Twisted Indifference

I was messing around with off camera flash and white balance. This is the first decent photograph of myself that I have since this one. I guess I am too picky when someone else is shooting me. If you need something done right…

It struck me a while back that I had a HDR shot of bike as my profile picture on facebook but it never made to the blog. It will be rectified soon. Along with other HDR shots I experimented with here.

This was part of an assignment given but we more or less had full creative and technical control. Well, no flash allowed but then, didn’t need it. We were shooting this toward the end of August and a couple of days before the assignment was handed out I finally got delivery of my bike. I had made the mistake of trusting a transport company to get me my bike. They excelled in their lack of professionalism and overall ineptitude.

However bike finally in hand I could combine exploring the tiny streets and by-lanes of Ooty with the assignment. It is fun to walk around in Ooty but it is tiresome always having the 5 kilogram bag with your camera, lenses and other accessories on your back. The locks and doors were all discovered while riding around Ooty except for the next one that I found while on a mini road trip to a village called Achanakkal. It’s hardly 5-6 kilometers from Lovedale.

While the main street passing through Achanakkal had modern doors and locks, a short walk through the village brought me to this specimen. Chipped paint in abundance and more rust than actual lock, I hope this door wasn’t guarding anything too valuable. Not that it would have mattered much given the crime rate here is phenomenally low. Since I was done with whatever I needed for the assignment I decided to move ride on ahead and explore.

I passed some schools whose buses I would regularly see around Lovedale and Ooty but nothing worthwhile. The road leads to Ketty, a place I seem to have developed a vehement distaste for since day one in Ooty. My first day here I took a local bus back to my place in Lovedale from Ooty town. As it turned out the bus was headed no where toward where I needed to be. I wasn’t too worried since it would still have to pass the the road leading to my place. I could always pick up another bus from there.

Imagine my consternation when the conductor refuses to have the bus stopped. Taking pity on me after I unsuccessfully tried convincing the conductor that we had already passed my stop a fellow passenger informed me that this was an express bus that stopped only between major villages and that the Lovedale Junction did not qualify. The conductor even refused to let me off the bus in the middle of the road. To add insult to injury he even charged me six bucks to ride the bus till Ketty, the next stop. Cursing everything possible I had to take a return bus back to Lovedale from Ketty and for all it’s worth left a bad taste in my mouth.

I don’t really hate the place nor do I hold any grudges against any public transport employee since as I settled into my new student life I discovered that people here are extremely courteous and helpful. An essential nicety without the goody goody vibe and having a simple thank you met with a completely unpretentious wave of the hand tends to make Ooty home to the rarest form of humanity.

A year in Ooty…it is not possible to do justice to this place with photographs. Hell it’s not enough to experience the place.

I only planned to ride till Masinagudi. For the past five years I have been driving a car. I got back on the bike less than a month ago. The 35 odd kilometres to Masinagudi from Ooty seemed like a good warm up before I began riding long distances. Even though it meant passing through Kalhatty Ghat with its infamous 36 hair raising hairpin bends. Masinagudi is another one road town. Under the impression that Mudumalai was closed to random visitors I went down the road to Singara.

I held no assumptions of capturing any wildlife since the max zoom I can achieve is 200mm. While I had hoped to capture some decent landscape shots my primary motivation for being there was the ride. A few days before, I made the mistake of going to Dolphin’s Nose, a viewpoint 12-14 kms from Coonoor. I expected the destination to be a waste of time since it’s a tourist trap but I was told by colleagues who had been there that the ride is totally worth it. Man were they ever wrong. Neither is the road worth the ride nor is the view worth the abuse you take riding till Dolphin’s Nose. Given that the person who informed me belongs to the ‘All Noise No Performance’ Royal Enfield Bullet Club I should have known better than to listen to him. What I think of those junk metal piles of shit would fill another blog post.

I can digress spectacularly. The gray langur above was the only wild animal that I managed to capture. The photo is slightly blurred which may not be all that noticeable in the low res image put up here. Of course a good telephoto lens isn’t the only thing I lack, the patience needed for wildlife photography also seems to be absent in me.

So the ride to Masinagudi and Singara Power House done I figured I’d head back. Around 5 kms out of Masinagudi I had stopped to take some shots of the road and I see bunch of my batchmates heading towards me. They planned to head through Mudumalai and this was the time I was informed that there’s a bloody national highway that passes through it. Duh! Too kicked at riding through roads which put all roads in Maharashtra (expressway and part of golden quadrilateral excluded) to shame I did not stop to take any photographs.

The motorcade now included a Mercedes ML 270, a Maruti Zen and me on my Pulsar 200 DTS-i. We crossed Mudumalai and came to the border checkpost that led into Karnataka. It was interesting to note that the Tamil Nadu – Karnataka border lay less than 80 kms from Ooty. While it is essentially the same reserve, being in Karnataka it is called Bandipur. The roads got even better. I had to take the shot. Click on it to view a larger image.

The highway through Mudumalai was peppered with speed bumps. Bandipur was not. Prudence might have called for a leisurely cruise through the forests but as I mentioned earlier I don’t buy into the all noise no performance propaganda. I was also finally getting the opportunity to unleash the full capabilities of my bike. My bike is no Hayabusa but we scorched the roads of Bandipur nonetheless.

I forgot the name of the village from where you take the road leading to Gopalswamy Betta but I’m pretty sure it was the first village we entered after Bandipur. It just couldn’t get any better. It was like a karmic reward for something good that I must have done somewhere. Or I was being handed this for enduring the miserable ride to Dolphin’s Nose. Regardless I was happy to collect. Not just on the view and the road but also the fact that I managed to capture half the sistine chapel.

It’s a little difficult to say how far I rode to get there since during the whole ride there was a lot of oscillations between two destinations. My total riding that day was 192.8 kms but riding straight to Gopalswamy Betta and back to Ooty without my diversions would be a lot less. Being there was totally worth it.

Sprawling green forests and a view way better than I captured since I was also hindered by a tooth ache that was triggered by the cold winds. On a side note the root canal procedure is finished and the cold wind can do me no harm. Well it does have me down with fever but that was my fault. Riding into the wind is one thing. Taunting it by forgetting to wear a jacket on a recent trip to Pykara was essentially stupid.

Well brick and mortar to be perfectly honest. But it is in the middle of a small forest. I am currently staying in Lovedale, approximately 5-6 kms from Ooty. Lovedale does not share the same semi urban landscape as Ooty. While the road to my house (rented not owned) is fairly straightforward, anyone without a good sense of direction and/or good navigational skills might as well carry pebbles to mark the route (We all know what happened when bread crumbs were used).

This photograph was taken late evening with a fairly long shutter speed. Four seconds if I remember correctly. The attempt at light painting the car failed more because the LED flash-light I have is not so powerful than the for the length of the exposure. I could have painted for a longer time had I kept the shutter open for more than 4 seconds but I would have ended up burning the light coming from the windows. So note to self. Buy a better flash-light.

What is missing in the picture is my bike. I finally received it yesterday and am having an absolute blast riding through the mountain roads. Sure I cannot open up the throttle completely on account of narrow roads with wicked twists but the world suddenly starts looking different through the visor of the helmet. I still have to get it all cleaned up and shiny and once that is done, expect photographs.

Gets uploaded on Flickr!

For those who weren’t informed, I am now in Ooty and will be here for a year. I am doing a specialized course in photography at Light and Life Academy. Given my transition from a professional to a student again it would be too presumptuous to continue writing tutorials. So at least for a year, this blog turns into a regular photo blog. I will of course try and include whatever technical details about the shots that I can. I am shooting 24/7 right now and am on an extremely shaky internet connection. It’s like being back on dial up. Well 256 kbps feels like dial up anyway. I actually saw that buffering symbol on YouTube.

So these are the hallowed halls in which I’ll be spending a year. Week 3 has begun and the workload has started piling up. I am not complaining. Except for the lack of light. My current assignment is to shoot sunny skies and the way it’s raining here would make a Londoner feel at home.

Asking photographers to be miracle workers is a little too much. I mean yea, most of us are really hoopy froods but weather control is not part of our job profile. It has been a blast though. Especially since some of us are part circus creatures.

Another high flying act

The train shot is probably a massive cliché but it had to be done. No reasons, it just had to be. This is happily just the beginning. Lots more where those came from.

This is an old post with a new photograph. I had earlier used my dog Edison’s snap which can still be seen on my flickr page here.

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.

It goes without saying that one should not develop a dependance on shooting RAW. Good technique and understanding of metering and colour contribute more to the shot than RAW. This photograph was taken while I was wandering around in Ooty. For all the tea estates that it boasts of, Ooty seriously lacks places that actually make a decent of cup of tea.

This was never meant to be a personal blog nor do I write sappy testimonials. My website and my blog mean the world to me. Due to reasons best left alone my hosting account was deleted today. A disaster of mind numbing proportions (to me anyway) was averted due to the presence of mind of a friend to whom I am already indebted to life several times over.

So yes, while this is not a personal blog I would like to take the time to thank Vivek who has not only ensured the uptime of my computers over the past eight years but also ensured that the website and the blog have backups. I could not have asked for a better friend or system administrator.

I realize that the above text reads like a bloody official letter of recognition but I don’t do sappy.

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.