 29, 2022

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Animal and bird portraits taken in the San Diego Zoo.

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  • photography
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Spring 2021

May 22, 2021

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Spring 2021 photography around Bay Area and Yosemite.

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  • photography
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Canyonlands

January 05, 2021

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Dead Horse Point, Canyonlands, and Arches in the Winter.

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  • photography
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Grand Canyon North Rim

October 25, 2020

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Photographing the North Rim of Grand Canyon and other national parks around.

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  • photography
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Lava and Lakes

August 15, 2020

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Photographing lakes, geological features, and waterfalls in Lassen Volcanic National Park, California.

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  • photography
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Lakes of Eastern Sierra Nevada

July 01, 2020

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Photographing various lakes in the Eastern Sierra Nevada region in California.

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  • photography
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Fall/Winter 2019 Photography

March 28, 2020

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Photographing California and Oregon in Fall and Winter of 2019.

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  • photography
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The Land of the Volcanoes

October 27, 2019

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Photographing Lassen, Crater Lake, and Mt. Hood areas in northern California and Oregon.

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  • photography
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Sequoia and Sierra

September 15, 2019

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Photographing the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks and Twin Lakes in California.

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  • photography
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Bay ↔ SoCal

March 16, 2019

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Spring 2019 was about photographing the Bay Area and roadtripping to Southern California.

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  • photography
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Olympic

January 26, 2019

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Photographing the diverse landscape of northwest Washington -- from rainforests to stormy coast -- in the winter.

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  • photography
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Photographing California

January 05, 2019

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The year 2018 was mostly about photographing the west coast states. Here's a review of what I captured.

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  • photography
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Photographing Death Valley, Eastern Sierra, and Mono Lake

June 10, 2018

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Dunes, mountains, a lake, and a river.

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Minimal. Abstract. Geometric. Vibrant.

June 02, 2018

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An experiment to create lively arrangements from simple geometric shapes.

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  • design
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Spring/Summer 2017 Photography

November 05, 2017

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From Chicago to San Francisco. A little bit of everything.

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  • photography
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Harmony: A Generative Art Project

March 07, 2017

Harmony, a generative art project to explore the idea that order emerges from chaos

I have been fascinated with this simple concept – sometimes order can emerge from seemingly chaotic situations. An example is a bright idea forming in our mind from a mish-mash of random thoughts. I even made a small painting about this idea. But I wanted to do more. Then, by chance, I came across this book The Storm of Creativity by Kyna Leski. The author explores this idea that creativity is like a storm. It can start from a small atmospheric fluctuation. And she uses these pencil scribbles to represent a storm’s eye view. At around the same time, I came across the concept of Perlin noise and how it can be used to create mesmerizing patterns using particle systems. I made a series of drawings in Processing using Perlin noise to explore the idea of order emerging from chaos. I call this project Harmony. This blog post summarizes the idea and its implementation in Processing.

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  • design

A Photography Trip to Grand Canyon

January 28, 2017

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Arches, canyons, waterfalls, and a lot of snow.

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  • photography
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Introducing 400RGB: An Exploration of Color and Form

October 08, 2016

400RGB, a project to explore colors and form

For some time I was thinking about working on a small piece, either digital or physical, that explores geometric shapes and vibrant colors. Recently the idea came together. I decided to use continuously varying colors and parametric curves - shapes that can be defined using math equations, to make some interesting patterns. To give this idea a structure, I decided to limit the number of colors and curves to 400. That’s how the 400RGB project started. This blog post summarizes the idea and its implementation in a web-app.

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  • design
  • web-dev

Summer 2016 Photography

September 10, 2016

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Exploring some new and some familiar places for landscape photography.

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  • photography
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Landscapes Around Golden, CO

May 21, 2016

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At the base of the Front Range, there is much to photograph.

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Winter/Spring 2016 Photography

April 30, 2016

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A few photographs from Colorado taken between Fall 2015 and Spring 2016.

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Visual Identity Development for an Academic Student Group

January 26, 2016

Logo for The Beam Team

The research lab I work at Mines has an informal name - The Beam Team. That’s because the group members spend substantial time each year at various synchrotron beam lines to carry out experimental work. Over the past year, I developed a visual identity for the group. This is a showcase of some of the branding and web elements.

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  • design

Moving Diffraction Patterns

January 21, 2016

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These are abstract patterns inspired by high energy X-ray diffraction images. Here I present a short narrative of how I developed these over the past six months.

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  • design
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San Francisco in Six Photographs

January 07, 2016

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Pphotographs I took during a short trip to San Francisco last year.

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  • photography
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Landscape Photography in the Southwest: Part III- Arizona and Southwestern Utah

January 01, 2016

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Photographing the landmarks in Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon and Page, AZ area.

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  • photography
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Mildly Interesting Few Hours Spent Tracing My Academic Genealogy

December 23, 2015

Harshad Paranjape's academic genealogy

The research lab I work at has a poster showing the academic family tree of my mentor. I was inspired in part by that to investigate my own academic genealogy. And here is the result of a couple of hours spent online trying to trace my academic genealogy. I have skipped a few generations past the 18th century and shown certain famous names because before 18th century, the distinction between Ph.D. advisors, mentors and “influencers” in general was rather diffuse. The scientific tradition eventually traces back to Constantinople in the 11th century. One could argue that the distinction between science, philosophy and theology was rather vague in the medieval era. And so, in principal, the academic tree can be traced back to the various monasteries of Europe. However I have not followed that path. Much of the data here is courtesy of the Academic Tree project and the Math Genealogy project.

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  • miscellaneous

I Got Familiar with Modern Web development and Designed Four Web-apps Along the Way

December 17, 2015

Web apps developed by Harshad in 2015

This year I spent considerable time getting familiar with the recent trends in web development. I was motivated to learn web development because, a web-app is very easily accessible to a wide range of audience. So your ideas when presented on the web can reach more people compared to e.g. through a Matlab based demo. Based on my experience, here are four tips that can make learning web development easier.

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  • design
  • web-dev

Landscape Photography in the Southwest: Part II- Utah and Wyoming

November 21, 2015

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A roundup of interesting places I found photographing in the Canyonlands, Arches and the Tetons.

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Landscape Photography in the Southwest: Part I- Colorado

October 21, 2015

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A roundup of interesting places I found photographing in the Rocky Mountain National Park and other places in Colorado.

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Processing GE2 Diffraction Images using ImageMagick

August 31, 2015

GE image processing using ImageMagick

Amorphous Si area detectors manufactured by GE are currently used at APS and CHESS to acquire far-field high-energy X-ray diffraction data. The data from such detectors is stored in multi-frame, 16-bit depth binary images with 8192 bytes of header data. The data files typically have an extension .ge2. Since ImageMagick is able to deal with raw binary images like any other image format, it is possible to easily manipulate ge2 files using the convert command-line utility. I have written a gist that shows some simple ways of processing GE2 images using ImageMagick.

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  • science
  • how-to

An Easy Preloader GIF Making Workflow in Inkscape and Imagemagick

August 08, 2015

Vector sketch for preloader in Inkscape

Preloaders are animated images shown on a webpage while the main content is loading. The animation gives the viewer a sense that some process is happening in the background and fetching the data that they wish to see. There are several ways of showing such an animation - CSS3, animated GIFs, Flash. This tutorial shows a relatively simple method of creating animated preloader GIFs using two popular open source softwares - Inkscape and Imagemagick.

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  • design
  • how-to