Twisted Indifference

There is not much to say in this case since it was a very basic shoot and in case of the opening snap, please refer to an earlier post about editing in RAW. In my original concept the orange glow of the setting sun would have alluded to the flame roasting of the kebabs but on perusal of the image in Lightroom I decided against it.

Wide angles work in this scenario too. There could not have been a more daunting contrast than black and white in the dying light. Though the source of light was a setting sun, it shone directly on to the table which obviously restricted the same amount of light hitting the chairs. Decide what you want emphasized and meter accordingly. The specular highlights on account of the cutlery also added to the metering mayhem.

There is only one other image that I have not used in this post and can be found on my Flickr Stream for those curious enough. For the remaining wishing for a bit of glamour and live subjects preferably of the female persuasion, I will be putting up a few shots from Femina Miss India 2008 in the next post.

Countless taunts, reminders and requests have made it impossible for me to procrastinate any further. So here we go. Below you will find links to my work that has been published on websites and a certain narcissistic moment of mine.

First of all, I was there shooting at the Femina Miss India 2008. So the lighting was bad and I had to shoot at 1600 ISO. So the contest was exceedingly boring and reeked of being fixed. Hey I was at Miss India!

The photographs have been published at Indiwo.

Femina Miss India 2008

I had the honour of doing a guest post over at a blog that has redefined movie reviews. Unbiased (last I checked), to the point and most importantly not written by the egregious hacks that most newspapers seem to hire at times. My apologies to my friends who do work with newspapers. Of course I didn’t mean you.

So without further delay and of course without giving the movie away…

Saved the best for the last. My moment in the sun.

The story is a little old since I had given the interview a long time back but when you are featured on a website that is a Web 18 venture, the details could be prehistoric for all I care. Skip the part mentioning the automotive magazines. I long moved beyond them. A special thanks to my friend and co-conspirator and the person responsible for the momentary spotlight on me and my work, Suraj Anand.

Twisted Indifference Studios at Moneycontrol.

I also shot at a restaurant. So now there are images from the Miss India shoot and the shoot from the restaurant that include both interiors and food. I might put the restaurant snaps up today. To hell with the bad chronology. Plus the snaps are already edited. I am shamelessly lazy when it comes to editing. So yes, expect another post by the end of the day.

My temporary break on account of Flickr turned out to be an unplanned sabbatical. But, fret not, I have not been idling. I went for a drive.

I’m also performing different experiments that will allow me to showcase larger versions of my photographs without having to worry about online theft. One of the options I tried was Zoomify but was unsuccessful. I am pretty sure the problem lies with my directory structure. This idea has been shelved for now. For the same reason the night photography images aren’t up either. I want you to see them full size. Or at least large enough to notice the tiny details hitherto not required in the earlier photographs.

The drive was awesome. I drove down to Lavasa City, a place advertised as India’s First Post-Independence Hill Station. I guess their marketing team had really run out of options. That does not mean that the place is not being built well. Neither am I being paid to say good things about them. Moving on…

It was not just the sights along the way. It was the car! A brand new Maruti Suzuki SX4. The car literally transformed the drive. The road was perfect to put to test the SX4’s ABS and the large company shod rubbers. The car does not disappoint! I did not hear a single screech. Not from the tyres anyway. This seems a good time to mention that the gorgeous owner of the car has a generous heart but a very weak stomach for the way I took corners.

It was the perfect cocktail. A blend of a sexy car, company and location.

Now for the surprise. Since I still have to work the bugs out with Zoomify, I intend to have an extended version of this post as a downloadable PDF. The PDF will contain more images and of course larger versions so you can have a better look at them. You can note the details and of course the fact that clarity is not lost even at larger sizes. If the PDF concept works out, I intend to have the Night Photography article out on PDF as well.

So wish me luck and do let me know what you think of this idea. The advantages of the PDF are plenty. I will skip past the obvious portable aspect. I will be able to add more images and larger images. Since I will not be limited by the blog’s design, the PDF will have much better structure and readability. This is just the beginning. Stay tuned!

I was planning on putting up the post on Night Photography today but I guess that will have to wait a while. Flickr is currently under maintenance and the functioning is pretty slow as of now. Not all of the snaps that are already being used in posts here are visible on the Flickr page though they are visible in the posts.

The reason for deferring the posts is simply because I will not be able to ascertain whether the images will be visible to everyone. I cleared my cache a few times and each time a different image was being affected. It is safer that I wait for Flickr to finish their troubleshooting. Or at least till the images load uniformly.

I do apologize for the delay. I will try and come up with a way around it as soon as possible. Incidentally to people with good memories who will undeniably end up questioning about the Ferrari event, trust me on this one, the less I say about that fiasco the better.

As promised earlier this post will be about the advantages of Processing in RAW.

First just to make sure everyone is on the same page, a little information about what a RAW Image File is all about. To put it simply, this is what effectively replaces the film negative. While the negative has to be printed to be of actual use, the RAW file goes through substantial post-processing before it can be converted to a RGB file format. So what is the difference between shooting in RAW and shooting in JPEG when they have to be put through post-processing anyway? Read on…

The RAW file is not a processed file. The JPEG undergoes in camera processing. For example, when you set the White Balance and Exposure while shooting JPEGs, you are more or less committed to that shot. While Photoshop does offer a wide variety of tools to fix errors, they are relatively limited and the editing here is destructive.

RAW processing involves non destructive editing. A RAW file literally holds all possible data for a given shot. If the in camera white balance was set to Daylight, a RAW file will also store the result of that shot had the white balance been set to Auto, Fluorescent, cloudy or Shade etc. It also stores data across 5 tonal ranges. While discussing tonal range is worth a couple of more posts, suffice to say for now that if you have shot in RAW, a significant error in exposure (under/over) is easily correctable.

In the photo above, the vividness of the colours, the slightly unnatural effect of the sky and the evident wash of light resembling a strobe on the grass is all thanks to processing in RAW. I am not going into details as to what were the tweaks that I carried out, this post is already a couple of days overdue, I do not want to set it back by a week. That and the fact that I recently did a midnight shoot with the full moon as my source of light. I want to finish editing those images, incidentally they were shot again in RAW.

Goes without saying that the upcoming posts will be on night photography. Save for one interruption of course. I will be in Bombay on Monday, Ferrari is planning on unleashing the F430 on the Bombay streets and me and my camera would not miss it for the world. The Enzo is also slated to make an appearance though I am not aware if it will hit the streets too. Have a great weekend, if you are planning on coming for the Ferrari event, do let me know.

Within this post I will discuss Depth of Field (DOF). The use of DOF, how to control it and its application. There will also be a small insight into vignetting. After a brief introduction of the model.

Drum roll please…

Making his debut (again) on the Twisted Indifference Studios Blog, the furry nemesis of pillows, couches and car seats, the master of the ‘puppy dog looks’, my best friend and favourite model;

Edison.

Readers who read the posts on this blog before my MySql database decided to vanish suddenly might remember the photo below.

Edison turned 6 in January. In dog years that makes him 42. That, as everyone who have read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams would know is the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything Else. If you haven’t read the book, I suggest you stop reading this and go buy the book first. A lot of websites that I referenced disagree with the 1 human year = 7 in dog years conversion but then these are the people who still think that digital watches are a good idea. Trust me you will love the book. Incidentally six years ago, on February 17 was when Edison first stepped into my house as a month and half year old puppy.

Moving on to the actual purpose of this post. First up, the opening photo.

Source of light: The setting Sun.
Location: Hills behind the ILS Law College in Pune, India.

The first aspect you need to notice is the ‘bokeh’ or background blur. Out of focus backgrounds are generally used in photography to minimize the emphasis of the background so that eye is immediately drawn to the actual subject of the photograph. This is seen often in Portrait Photography and Macro Photography. Usually while shooting landscapes the objective is to ensure that the sharpness extends to the background as well.

This is what depth of field (DOF) is all about. DOF is controlled mainly by the aperture. The other aspects that affect DOF are focal length of the lens and the distance of the subject. Larger the opening of the aperture (smaller f stop), shallower the depth of field. Smaller the opening of the aperture (larger f stop), sharper the depth of field.

If you take the photo with Edison and the Coffee Mug, you will notice a much shallower depth of field. The lenses used in both cases were different. In the opening photo I used the Nikkor 18mm - 200mm. The maximum opening of the aperture at 18mm is f/3.5. This photo was taken at 60mm and the aperture was stopped down to f/5. In the second image, I used my Nikkor 50mm Prime Lens. Primes are the babes of the optical world. 50mm is a fixed focal length but the aperture opens up all the way up to f/1.4. These lenses are also called fast lenses. They will give you high shutter speeds even in low light conditions.

Another aspect to note on the opening photograph is the liberal use of vignetting. Vignetting happens on most lenses as the light entering from the peripheral edges of the lenses hit smaller lens openings as compared to the light that is incident on the center. In the opening photograph I forced vignetting in post processing. The result as you can see is a hot spot in the center, making it look like a spotlight on the subject, in this case my dog.

Take a look at the images up in this post. Clicking on it will take you to my Flickr page. I want to get rid of some of the bugs in Lightbox before I switch to it again.

To Summarize:

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  The opening shot has a relatively sharper DOF than the rest on account of a wider focal length.
  

   

   

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  The second shot has maximum bokeh (as opposed to the other photos in this post) as it was shot at f/1.4 with the focal length of the lens being 75mm (50mm with the 1.5x crop factor of the Nikon D200).

   

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  In the third image, while the aperture has been stopped down to f/5.3, the focal length (90mm) and my distance from the subject contributed to the shallow depth of field. That is of course not to say that f/5.3 would have given crystal clear backgrounds under different circumstances. Though I do not like reducing choices, certain limitations of the camera and the lens do exist and so when you are talking clarity in photos where a clear depth of field is that important higher aperture levels are very much necessary.

I hope this post about Depth of Field was helpful. If you have any doubts, questions, you are more than welcome to post them in the comments. In the next post I will be using another photograph of Edison to talk briefly about shooting and processing RAW files. Make sure you check back, or even better,

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Photo Courtesy: master chong

16 Kilograms of Glass!

There comes a time when even in Photography you have to make that annoying decision. Passing up the really sexy piece of glass and concentrating available funds on a more practical purpose. So when confronted with this Sigma Lens that opens up all the way to f/2.8 at 500, all I can do is add it to my wishlist. If any of you did not get the innuendo in the second sentence, you are missing out on a lot.

Filler Post

I am currently shirking blogging responsibilities because the gentleman in the image below is keeping me busy.

Image Courtesy: Official Website

It has been a while since I played a really good game. The last one was Need For Speed: Most Wanted. I had bought a copy of Need For Speed: Pro Street too, but while the graphics in Pro Street are distinctly better, the gameplay and the adrenaline levels in Most Wanted are much more to my liking.

I shall of course be posting photography related articles, news pieces etc. in the meantime. If you do have anything specific that you have in mind (photography related) do let me know. I will do my best to to create a post around the topic that you suggest.

(Insert statement here that is synonymous with the catch line of a certain Gubernatorial Action Hero)

From graffiti to flames to the downright eye-poppers; the artists had managed to create them all. Having spent a considerable amount of time as a photographer for an automotive magazine in India, an intense love affair with cars tricked out in custom paint jobs is inevitable. Of course covering an every inch of an Ambassador in white fur might be overkill. Even the interiors weren’t spared.

The graffiti art was on a Maruti Suzuki Swift. This car without the custom paint job can makes me want to get in behind the wheel and floor the throttle. Especially the diesel version. The throttle response is brilliant. But then this blog is about photography not cars.

The Royal Enfield, a motorcycle owned by those who dare to be different (and also love pushing the bike to the nearest garage at frequent intervals.) This bike has an undying affinity towards proving Murphy right. Given the new technological breakthroughs that the company has now adopted I guess things should be different.

Flames were largely popular with the Yamaha RX series in its heyday. So putting solid colours on a bike that is coveted for its acres of chrome is I guess keeping with what the bike stands for. Being different.

I just might be prejudiced in my opinion of the art work on the Swift. Apart from the fact that he used a car I really like, the canvas (body) is my favourite colour. Black. Narcisstic, the way the artist’s name is emblazoned on the car panels but it is acceptable. I am the last one who should point out to people marking their territory as far as their creations are concerned. I cannot really use protection of my intellectual property as an excuse.

Now we come to the reason why I spent almost an entire day working on this post. I was saving the best for the last. I do not claim to be any kind of expert with Photoshop. Whatever I do know about it is through watching a colleague of mine. He is a graphic designer and we worked together briefly. That and a little credit to online tutorials. I, however, do know what different techniques were applied when shooting on film. The one emulated here in photoshop is called cross processing. In photoshop, cross processing is done using the Curves function. Stick to non-destructive editing and use a Curves layer. Makes life much simpler. Adobe has certainly made mine easier by adding the Cross Processing action as a Preset.

All I had to do after selecting it from a drop down menu was to apply a little fine tuning. In this photo and in the photo that is used as the opening image in this post, the Dodge and Burn tool have been my best friends. I wish I could have taken a better angle for the car, I would love to do something similar maybe with a wide angle, taking in the rear three quarters of the car with the Gothic Revival Buildings in the background and then apply a similar effect. I think I will take someone along with me who has a thorough knowledge of the buildings and the architectural style.

This should do it for Art in the Financial Capital. Bid adieu to the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, let’s hope I can spend more time there the next time. The next few posts will be about the photos from the Auto Expo 2008 again. I am going to try and put up as much of it as I can by the week-end since I would like to start with something new next week.

I was done with the photography workshop by 1400 hrs. A cola and a smoke and then a cab down to Jehangir Art Gallery. The street was already filled up with the artists setting up their exhibits. I met up with fellow bloggers for lunch, including celebrity bloggers like Sakshi and a blogger that churns out ideas by the dozen.

Now down to the photography. The photograph used at the top of this post was clicked with the intention of putting it as the opening photo. When I saw the sculpture of the paint cans hanging on the stand, I knew this was what I would want to open this post with. Confession time, I agree this is a clichéd snap. I believe a lot of people will have attempted a similar snap. With the plethora of photographers around I doubt that it would not have been attempted. Always fun to play with Depth of Field (DOF). Even though the aperture was stopped down till 5.6, which is not really something that would support a clear DOF in say a landscape shot but it was more than adequate here. You can still see the slight gaussian blur after the 5th can.

The correct DOF can make or break a good photograph. I believe that a proper tutorial on DOF would make a great post. That however would have to be kept for later. I have another post to make for the Kala Ghoda Art festival and I still have to feature the remaining vehicles shot at the Auto Expo 2008. I have a feeling that I am going to end up updating everyday this week.

Another couple of snaps that I clicked at the fest.

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Even the best laid plans can be rendered ineffective. Especially if you happen to be me. The trip down to Bombay for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival was not an easy one for this photographer. After sleeping only for an hour the earlier night, I get ready and step out to make my way to Pune Station. The first shock of the day, ATM card had expired a day before. I love my bank to death but it tends overlook these tiny details.

So with the little cash that I did have in my wallet I set out for Bombay in a cab, thinking I could attend the photography workshop and then borrow money from a friend for the ride back. Great plan, except that the cab I was in decided to break down in front of the sign that said Expressway Ends - 500m. After a long and painfull process (I’ll spare you the details) I reached the workshop an hour late.

David Desouza is brilliant at what he does. He is a great photographer. Older than me by at least a couple of decades, his mannerisms reflect the eccentricies of the profession. Definitely the mark of a photographer. His vehement disregard for boundaries was further illustrated by his insistance that if necessary even spitting betel juice can be used as a form of expression. ‘Paan Thook‘ reverberated through the auditorium everytime he wanted to make a point about breaking boundaries.

The workshop continues tomorrow, although the Kala Ghoda Association website says otherwise. I hope I can make it but the lack of an ATM card might just put a damper on those plans. So do go check it out if you can, the experience is definitely worth it.