I saw this man during an early morning drive from Mandya towards K M Doddi:

It was a beautiful misty morning and my primary aim was to shoot birds. I stopped the car seeing a White-browed Wagtail and started clicking with the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L telephoto lens. The bird was sitting on an electric wire - as is the case nowadays, whenever I spot birds :) (see Black-winged Kite) Anyways, once I was done with the bird and turned around, I saw this very old man, finding it difficult to walk even with the help of a cane.

He didnt have very good eye sight either and was not noticing anyone around him. Everybody around seem to know him too. I watched him for a while walking along the road and then taking a turn towards his house.

Needless to say, I did click some shots of the man :) The first few clicks were with the same Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L telephoto. Though, I changed to the 180mm and managed a few more shots later, I liked the first few shots better. I used Av mode, hand-held, with partial metering, ISO-400 and f/6.3 for a 1/640s exposure.

Update: One advantage of using the 400mm for candid portraits is that the subject will hardly notice you, unless you make it very obvious :) In this case, the man had a bad eye sight as well and did not see anything more than a stranger standing in his way.

I read an article (forwarded via mail) about how too much post processing is masking real talent and was thinking about it ever since. Recently, I am browsing through a lot of photo blogs (ofcourse, looking to learn and emulate) and saw that a lot of post-processing is indeed being done. Once I learned a few basic tricks, a lot of the pictures actually look 'too much sharpened' or 'too high contrast' or 'nothing much in it, other than post-processing'? Does, anybody out there get a similar feeling?

Ofcourse, there are lots of people who does very minimal post-processing and come up with astonishing results. Those are the people, I would like to emulate! As a rule of thumb, I dont think about post-processing until I see the pic in my comp (except may be when I am trying an HDR: see 'HDR image from Golden Temple, Bylakuppe' or a moon merge: see 'The Full Moon Glory' - a very old post). Once, I have the picture in the comp, I would play a little bit in GIMP: trying to improve sharpness, color, contrast and do some cropping to remove unwanted portions. Thats about it. Some of the pictures I posted here are almost untouched. But, I am sure that there will be some people who may still think that I do too much of GIMP. I am sure, my dear wife is one of them :) The fact is, everybody would have their own levels of 'too much'!

If u r wondering where this is going, I was just thinking aloud and there is no conclusion :) Infact, I am sharing a heavily post-processed picture today:

I have a fascination for rural scenes, involving a lot of colors and I grabbed the opportunity on seeing this lady on my way from K M Doddi to Mandya. I had good light and shot this picture with the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L (macro) lens, handheld and set in Av mode, ISO-100, f/3.5 for 1/500s. But, the picture didnt turn out to be as smashing as I thought ... in spite of applying an Unsharp Mask, improving the constrast and turning up the color in GIMP!

Hence, I sat and played a lot more than usual with that image. I could have done more, like trying sepia toning instead of Black and White and coloring the entire foreground, but I was too lazy to sit and do that much :)

For those who may be interested in knowing the 'How-To' part, here is what I did:

1. Open the picture in GIMP and open the Layers Dialogue (Ctrl-L).
2. Create a new layer (lets name it the 'B W Layer') and select the background layer.
3. Go back to the image, select all (Ctrl-A) and copy (Ctrl-C).
4. Open the Layers Dialogue (Ctrl-L) again, select the 'B W Layer', go back to the image and paste the copied layer back to the Image (Ctrl-V).
5. Go back to the Layers Dialogue (Ctrl-L), right click on the pasted layer and 'Anchor Layer'. The pasted layer should merge with the 'B W Layer'. Select the 'B W Layer' again.
6. Go back to the image, right click, go to Colors -> Hue-Saturation, move the 'Saturation' slide bar to its extreme left position and click on 'OK'. The 'B W Layer' should now turn black and white.
7. Now, select the 'Eraser' tool from the toolbar and erase the portions you want colored in the final image. Double clicking on the 'Eraser' tool will give you options to control the size and shape of the eraser.
8. Once, erasing is done, go back to the Layers Dialogue (Ctrl-L) again, right click on the 'B W Layer' and 'Merge Down'. You should now have a selectively colored image.

One has an option of converting the image to Sepia and using it instead of the 'B W Layer' for a sepia toned background. Ofcourse, the most tedious process is the erasing part and there are lot of different ways to do it, like 'Select by Color' / 'Select Contiguous Region' and delete (Ctrl-X). It might get tricky to properly erase some portions and increasing the size (Ctrl-+) will help. Infact, this is the reason why I got lazy and chose to color only the clothing, instead of completely coloring the lady and the bundle of grass :)

Update: I am setting myself a personal limit for post processing. Anything, I can do in-camera, I would try to do it in-camera. But, there are always limits to existing technology (say, in terms of dynamic range), equipment (lens not fast / sharp enough) or photographer (unsteady hands, improper focus, non-optimal frame requiring crop) and post-processing can help in some of these cases. Ofcourse, it should not be thought of as a fallback option while shooting, unless its used to overcome a technology limitation (read HDR, super imposing moon). The aim is to post the pictures as it is :)

A weekend stay @ Mandya, where my in-laws stay, had been very productive for me :) This is the third post from pictures taken during that stay:

The pic is taken with the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L (macro) lens, hand held (peeping out of the car window), Av mode, f/3.5 and ISO-400. With a -1 EV exposure compensation, the camera returned a 1/400s exposure time. I guess, the -1EV compensation was a bad idea in the end, making the subject a little darker than I would have liked.

This time around (unlike in the 'How much is too much?' post), I refrained from doing anything extra with GIMP :) So, here it is, after minimal sharpening and contrast adjustment.

The pic is taken with the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L macro lens, set on a Manfrotto 728B digi tripod and timer triggered in Av mode, f/9, ISO-100 and partial metering for a 1/30s exposure.

Update: Preethu found out through Google that the name of this plant / flower is Scarlett Milkweed (with a scientific name Asclepias Curassavica)

... for the D-Day and the model is quite excited (so is the photographer) :) Doesnt it show in the picture?

This is a typical 'studio' shot, home studio ofcourse, using a white wall for the background, Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L (macro) lens and Manfrotto 728B tripod for stability. I used full manual mode, since I was looking to make it slightly over-exposed and settled for ISO-200, f/3.5 and 1/2 sec exposure. I did try some shots using an on-camera Vivitar 285HV strobe, but finally settled down to use only the tube-lights in our hall, which gave decent indoor light.

The amount of ads which come in news papers, etc for Akshaya Tritiya is a relatively new phenomenon. I was, infact, surprised to see the crowd in front of 'Malabar Gold', near Commercial Street, Bangalore. But, the next day I was in for a bigger surprise when TOI reported that the gold purchase for this years Akshaya Tritiya was low!

I tried out a new combination for this shot: Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L life size macro lens and the Canon EF 2X extender combination, for twice life size macro shots. On my EOS 400D (with a 1.6X field of view crop), this is a magnification of about 3.2 times!

The lens was tripod mounted and I had to use manual focus (the 180mm, 2X converter has a maximum aperture of f/7.1 only and does not support auto focus). I used Av mode with a -2 EV exposure compensation for a 3.2s exposure @ ISO-100.

The picture is posted as is, without any crop. In case, any of you is wondering that I am super rich owning big chunks of gold, the jewellery in the pic is a thin gold chain, about a milli-meter wide!

The picture is shot with the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L (macro) lens, hand held, Av mode, f/6.3, ISO-100 and -1 EV exposure compensation for a 1/250s exposure. I used the exposure compensation, since I felt that the red color came out better with a little under exposure.

Update: Just wanted to add that my intention was not to oppose the Metro rail construction. I believe that these are sacrifices we need to make for clean and more efficient transport. Instead of crying about the trees which are being cut, let us all pledge to use more public transport and reduce the congestion and polution, which will save some of these trees.

The pic is taken using the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L macro lens, mounted on my new Manfrotto 728B Digi tripod. Ducks are placed on a table glass top for the reflection, with a black cloth in the background. At Av mode, f/5.6, ISO-100, I set a -2 exposure compensation to completely remove the background. Exposure time was 1s. In spite of the exposure bias, I had to use GIMP to remove some wrinkles on the cloth for a clean background.

I'd seen this bird a few times while driving around Mysore, but was in no position to take a shot. On this day, while returning from Kozhikode, I saw it again near Gundulpet. This time, I did stop the vehicle and picked up the camera:

I took some more time to identify the bird though! I first thought its a young Indian Eagle, but thought that it has some owl-like features. Finally, a mail to Gowtham resolved the issue (like always, I should add), as he identified it as a Black-winged Kite.

The lens used is Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L telephoto, supported by the half-raised window glass. I tried stopping down the aperture this time - to f/8.0 - and was pleased with the image sharpness. To make sure that the camera's exposure-meter is not fooled by the bright background, I used full manual mode with an exposure time of 1/500s. Infact, the Av mode returned smaller exposure times even in the Partial metering mode and I had to experiment with longer exposures to get a shot with good details of the bird's eye. Finally, ISO-200 was needed to make this combination work.

A note to self is to try and use narrower exposures whenever possible, even though every review in the world says the lens is as good at the widest aperture :)

I spotted this arecanut knife @ Padinharayil, my maternal house in Kozhikode, Kerala, during an offering for the family diety. Guess, its owned by one of the priests who presided over the function:

Both pictures are taken using the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L macro lens, hand held, Av mode, f/7.1, -1 EV exposure compensation. The first pic is at 1/250s and the second one @ 1/200s.