O'Mahanta, That's why the sceptic in me asked who took the picture. Thanks for your analysis. O"Deka
----- Original Message ---- From: Chan Mahanta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 9:49:11 AM Subject: Re: [Assam] banana... Thanks for sharing the picture Babul. While it is quite amazing at first look, the skeptic in me raises the immense possibility of a pretty fair Photoshop job. There are several reasons: A: Knowing how a 'kolor thwka' develops, from the top towards the bottom, this picture looks unnatural. The bananas in the lowest 'aankhi's are large than those in the middle. While one cannot entirely discount the possibility that somehow later in the development of the 'thwka' the tree got some steroids fed to it, but that is a veeeery long shot . And perspective distortion--of foreshortening, as we call it ( as in the enlarged nose and fattened lips of a man's face photographed with a wide angle lens) -- was not the cause. This was picture taken with a 'normal' lens. B: The arrangements of the bananas in an 'aankhi' are random, as the uppermost ones will testify. But in the lowermost ones certain patterns repeat themselves, a tell-tale sign of a liberal but not too careful application of the 'clone stamp' in Photoshop. C: The 'kolor thwka' matures top down. The usual 'thwka' completes its cycle of generating the ten or twelve 'aankhi's in about a month. In this picture of about 70 or so 'aankhis', while the lower ones continue to form from the flowers, the upper ones would have ripened and gone, unless, again intervened either by divine powers or a mad scientist who has gone bananas with her invention of eternal youth for banana-life. D: In nature, the 'dil' --flower - of the banana starts out quite full at the outset and gets depleted to a shriveled remnant of its original size by the time it is done with its production of ten to twelve 'aankhi's. Here is the fatal flaw of the photoshopper, whose ignorance of the biology of a banana flower or his carelessness gives the whole thing away. Look at the 'dil' at the bottom. It not only does not look depleted, but actually has widened, as if by the obstruction by the concrete slab and holding the promise of keeping on producing for ever, from the look of the flowers still in bloom, while the sharp conical point of the dil got truncated in the 'clone stamping' process altogether. Assuming the forever-thwka was indeed destined to keep producing come hell or concrete slab, by this time, the 'thwka' would have taken a slight curvature towards the bottom. Again our picture doctor forgot that possibility . It is all in the details! At your service, Sherlock Mahanta >-- >Babul Gogoi >i-50, Lajpat Nagar 1, New Delhi 110024 >Tel: 011-29817150 / 9868182079 > > >Content-Type: image/jpeg; name=image001.jpg >X-Attachment-Id: f_fhjyvswy0 >Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=image001.jpg > >Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:image001 1.jpg (JPEG/«IC») (00B6DE1D) >_______________________________________________ >assam mailing list >[email protected] >http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
