Siddhesh Sali
  1. Siddhesh Sali, photographed indoors against a warmly lit interior, looking towards the camera.
  2. Siddhesh standing on an e-scooter in Rome's Piazza del Popolo, Italy, smiling at the camera, with the obelisk and its stone lions behind.
  3. Siddhesh seen from behind, looking out over the rooftops of Siena, Italy, towards the cathedral and the Torre del Mangia under a clear blue sky.
  4. Siddhesh on a gravel path at Jungfraujoch, Switzerland, looking towards a wooden chalet below steep, snow-covered, cloud-hung peaks.

Siddhesh Sali21/10/2026

About

Engineer by training, photographer by habit.

I studied Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay. Most of what I do sits between hardware and software: embedded systems, and machine learning.

My thesis work explored multimodal deep learning: using language to guide vision models, from deep metric learning to out-of-distribution detection. My engineering projects include a low-cost spin coater, an amplifier for measuring magnetic cores, and a pipelined processor in VHDL.

I have been photographing since 2015, with a focus on landscapes and wildlife. In 2023, I was director of photography on Narsimha, a short film produced by SilverScreen at IIT Bombay that placed first in Filmmaking Arts at the Inter IIT Cultural Meet.

Projects
11
Frames
61
Since
2015

Things I like

0404

Chess

Less a game I am good at than one I cannot put down. The 1972 Spassky – Fischer match is the one I keep going back to.

Boris Spassky – Robert James Fischer · Reykjavík, 1972 · game 3

The one game of that match played away from the audience — an odd favourite for someone who photographs things.

11…Nh5. A knight to the rim, which every beginner is told never to do, and the move this game is remembered for.

With JavaScript on, this diagram becomes a board you can turn and play through. The score below is the whole game either way.

The score · 0–1 in 41 moves
  1. 1.d4Nf6
  2. 2.c4e6
  3. 3.Nf3c5
  4. 4.d5exd5
  5. 5.cxd5d6
  6. 6.Nc3g6
  7. 7.Nd2Nbd7
  8. 8.e4Bg7
  9. 9.Be2O-O
  10. 10.O-ORe8
  11. 11.Qc2Nh5
  12. 12.Bxh5gxh5
  13. 13.Nc4Ne5
  14. 14.Ne3Qh4
  15. 15.Bd2Ng4
  16. 16.Nxg4hxg4
  17. 17.Bf4Qf6
  18. 18.g3Bd7
  19. 19.a4b6
  20. 20.Rfe1a6
  21. 21.Re2b5
  22. 22.Rae1Qg6
  23. 23.b3Re7
  24. 24.Qd3Rb8
  25. 25.axb5axb5
  26. 26.b4c4
  27. 27.Qd2Rbe8
  28. 28.Re3h5
  29. 29.R3e2Kh7
  30. 30.Re3Kg8
  31. 31.R3e2Bxc3
  32. 32.Qxc3Rxe4
  33. 33.Rxe4Rxe4
  34. 34.Rxe4Qxe4
  35. 35.Bh6Qg6
  36. 36.Bc1Qb1
  37. 37.Kf1Bf5
  38. 38.Ke2Qe4+
  39. 39.Qe3Qc2+
  40. 40.Qd2Qb3
  41. 41.Qd4Bd3+

Board: “Boris Spassky vs Robert James Fischer Game 3” by Anthony Yanez, CC BY 4.0. Textures removed, re-lit and simplified for this page. Diagram pieces by Colin M.L. Burnett, BSD licence.

Anime

Drawn to it for the same reason as animation generally: it is not bound by what a camera can physically be pointed at.

01
Key. The top of the bounce, where it moves least.
02
An in-between.
03
An in-between.
04
An in-between.
05
An in-between.
06
A smear. Stop on it and it looks like a mistake.
07
Contact, squashed flat.
08
An in-between.
09
An in-between.
10
An in-between.
11
An in-between.
12
Nearly back to the key, which is drawing one again.
Play the drawings

Stopped. Pick a drawing, or step with the arrow keys.A new drawing every frame: the bounce takes half a second.Each drawing held for two frames. A lot of anime moves like this.Eight drawings a second, and it still reads as a ball.

Cooking

Mostly Japanese, mostly slowly. Sukiyaki is the one I have made often enough to stop measuring.

Sukiyaki for 2

The sauce — warishita

Soy sauce
60 mla long pour
Mirin
60 mlthe same again
Sake
60 mla splash, and one for the cook
Sugar
2 tbspmore than you think

In the pot

Beef, sliced thin
300 gall of it
Grilled tofu
½ blocka block, in cubes
Negi
1 stalka handful, on the bias
Shiitake
4a few, scored
Shirataki
100 ga tangle
Eggs, for dipping
2one each, not optional

The textbook proportions, per person — a starting point.The version that actually gets made.

3D modelling

Useful long before anything gets built — modelling a part is the fastest way to find out that I do not actually understand its shape yet.

  1. Fig. 1 · Front
  2. Fig. 2 · Top
  3. Fig. 3 · Side
A square, a circle and a triangle, and one part that is all three.

Elsewhere

For projects, collaborations, or a conversation, reach me at [email protected].

There is a résumé if you want the short version.