After (what felt like) a very long time, I did some kind of travel. Driving upto Kozhikode with my parents and back to Bangalore, alone. Heavy rains greeted us throughout the journey. How I love the way it rains in Kerala :)

We also got some time without rain while passing along Gundulpet and the place was so beautiful with Marigolds and Sunflowers in full bloom. I've tried shooting Marigold and Sunflower fields innumerable times and have always ended up disappointed. This time also, after taking so many shots, I was not sure if I should post them. But, finally I am posting a few of what I liked most:

This shot is with my recently acquired Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L wide angle zoom lens. Hand-held @ 19mm and A-DEP / automatic DOF) mode. The camera selected f/11 and 1/125s at ISO-100.

Obviously, I've still not figured out how to shoot landscape, especially with a wide angle lens :( Hence, just to be sure I got some shots with the tele photo as well (Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L telephoto lens). I was trying to get the fence as well as some flowers in focus but that required a very narrow aperture, which the available light and the long focal length did not permit. Finally, I used Av mode for this shot with the car window as the support (guess, this works well ... atleast as good as a monopod). At f/8 and ISO-400, I got an exposure time of 1/125s and the pic was sharp enough, in spite of the long focal length.

Guess I have a long way to go before getting satisfactory landscape shots!

Update: Yet another picture, this time of a dreamy little house right in the middle of the fields with Marigolds in full bloom.

This is yet another shot with the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L telephoto, hand-held in Av mode. I used f/8 and ISO-800 for a 1/400s exposure.

Upasana has appeared here more than once and may not need much inroduction (check the 2nd pics from 'Kids @ Padinharayil, 2009' or 'Kids @ Padinharayil, 2008'). But, Nikhil is here for the first time and he is a live wire. The only reason why I think Upasana was happily posing is Nikhil's influence! If you dont believe, me look at the poses Nikhil was giving in these shots. How can somebody not be inspired?

I wouldnt lie that they were not posing! Infact I had the camera, mounted on a tripod right in front of their face.

In about 5 minutes time in front of the camera, Nikhil gave me some ten different poses and all of them were so natural and innovative :) I was wondering which one of these shall I post here. Finally, decided to post a couple of them and some more as a collage. Thats the only way I could do justice to the miriad expressions Nikhil gave in front of the camera!

Would you believe me, if I say that Nikhil and Upasana met each other only half an hour before these photos were taken. Atleast those who know how shy Upasana is ... just cannot!

By the way, I have acquired a new lens, a Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L wide angle zoom lens. Ashi and Pappan got this to me from US almost two months back and I never got a chance to use this lens for landscape shots, since I never really travelled after buying it. But, I had to try it out somewhere and this is the first occassion. By the look of it, the f/2.8 is pretty handy for indoor shots! Thanks Ashi and Pappan for all the trouble to get this to me :)

The setup comprises of my usual bed sheets, curtains and a white wall, a little over exposure for the clean white background, a Vivitar 285HV for the extra light needed indoors and a Manfrotto 728B digi tripod for better stability. I used manual mode @ ISO-400 and f/2.8 aperture. The first two pics are @ 35mm focal and 1/30s exposure.

Just that the guys were not using a red ball, but a red brick! Thanks to the numerous new buildings that is coming up in Bangalore, we have concrete skeletons almost everywhere. There are few of them on my way to work and this is what I saw when I was heading back home one day:

The guys were moving the bricks from a truck to the 2nd floor of this building. There was a chain of people from the truck all the way to the 2nd floor and the bricks were being passed by hand. One of these guys were taking some nice catches and was positioned in front of a shaded area giving me an almost black background.

Shots are taken using the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L (macro) lens, handheld in Av mode @ f/3.5. I bumped up ISO to 800 to freeze the action @ 1/640s for the first shot and 1/500s for the second.

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.