There is always somehting to learn.. always..

like someone i respect as a good photographer loves to say.. photography and golf are exactly the same for a weekend warrior.. you get one good shot by luck the first and that gets you hooked,.. you just chase for another "that shot" again and it just keeps going on :)

I have been chasing patience for a while now.. you go somewhere.. look at the place for some shots and you start seeing patterns and you start expecting things to happen.. just that you have to wait.. and as simple as it sounds, it is frigging hard.. sometimes, we need to wait forever and many a times i have given up (knowing fully well that if i waited i would get that shot)...

so, here are some results of that "waiting game".. when you know things will happen and you have the fun of framing it :) pardon me for posting more than one image..


if anyone wants to see full size shots.. please click here

Color and Depth

Tried to calibrate depth of field with a different color to demarcate each of the stages. Scene is from Pt Reyes National preserve.

Exposure Time: 1/160sec
ISO Speed: 200
Lens: 55-200mm
F-Stop: f/9

New feature tried Aperture Mode
Aperture setting 4

Assignment 5: Food & Drinks

Food photography has always interested me. There are some incredible pictures on the web. So, for the next fortnight I am going to try to shoot something I cooked/ate/drank.

So could you ..!

Cherry Blossoms

...never used the flower setting on my d40x, so on our recent trip to Japan, thought to take advantage of the Cherry Blossoms in full bloom. Here is a closeup that I took!!


Shutter: 1/100
Metering: Matrix
Aperture: f5.6
Exposure: Close up
Focal: 200 mm
ISO: 400
White balance: AUTO

Manual Focus


I spent a couple of hours today to try out new stuff with my camera. After spending a good part of it on playing with AEB to blend a picture I wasn't satisfied with the results. So, I switched to trying out manual focus which I have never really used in my camera.

So, this picture was shot with the sun in the background while focusing on the leaf blades. I tried a few shots & decided on this picture because of the circular halo in the middle, although unintentional it still doesn't hurt :)

Multiple Exposures

I was going to fiddle around with ISO settings since that is one area that I haven't played with much. But then, I discovered the multiple exposure feature of the D80. It allows you to take two pictures and then combines them to create a JPG/RAW image. So here is my attempt - a window within a door taken using 2 exposures. The window, car, trees, etc are taken from a window facing North, and the door is on the opposite side of the room. You can see a faint version of a second window to the right side of the image.

Reading by the river

Here's a picture I took during our last trip to the Sequoia. Sorry, I haven't had time to post it, but here it is. Anjali and I were staying at a B&B which had this river flowing behind. We were relaxing and enjoying the quietness just before sunset when I took this.

What new feature did I use on the camera?
I'd never used Aperture mode on my camera (I'm still a rookie) I know it's not a fancy feature, but I learned something about photography & my camera while fooling around with this mode while taking the picture. I really like the light and how the background is all blurred.

Cascade

At Yosemite last weekend, I was without my tripod. And I wanted to shoot this waterfall. It was bright overhead (Sun was beating down), and I still wanted a blur. So, handheld I had to shoot. What were Naveen's choices?

1. Wide aperture? No. I wouldn't be able to capture the blur.

2. Narrow aperture? Yes. But that would also make the picture too bright. So, I set exposure compensation few stops down, and I shot this. f/22. What would the shutter speed be? 1/60 was the slowest for handhelds. I took a deep breath, supported my elbow on my knee, and shot at 1/10sec. Well, there is camera shake, but I think my sharp-shooting skills helped.

I hadn't used the exposure compensation feature in the camera in this manner. It worked. I hope.

Rose is a rose is a rose

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Loveliness extreme.
-- Gertrude Stein

It was 'Hello AEB' for me. Yes, Yes, I had never used the auto-bracketing feature..
This shot was quite underexposed and I played around in iPhoto to make it look like this.

1/500, f/5.6, ISO=100, shutter priority