I always had the soft spot for a good picture, well you could argue who doesn’t? Fair enough.. but I always thought what makes a good picture. I started exploring the rules of guiding the viewers to the elements in the photograph. I studied all the rules of composition and then I stumbled upon a quote from a photographer Edward Weston who famously said.. “Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk”. This hit me in so many levels. So, I stopped watching butt-load of YouTube tutorial videos and decided to just go for it. I didn’t have a DSLR so I borrowed from a colleague at work. I started experimenting the settings with freedom and found myself instantly falling in love, it was love at first sight! Then I understood why people made rules; it is because of the experimentation, what looks good and what not. And, I have also been familiar with when to break the rules, as we all know rules are meant to be broken, eh! Now, it’s been almost a year of me and photography and I couldn’t be more happier. But, life is a constant learning curve; I am pushing myself every time getting up from bed early to shoot some sunrise and staying late for sunset. I am deeply fascinated in landscapes and wildlife and if I am lucky enough I’d wanna be a full time landscape/wildlife photographer. I think this much of rambling is enough for today. I’ll leave now with some of my shots below!

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Steganography is conjunctly used with cryptography to make the information doubly protected. First, encrypted and then hidden so whomever takes the pain to decrypt and reveal has an arduous or may I say impregnable task ahead. So, basically Bob can stuff some information onto the image and then send to Alice whereas the skeptic wife Jane of Bob with much tools at the disposal sees the image sent to Alice and realizes, Ohh false alarm, just an image of office agenda. But we know Bob and how attracted he is to Alice , we spent hours reading about Bob and Alice, there is surely some attraction. I’m hoping he is going over tonight to Alice, enough of Bob and Alice cryptic messages because it’s time for action now!

I ain’t gonna ramble on much about steganography and many techniques used so I will leave the links here and here. But, I’m going to put easy-peasy codes on python to give a glimpse.

from PIL import Image
import stepic

#encoding

img = Image.open(‘./sacred.jpg’)
step1 = stepic.encode(img,”Alice…I’m coming over tonight :)”)
step1.save(‘isItHidden.jpg’,’JPEG’)
img.show()
step1.show()

#decoding

decode = stepic.decode(step1) 
raw = decode.decode()
print raw                                          #see what’s hidden

So, let’s look at the two images before encryption and after encryption

Before encryption:

After encryption:

So, Jane can your naked eye see that your husband’s cheating on you!

So, that’s it guys that’s my first blog post. Do leave messages as I love being disturbed..

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