Twisted Indifference

I figured I start out with this since the photographs required are already edited and uploaded on Flickr. Remnants of lethargy on account of being absent from blogging for so long. Hopefully it should be gone soon.

This is a pretty old snap, I had never put it up on the blog. It has been shot on film and I was using a Canon EOS 300 at that time. I am extremely fond of this shot since it started my love affair with concept art and the fact that this snap alone got me a lot of attention. If you are wondering why this shot is in a post clearly titled “Interiors and Food”, this was one of the shots I took while shooting for Oxford Properties in Pune.

The next couple of shots are part of a restaurant shoot I had done last year.

Just goes to show how much fun can be had with RAW processing. I should add here that shooting in RAW does not automatically make for a brilliant shot. If you are going to muck around with tonal ranges there should actually be a distinct tonal range.

Given that in the earlier post for this shot I spoke about specular highlights, I will summarize it briefly. Your best option in such a case is to diffuse the light. This is not a hard and fast rule and could always depend on the situation and the source of light. Another option that can be considered is to compensate for the highlights but you stand to lose data in the shadows.

I never had to resubmit assignments at school, the first attempts were always good enough for the teachers. Pointing out the obvious but that was definitely a good thing. I am not putting up the posts that the MySQL backup did not restore. For a simple reason. It is excruciatingly boring. It is only a copy paste job from the text file back up that I have but it’s like setting up and shooting the same bloody photo. What I will be doing is putting up the earlier shots in a different post. More showcase less tutorial-esque. Will start work on it tomorrow.

Random Fact: I hate taking U-Turns while driving since it involves going back down the same road and I try and avoid it as much as I can. Sometimes I tend to leave a carbon footprint that would put a sasquatch to shame.

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.

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 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.

Please note: This is an older post that I have put up again since this blog was restored from a back up after another crash that did not contain the more recent posts. If you think this sentence structure is bad, think how bad I must have felt having to live through it.

As made public at yesterday’s blog camp by Tarun, this blog had been down for a while. Sumit had been pestering me for the past couple of months to fix it and I have been slacking. After all, I am only a poor and unpaid “Chief Take-The-Blame Officer”. Yesterday’s events finally prompted Sumit to offer me what I have been asking for as payment. A bottomless mug of beer.

Root Cause Analysis: – The MySQL database was FUBAR.

How the database got corrupted is still a mystery. I had to restore from an old backup which is missing a few posts. Sumit will be posting them again soon.