My friend Suketu (K2) is over for some work in Mumbai. These days he is busy shuttling between Mumbai and Pune, giving his micro-brewery its final touches. Apparently it’s going to be India’s first micro-brewery. I’m not complaining.
I know K2 from MBA days. He is living proof that even God shuns his strict utilitarianism every once in a while, and gives in to his experimental streak. Nothing about this person is either regular or rational. Picture dictionaries would do a great service to the language by encouraging the substitution of words such as the ones below with a much more convenient shorter version by putting K2’s picture as a single visual depiction for all of them:
oxymoron (the car zoomed past with K2ish speed)
maverick (a completely K2 politician, or K2, starring Mel Gibson)
skyscraper (the second plane crashed into the B-wing of K2)
supine (As the nervous patient lay supine, the dentist investigated his dentures)
inertia (and thus proclaimed Newton, ‘this shall hereby be called K2 of motion’)
Through some divine design, I had the (mis)fortune to be with K2 in almost all assignment groups in MBA school; and discovered that like most other more evolved beings, he lived in a perpetual state of nirvana; while all of us would be running around trying to meet deadlines and finish assignments, his 6’2” frame could usually be found in a sphinx-like pose in front of his laptop, or a book on some aspect of branding that would definitely be all the rage in 2050 AD. He would spin into action only when an emergency struck. (Am still waiting for an event that would qualify as an emergency in this context; the closest I got was when we were involved in a drunken brawl in a pub near school, when I can swear I saw him twiddle his thumbs).
In retrospect though, it was perhaps not laziness that caused this apparent inaction. It had more to do with motivation. Suketu was, and still is, a good couple of strides ahead of his peers when it comes to marketing. And he perhaps saw little point in wasting all of that on class assignments. He chose, as it were, not to prostitute his intellect in exchange for grades. So when we graduated from B-school, his intellect was, errr, still a virgin.
Currently, as I said, K2 is busy setting up India’s first micro-brewery. Being complacent with a cushy job in the world’s top FMCG company was too much to ask of K2. So he just got up one fine day, and said ‘#$@% it! I feel like a revolution.’
Knowing K2, if I were your investment broker, I would say that his micro-brewery thingie is a definite BUY; long-term may be, but definitely a BUY. Watch out for it, and till then, listen to this.
I took the following portrait of Suketu this morning while he was talking on the phone with his business partner. The idea was to have a photograph that he could use as his profile picture on the web. Asking him to pose was not really an option; so, decided to take a candid portrait instead. The photograph was taken indoors, but in broad daylight in my living-room. I am pretty kicked about the results. His stern expression gives him a very flatteringly intense look; and this is further enhanced by the B&W post processing (something about this later in a separate post). The tight crop also creates some sort of tension in the frame.
Here is the lighting setup:
Suketu was lit by a strobe shone through a white umbrella held at about 45 degrees on camera right very near to his face. K2 also had a reflector on his lap (white cardboard) to fill some of the shadows under his eyes and nose, but expecting him to maintain the correct angle was wishful thinking; hence the impact of this is negligible in the final image. My Canon XTi was at ISO 100 (there was ample daylight), f/10 and 1/160s. Why these settings? I was shooting manual. I first set the ISO to the camera’s minimum setting of 100 to eliminate any noise (higher ISO = more noise). Then I set the shutter speed at 1/160s as a starting point. After that, I tweaked around with the aperture dial till the camera told me that the shot was about 2 stops underexposed. This, I did so as to darken the background. This did not have an impact on K2’s face as it was being lit by an external light anyway. Now the ambient light was under control through the in-camera settings, all that remained to be tweaked was the external light so as to properly expose K2’s face with the above camera settings. My light does not have any controls, so the only way to control the intensity of the light was to vary the light-to-subject distance. There was also considerable distance between subject-to-wall, so that the light shot through the umbrella fell off considerably by the time it hit the wall (this saves a lot of time I would have had to spend getting the same effect in post-processing).
In post-processing, the image was converted to B&W, sharpened a bit (unsharp mask), and boosted in terms of contrast through curves. The burn tool was also used a bit to tone down some light patches around the background.
I am pretty kicked about the end results, but more importantly, my ‘client’ approves of them too 
. You can see more pictures from the same session here and wish K2 the best for his venture on his facebook profile here.
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Comments ( 4 )
Wow!Vintage K2 brought to life in your post. All these years, K2 seems to be defying those CEAT ads (change is inevitable, etc.). The look in the pic as far as he can get from his non-serious self..
btw rishi, how come this was a candid pic when all this while K2 was holding his iphone along with all those strobes, reflectors, light, et al!
Chanakya added these pithy words on
Jun 30 08 at
4:35 am
I thought this photo was taken before your ConB Apex presentation…
Jeeves added these pithy words on
Jul 08 08 at
11:58 am
amar added these pithy words on Great posts Rishi.. the photos of Charsi and K2 are awesome… and the write up on k2 too
Arjun Dev added these pithy words on
Oct 23 08 at
7:40 am
