No no .... I am not talking about the traffic gridlocks on MG Road due to the ongoing metro work. This is another gridlock created as part of the metro work:

Needless to say, the construction has already changed the face of MG Road and many other major roads in Bangalore. This one here is the construction work going on at the Brigade Road - MG Road - Kamaraj Road junction. I used the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L telephoto lens for this shot. There was enough evening light and the shot is hand-held @ ISO-200. I used Av mode for this shot @ f/6.3 for a 1/800s exposure.

Like I mentioned in the last post, I'd been confined to Bangalore for a while now and one of the outings I had was a stroll on M G Road!

The light was good and I opted for my usual Av mode with f/6.3 and ISO-400 for a 1/640s exposure.

Further ahead, near the Barton Centre, I spotted this parking attendant. I followed the same strategy, lens and mode, but stayed a little closer for a tighter shot. Here also, I did get shots with him looking towards me, but liked this one better. Look at his cap! I kept wondering which this tournament was ... and later found out from Google that this was an under-17 tournie :)

Another shot with the Canon EF 400mm 5.6L telephoto, handheld in Av mode, f/6.3. But this time, I boosted the ISO to 800 and got a 1/800s exposure. The yellow background behind him is an auto rickshaw passing by.

With no travel for a long time now, I carry my camera and some of the lenses almost every day to work, expecting something to come up. It turned out to be a good thing to do, in the end, since I had all the required equipments when I saw these kids at a contruction site next to our office. It was evening time and the sunlight was coming from behind them, giving me a good backlight. I watched them playing for a while and mounted the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L (macro) lens and started clicking:

The kids were kinda curious what I was doing there but soon ignored me as I pretended that I was shooting monkeys. They seemed busy acting out what their parents do for a living. Still, they gave me occassional glances so that I can click. The light was barely there for the 180mm and I didnt have the tripod. So, the ISO was bumped up to 800, Av mode was opted with f/3.5 and the camera came up with this 1/160s exposure shot.

All the settings remained for the 2nd pic as well, but the camera returned a 1/200s exposure for this shot. The light was fading by now and I packed the camera back to the bag, to watch them some more time playing amidst the bricks, concrete and the wreckage at this site.

The pic is taken hand-held with the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L (macro) lens, in manual mode, f/3.5, 1/200s @ ISO-200.

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!