Tech Info: Nikon D300s | Nikon 18-200 | ISO 200 | f/16 | 8s
Having some fun with lens zoom.
Continue reading “Alien Abduction”
Category: Travel
Up in the Air – II
Tech Info: Nikon D90 | 50mm | ISO 200 | f/5.6 | 1/20 sec
You might enjoy this in large.
This was shot during our flight to Yellowstone National Park in sep 2009. The flight had just taken off and was headed east which meant some lovely morning light. For the first few minutes, I just sat there at the window gazing at these awesome cloud formations and completely forgot that I had the camera in my hand. After I realized what an idiot I was, then it was so much fun in trying to capture these.
Continue reading “Up in the Air – II”
Misty Trees
Tech Info: Nikon D300s | 50mm | ISO 200 | f/8 | 1/180 sec
Still digging from the archives as I haven’t been able to go out. This was taken last year at the great Yosemite National Park during a winter workshop from RadiantScape.
Care for a drink?
Tech Info: HDR from 5 exposures using Nikon D300s on a gorilla pod with Tokinaa 12-24 @22mm, ISO 200 at f/10. Exposures ranging from 1/6 sec to 2 secs
Actually I would have if I had some company 😉
This shot was taken en route to Inida last year. Usually most of my friends prefer to have short layovers so that they can reach their destination faster. But due to my back problem, I prefer to have longer layovers. This gives me some time to give the back much needed rest and I pretty much stay in a hotel. Most of the airports have some kind of transit hotel and I’ve used Singapore airport hotel (Ambassador) for majority of my trips and recently during this trip it was the Dubai’s International Hotel in Terminal 3.
Continue reading “Care for a drink?”
Rings of Fire
Tech Info: Nikno D90 with 70-300 @70mm, ISO 250, f/4.5 for 1/10 of sec.
Digging this from the archives. This was shot during our visit to Hawai and at the Polynesian Cultural Festival. If you visit Oahu, Hawai, then you must include a visit to this place in your itinerary. Its really interesting to see all the different cultures of these islands. I don’t remember which one, but one of the islands main source of food is coconuts. Climbing a coconut tree, grating a coconut didn’t generate a ‘Aww’ from me as I’ve seen it multiple times in our village and even managed to climb on one, but the performance is simply awesome.
Continue reading “Rings of Fire”
Clipped Ear
Tech Info: Single exposure with Nikon D300s, 70-300 @210mm, ISO 200, f/5.3 for 1/320 of sec.
During my trip to India last year, I managed to go for a bird watching outing with my friends to Bannerghatta National Park just outside of Bangalore. We had a great time and in fact Karthik released a Wolf Snake there which I had mentioned it earlier (link).
Up in the Air – 1
Tech Info: Single shot with D300s; 50mm using f/8.0 with ISO 200 for 1/1250 sec.
This shot was taken somewhere en route to BLR from SFO, on an Emirates flight. I’ve quite a lot of shots taken through the window seat on flights, so this is going to be a new series that I want to get them all done.
My memory of the first flight ever is still fresh. It was a short one (compared to now) of BLR to Abu Dhabi, a palce where I was going to start my first international job back in 1999. I was assigned a window seat and the entire 3 hrs, I just kept looking out of the window. Due to my height and the cramped economy seats, I started requesting for an aisle seat. Its been over 10+ yrs that I now want to be seated on an emergency window seat…does work both ways; have enough leg room for a comfortable journey and I get to see the wonders through the tiny hole.
About this shot: Imagine a vantage point just above the clouds. That would be just enough to get one’s juices going as you can find a range of patterns. But I wanted to include part of my vantage point in the shot; could have been anything like the window of the seat, huge turbine or in this case, the wing of the plane itself. I hope this does give the viewer an idea of where the shot was taken from.
I’ve sat in seats that didn’t have any opportunity of including anything of the plane (with the exception of the window itself) and have taken some shots, which at that time was compelling enough, but I’m not sure whether I would process them now. Well, you’ll get to see if I do in this “Up in the Air” series.
Processing: I’m now becoming a huge fan of “Curves”; Its one tool that can do so many things, right from fixing the black & white points to color correction, control contrast and even toning. So I’m making a habit of using just that. Since I still can’t do “complete” toning in curves, had to use channel mixer for it. After the curves adjustments, resized the image and applied a slight “Smart Sharpen” for web display.
New York in Vegas
For best effect View Large
Tech Info: Single exposure taken with Nikon D90 using 18-105 @40mm, 5 sec at f/8 with ISO 160
This is a shot of the New York imitation found at the starting of the strip in Las Vegas. There were too many people moving and hence I had to compose the scene in such a way that there were no people in the shot. Couple of people did screw a shot as they came right in front of the lens and stood still for almost 5 seconds. So it took some time to make sure I got it right. While I was trying this, wife was busy looking at handsome hunks and Nidhi was happily dozing in the stroller
How was this shot processed? I usually use curves to get some contrast in the images, but this one had all pixel values in the entire luminosity range. So couldn’t use curves to compress the range anymore. The next option was to use levels. Also since the scene contains lots of lights, they pretty much tend to get blown out. While taking the shot, I had made sure that the amount of highlights that got blown out was almost nil. In post, all I had to use was a little bit of dodging and burning to recover details from those highlights and shadow areas and use layer masking to blend them together. After that it was the usual border and watermarking the image.
I’m in love with the blue hour shots and for some reason I just love long exposures during that time. I’ve way too many shots in the archives and hopefully someday I’ll get to process them. For now this one was done to take a break from my Yosemite series 🙂
Yosemite Tunnel View Panorama
Tech Info: Five image panorama stitched manually. Each image was from a Nikon D300s with Nikkor 50mm, f/8 for 1/750 sec with ISO 200
The five images used to create this panorama was taken on the second day of the Yosemite visit. It was still drizzling and we had to shield the camera equipment with anything we could get from the rain. I was using a good old black umbrella (the one used by Grandpas..) and some of the wide angle shots here got the tip of the umbrella in them :-p
This is my first panorama and probably the last one that I’m going to stitch manually. Its way too time consuming and difficult to stitch. The auto stitching programs were cutting off most part of the stitched image, but since I didn’t want to loose them, went the manual way.
Stitching a panorama manually is very difficult as you have to take care of the alignment and the lens distortions that might be there. This particular one had both and I’m not sure how I managed to do it. I’m happy that its done and will appreciate the auto stitch programs a lot more now 😀
Half Dome from Sentinal Bridge
Tech Info: Nikon D300s with Tokina 12-24 @24mm, f/16, ISO 200 for 15s.
Filters: B+W Polarizer and Hoya NDX400
Its been pretty busy at work and haven’t got much time to work on photos, but today after witnessing a superb match win by Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) over Rajasthan Royals (RR) got some energy to work on a picture taken during the Yosemite trip.
Another very useful filter to have is a Polarizing Filter. This one helps to reduce the polarizing effect and can cut the reflections. This shot is an example where the filter is at its use. Usually when water is an element in your composition, the glare/reflection from the surface would be pretty high, thereby preventing the camera to see underneath the water. A polarizing filter will help in reducing those reflections and revealing details.
In this shot, I angled the filter just enough where the scene would contain some reflections and details on the river bed. To the bottom left, you see the river bed and as the polarizing effect is reduced, you can see the reflected light. Of course when you are trying to capture the reflection itself, you would avoid this filter. But here, I wanted both of them and hence the change in angle of the filter. The smoothness on the water surface was obtained by the use of NDX400 filter. As mentioned in the previous post, this one cuts the light and helps to get longer exposures during the day.
While taking this shot on the bridge, there was another guy with a medium format camera standing next to me. It was interesting to see the way he was composing; he took some test shots with a point and shoot and then used the medium format camera to compose the scene. I think its a great idea to go about composition this way, especially if you are having trouble visualizing the scene in a 4×5 format. Of course not necessarily with another camera, but even a small cardboard with a cutout in the middle should help. It’ll be interesting to try it out next time I’m out 🙂