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.

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!

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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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.

Like it? Love it? Share!

I think I need to stop dubbing these as tutorials. It somehow goes against what I have mentioned in one of the earlier posts. To reitarate, photography cannot be taught. In a more general aspect, creativity cannot be taught. So what am I exactly doing telling you how I shot the photographs that are put up here? Think of it as me telling you what the rules are so that you can break them.

I started out breaking all of them. I could not conform to set standards nor did I want to. Experience taught me this much that to cross the line, you need to know where and what the line is. So in the photo you see on top, we go back maybe not to basics but to a boundary set by our predecessors. Negative Space.

One rule I continually keep breaking, is the rule of thirds. I will not go into details here, suffice to say that it also concerns what negative space does. Composition. The most typical shot, very popular with holiday makers is to put a bunch of people in front of a scenic backdrop and fire away. Nothing wrong with it. What you click should make you happy. Experimenting, however, demands more.

What is negative space? It is somewhat self explanatory. In the snap above the subject is not the larger part of the picture. The camera was held vertically and with my lens at its widest, I released the shutter. I will avoid mentioning the exposure details and such since it is a very basic shot.

Another example that you see here, shot vertically again albeit with a different perspective. Both these have been shot in Indore where I was attending the SAE India Baja (pronounced Ba-ha) event. Colleges from all over the country competed with ATVs they built themselves. This post is not about them.

In the second shot, my intention is obviously to put focus on to the box cigarettes, which incidentally are the brand I smoke. Yes lucky am I not, to have them when needed. Ash tray on its side, I think it might have looked better if it had been a clean one instead of one I had just tapped ash into. Regardless, I think the point is clear. It is still a use of negative space.

What needs to be noted here is the perspective and the point of focus. Now I cannot draw or sketch or I could have shown you with a diagram how exactly I was positioned while shooting this. It is kind of evident if you study the photo long enough.

Incidentally all this posting with the images on either side is making me do something tiring. Coding. I belong behind a camera not on websites learning CSS. Actually I know CSS but I keep forgetting the tags and have to keep referring to the websites that run the tutorials for that.Is it too late for me to ask you to ignore this paragraph completely?

I think I have given you a fair idea on negative space and its purpose. The latter, more difficult work of applying this knowledge is yours. I will not tell you how and if I do, ignore it. You are much better off doing it on your own.

I am pretty sure I haven’t pioneered this concept. Reason? I am a photographer and not a designer. It took me ages to do this (4 hours spread over 2 days). I guess the main reason bloggers (excluding the one’s running webcomics on theirs) would not want to follow something like this would be since it would screw up their SEO.

So why am I doing it? I am not going to say I that I do not give a damn about SEO. I would love it as much as the other guy if search results with photography as the keyword give Twisted Indifference Studios as the first result. Think of it as a burglar alarm. It may not be 100% effective but still makes the job a hell lot tougher for thieves. Not to mention the fact that I really like the way it has turned out.

Moving on to what went on while taking this shot. I wanted to shoot the scooter in an urban location. I agree this location is more residential than commercial but it suited my aesthetic purposes. Took the easy way out on the lighting. Sweet morning sunrise.

For this shot the sun was behind me, i.e. incident on the subject. Metering was on matrix but I shot a little to the right. Just enough that I could recover it in Photoshop. The histogram display has seriously become my new best friend. Shooting to the right ensured capturing the complete detail of the bike which I am sure you must have noticed is black. You might find it a little hard to note the details in the area a little behind the front mudguard. I am presuming this is on account of this being a low res photograph.

The colours underwent the maximum post processing (not to be read as dependent on post processing!). I shoot at the default settings without boosting saturation. Image Optimization is also at Normal. Please note that the nomenclature used for camera related purposes will mostly be unique to Nikon. Canon generally has different terminology. Semantics most of the time. Nikon has Vibration Reduction (VR) and Canon has Image Stabilizer (IS). I like how the camera sales people make it sound like that function is the lens’ USP.

I digress. Post processing involved playing with Levels a bit and a moderate hand with the Burn tool. It brought out the saturation required. I must also mention that while in Levels, I boosted yellow a notch. The result, a warmer tone on the buildings and a cool blue sky, is at the beginning of this post.

There are a lot of kinks to be worked out for a post like this. Suggestions and/or requests are always welcome.