Welcome to the world of HDR

Okay, so token apologies for ignoring the blog to death aside… I wanted basically to just share a small trio of images I’m working on right now.

 

These were all shot in (or around) Darjeeling this past November and are the first images of mine to be treated to Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro that essentially makes HDR a bit of a breeze.

 

For those who don’t know – HDR is a short for High Dynamic Range which itself is a misnomer for images with higher tonal density and exposure gamuts. The way this works, very simply put is – when you take a picture, you or your camera will expose the scene for as good a representation as it can muster. This however will mean that you’ll never quite get brilliant contrasty skies and gorgeously lit fields… If the meter is for the highlights, you loose your blacks or the other way round.

 

Also, while this isn’t a review or such for Nik’s HDR Efex, I will say that my initial impressions of the plugin (used alongside Lightroom 3) are extremely positive. I’m by no means a champion user of it but the simplicity and intuitive way they’ve made this work is very promising and inviting.

 

So anyway, here’s the first bunch of my shots to try and get something of what I just mentioned. Two were shot by my Lumix L-1 & the 25/1.4 Summilux and one was taken by my girlfriend’s Olympus E-620 with her 50/2 Macro.

42, 43.52

Howdy Ho Everybody!

So here we are, late again for the weekly shots entry, but in a remarkably rare turn of events, I actually managed to have my shot ready in time & we were delayed by my beautiful lil’ girlfriend who has been rather buried under the load of her nurse-work lately. Add to that the generally chaotic & uninspiring nature of “just before we’re together” & “I really gotta start packing” and you feel more than a twinge of sympathy for her & find yourself graciously accepting the delay.

For my shot, I accidentally stumbled onto the idea of explaining tea, and aptly found myself showcasing a good cuppa in 5 steps which I later realized worked well as a tip of the hat to good ol’ Douglas Adams as well. (This being week 42 n’ all…)

Pili took a more direct approach to our favorite post-apocalyptic comedy & has managed to share one of the most important messages in the known Universe(s) with us all for her 42nd shot…

For week 43, I decide to include my new clock as a prop piece & it’s classic design as the post-processing guideline. A simple shot, but one I like nonetheless.

And finally, for Piwi’s 43rd, she decided to give us a peek in her packing process as she readies herself for coming over to India yet again! The bag in question is her Jill-E designed camera bag/hand-bag.

So that’d be that my virtual friends. Cheerios & Peanut Butter for all!

10 Shots Trapped in 21 minutes…

So this is a very cool lil’ exercise I made up one evening while I was at Umesh’s house. Both he & I are avid amateur photographers & I had been thinking of something along the lines of this excursion for a while. Here’s how it worked for us, we both picked our least used lenses & trapped ourselves in his living room & decided to take 10 shots. Now the key here was that we could literally only take 10 shots, which meant that we had to nail our shots every time or live with the lemons we’d be generating…

My lens of choice was the beautiful lil’ Pentacon 50mm f/1.8. This puppy is older than I am, and I got it used off eBay for like $50 not more than a couple of months ago. I’ve barely used it since, and have been mostly happy with its performance the few times I have used it…

Now it took me a total of 21 mins in his living room to take the 10 shots I ended up & I think I rather mucked up on most of them. The perils of shooting with a lens you’re unfamiliar with (added with the tedium of a manual focus only lens which doesn’t so much as meter accurately). So here’s my 10 shots, edited moderately to heavily to better suit the vision I had for them… Overall, not as bad a batch as I feared they’d turn out to be.

I think I’ll try one of these in my own room too. They say you’re never more than 10 feet away from an amazing picture, and I guess it’ll be interesting looking at my own familiar surroundings through a literal lens & frame…

Gaurav S, Over & Out!

Intra-death 2.0 – Meet the Suicide Machine

So I stumbled onto this lil’ gem & wow, it’s so post-Orwellian that it’s managed to impress me rather beyond the ordinary. Assisted suicide for the world wide web, all a click away. Reminds one of the “Telephone Booths” in Futurama actually. Gotta love this brave new world, right?

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine – Meet your Real Neighbours again! – Sign out forever!

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40,41.52

I should probably re-work the naming style I’ve adopted here, it sounds rather technical does it not? But the name notwithstanding, I do believe it’s high time I put up the self shots by my girlfriend & I for the last 2 weeks.

My first shot is essentially a marker between my journey back from the United States to India. This was shot as we were landing at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. Although I wasn’t trying to capture the reflection of my own hands against the glass window, the fact that they were so prominently visible made me consider this as a self portrait, for while it isn’t the greatest shot aesthetically or technically, it is an excellent way to remember my very brief tryst with Amsterdam & as a farewell to my 5 month home in America.

Piwi’s shot also features her hands, albeit in a very different manner. In one of those freak weather phenomenons that are becoming all too common, Spain experienced a fair bit of snow. Not to miss out on that rare opportunity, Piwi snapped up this lil’ paw-print on the very first Monday after our last submission two weeks ago.

Then, in an effort to further enhance my photographic experience, I challenged myself & my friend Umesh to this lil’ made-up game where we both picked out our least used lenses, and confining ourselves to his living room we commenced a 10 shot project (more on that later). This is one of the 10 shots I clicked & it’s one of my favorites from that session. After a hectic bit of re-acclimatizing & jet-lagging on my part, this seemed like a great way to express that “aah” feeling you get when you’re home.

And finally, Piwi’s ultimate expression of the self… Well nothing quite so philosophical, but her aim in this shot (which doesn’t actually feature any biological part of her anatomy) was to figure out what represented her best in terms of her e-verse. With the final intention of becoming her Blog-Button, this excellent shot shows what she is far better than I think my attempt during week 8 did. Infact, I’m fairly sure that I’ll be trying this out myself, not so much to get a blog-button, but just as an experience to try & condense myself to a single frame.

So that’s that, our shots for the week. Nothing world altering about ‘em, but they are, as always, uniquely expressive. Week after week, I feel like shouting out to all my fellow photographers that a 52 week challenge is truly an inspired & deeply enriching photo-journey to embark on. And if you’re reading this (for whatever strange reason) and happen to be a photo-enthusiast, believe me you wanna try this out.

Until next time…

Spring Cleaning the Virtual Soul

So I’m writing out this particular entry not so much because I have an expressive shot to share or a poignant message to deliver, but rather because I’m essentially frozen out of any other means of passing the time of my digital life. You know that feeling when you realize that you have some 2.5% of your total internal memory left & you go, “Holy F***!, I need to clean this shit up!”…

Well, I’m ^ there ^ now, cleaning the proverbial shit up & off. Which for me means mostly just backing up my photographs (which constitute roughly 65% of the total memory usage on my system) and organizing the results in a way to have direct access to my more recent shots (relatively speaking) but not things I haven’t so much as looked at in over a year.

Which in turn made me think of that all important phrase there, backup. While in the US, I lost most of my non-photo-related data, which thanks to a friend of mine who had backed up 90% of it, I have managed to recover. That experience taught me the true value of backups & multiple backups (specially for my photo-related data). And resultingly, in 2010, every one of my shots will be backed up to a’least 2 separate physical locations alongside their primary storage. Consider it a new years resolution even.

And so, as I backup my Lightroom Catalogs right now before purging the (backed up) “stuff” off my lappy, I find myself having a nice lil’ chat with my blog about it. So about that poignant message for whatever it’s worth here it is – back up things you like. All memory tends to go ka-boom & if it hasn’t for you then that’s just it being nice & giving you fair warning. I lost none of my photos, none of my music & infact the only things lost were for me easily replaceable… but even so I get how easily this could have been a miserable loss!

And yay, with that one of the 3 catalogs I want to backup presently is done so I’ll catch you later my dearest interwebers!

Live Long & Let your virtual memories Prosper…

39.52

On April 19th of the year past, my girlfriend & I embarked on an experiment hoping it would help us better define ourselves as well pick up a thing or two about photography. The idea, simple as it sounds, is to take a self-portrait every week for 52 weeks – a full year.

38 Weeks, 38 Photographs & a whole lot of late-sunday-night-head-scratching now brings us here, to this blog of mine which shall serve as a co-host to our weekly shots, as we finish up the final quarter of this most satisfying & educating endeavor. So far, we’ve managed to take some very average, some rather poor & even a few absolutely brilliant shots which you can view here.

For this week’s shot, Piwi wanted to showcase her new Coffee Maker, that she received for Christmas & in managing to set up the shot on her gorillapod, compose & expose all within the time it takes for the coffee to be poured, she’s managed a great shot.

For my shot, I initially wanted a burst of light from my hot-shoe mounted flashgun illuminating me in a dark room, but a miscalculation on the refresh rate of the flash left me with a 13 second exposure, where any movements I made seemed to blur away. This inspired me to try & take a shot with what would eventually come to appear to be the ghost of a photographer.

That’s it, two shots showcasing our 39th week taking one shot every week. And here’s looking forward to a’least 13 more…