Pediatrician and a Forensic Expert. A passionate PHP geek. Currently CTO, SANIsoft. Also a photographer, bird watcher, nature lover and a FOSS enthusiast.
Monsoon finally hit Nagpur in all its glory on Friday – We celebrated the event by going out for a drive by the Telangkhedi lake side in near zero visibility with some friends.
Well, honestly, it was not planned that way, the plan was to go and see all the birds which feast on the flying termites which come out after the first (pre-monsoon) shower but we were expecting rains and the children were wanting to soak in the rain and for a few minutes all the adults revelled in being children 🙂
We later stopped at the famous Samosa walla and had piping hot Sams – apparently a whole lot of people had the same idea as us and the fellow was doing a roaring business.
Saturday saw us again out… The picture on the left was taken when suddenly this pretty bird alighted right in front of our car as soon as we stopped – It was a pair of Red Rumped Swallows and they were collecting mud for their nests. That day we also captured a Leucistic Jungle Babbler.
Been grappling with some fine lines of discrimination lately – no this has nothing to do with the picture! More on the picture later. It is about the small but significant differentiations between some very similar looking birds for example the difference between Oriental Skylark and Syke’s Crested Lark. Hint: Look at the crest and beak. This confusion is at its prime when it comes to warblers – almost half of them look like the other half of them 😉
With ornithology getting big in our daily routine – this is one thing which I have to master as best as possible. Another exciting thing on this front is that we have been able to garner substantial support from bird watchers of the city and have in hand a lot of data – hope to put it to good use very soon, the data contains some almost unbelievable reports but with our own sighting of European Roller and Cinnamon Bittern I am inclined to believe anything….
Coming to picture adjacent the aim was to produce just the outline of the body using only a single light – this was successfully achieved by placing the light at 10 O’clock position in both planes. The fair skin of the model helped a lot in this case.
You have seen her before, but I won’t blame you if you do not recognise her. She is one of the very few whose face can almost be sculpted with light to give new looks. Yes, she is Nivedita, who once again agreed to be my muse for an evening…. hopefully I will now onwards see her more often.
The lighting was done using two studio lights the main placed at 7 o’clock and the hair light at full intensity placed diametrically opposite. Shot using the normal lens on D70 at f20 for the great depth needed in these kind of pictures… focused manually to prevent the camera fixating on the cloth in front.
I am not too great a fan of Minimalism when it is applied to painting or philosophy or for that matter most of photography, however when it comes to erotic photography I very much prefer pictures which develop not through stark visual narrative but through visual suggestion. Pictures in which the viewers inscribe their own story in the fertile grounds of their mind’s eye.
True to my own tastes there are several of my photographs where I strive to create a mood, prompt certain themes and concepts in the mind of the viewer by showing less, by association of ideas, by dabbling in erotic ambiguities rather than through a complete picture. In these pictures, because I am operating in the realms of open-imagination I can insinuate the inexplicable or the unmentionable taboos and still get away with it 😉
Judging from the number responses that I get I can safely presume that this kind of photographic art is widely appreciated and from the content of those responses that I have achieved a fair degree of success in taking these pictures.
Yes, there have been detractors who have accused me of pornography or something as opposite and inane as the “pictures do not show enough”! For them all I can say is – Surf on please…
She is Indrani the resident Queen of Indri, Kanha. Named by Uncle Denzel Stephens after the region where she reigns and the English news reader from Radio Sri Lanka of the same name. Seen in the picture are two of the young prince born barely 6 weeks ago!
She embodies in her the resilience to survive despite all odds and the majestic beauty of Indian wildlife at its best. We were fortunate enough to be granted attendance to her court for the royal viewing on Saturday morning, 11th June 2005
So as the Prime Ministers Task Force for Tiger conservation bumbles, stumbles and mumbles along giving importance to everything but the Tigers, the Tigers themselves are doing a great job, Indrani is just one of the three tigresses with a litter in the park. Currently including Indrani’s 4 there are a total of 10 cubs recorded more or less the same age but sadly, lament the conservationist and the naturalist, that it is almost sure that by the age of 15 to 18 months all of them would be dead – mostly gunned down by poachers and listed in records as being killed by other male tigers!!
Aasim has very innocently named the strongest cub “Rex” and hopes that he will see him as the King – I really doubt that he comprehends the irony of his naming of the cub but I do pray that the fate of these cubs is different
The long weekend got over, It went by too fast and I was working half the time and no I did not play holi and yes Aasim did play holi albeit at his grandparents place.
This would be more or less the dull boring summary of past 2½ days BUT I redeemed parts of it by putting my 105mm lens through its steps. I took a wholelot ofinsectmacros and I am fairly pleased with the results for the lens, I do wish that the AF on this would be a bit faster however the pictures are as sharp and as detailed as I would like them to be and at f32 the DoF is reaallly deep – no more thorax out of focus if head is in focus (well almost 😉 ).
Recently I also realised that I know very very little about the several dozen types of butterflies which can be found in and around our garden and have decided to rectify that in the coming weeks.
This lens is N number of other things but it is not a lens for birds, however birds, butterflies and insects around my house do not know this fact and are happy to pose for perfect portraits despite my using the said lens.
In case you have not been looking at the EXIF info at my site, I upgraded to a Nikon D70 sometime last week. After several trial and errors and almost debunking the camera as useless I did manage to take the pic on the left of a Pond Heron basking in the late evening light. When I showed the it to you know who her comment was “Pappu pass ho gaya”
I am waiting to get my TC 20e which right now seems like a needless investment but since I have the budget I might as well, it is not very often that I get to spend money anyways…
After about 2 days I realised that I can take a better (and faster) picture if turned off all the *auto* options, specially if I am shooting through some vegetation.
However I did commit a boo-boo when I shot nearly 40 pictures of a model in the studio only to realise that I had not switched back to auto-focus, needless to say the entire session was a write-off
With much better pictures on the way specially for birds and all the B-lettered creatures I am wondering if I should prune the older ones which were put on line just for record sake? Most likely I will not but I don’t like the clutter either….
Fact: Most women are beautiful.
Fact: Most women do not acknowledge this to themselves.
Result: A very common refrain among all my (amateur?) photographer friends that finding people/women to pose is difficult. That is unless you are a very handsome fellow wherein being a damn good photographer does not matter 😉
Why do all of us have to be slaves to the western concept of beauty?
Indian women are genetically built differently and naturally tend to be more curvaceous, rather to put bluntly hip heavy! Only a small percentage will have stats which fit the correct golden ratio in every manner.
I, an ugly looking runt, experienced success very early but only after I stopped searching for models and started looking at subjects. I saw women as beautiful and made them feel confident enough to consider themselves beautiful, though this is the first time I have been able to put this in words
None of my subjects are professional models or conventionally beautiful (read: someone who would attract wolf whistles as she walks down the street), or now for that matter very young, all of them are 30 years or older.
A more specific example is the gorgeous woman you see here – Nivedita. She is 34, mother of a 10 year old boy, a school teacher, dark skinned. In short you most likely would not look at her twice if you met her and this is not being derogatory to her in any way.
Her pictures however tell another story. In fact some women have confided that this ability to turn on/off the attractiveness is a great asset and I can well imagine
Professional portrait photographers will agree to this – You will be always better off talking to your subject and getting to know her before you being your photo session – Once again every woman unless she has really abused her body into clinical obesity is beautiful and it is up to you as the photographer to demonstrate that – learn to be an empath and soon you will be taking great portraits.
Of course in my case having Swati around helps a lot in many ways and I can rightfully (dear?!) boast that she has been my first successful convert. This was about 14 years ago, when I first took her pictures which we to be sent to prospective grooms, well then that is an entirely different story for some other day…
Oh! In case you have not yet clicked this album has 14 pictures of Nivedita from last Sunday’s shoot and for the technically inclined 3 of them have links to corresponding pictures of the setup used
Am getting bored…. well really bored is a relative term, after a Superb Sunday getting back to the daily drudgery is pulling me down.
Yesterday I woke up late (by our usual standards) and as soon as Aasim left for his tabla class got into the studio and started the setup for some table top photography – the aim was to take a picture very similar to my earlier Garlic but on a white background. A couple of things immediately became clear – Mirror would not work with a white background, I had to be careful about the light fall off effect to prevent the white from turning excessive grey, the contrast had to be much lower and white needs more negative space to look better…
After Garlic I tried some pictures of Roses which turned out all cliched except one – will put that up later.
Once Aasim was back he wanted me to continue with his logo lessons – I finally told him that he could use shorthand notation and he was thrilled with it 🙂
Lunch was a nice mutton curry with zeera rice and rotis lovingly, efficiently and expertly cooked up by Swati (yeah, the maid bunked) in 50 min flat.
Around 2:30 in the afternoon Vivek called up saying that he was coming over in an hour with a friend who would be willing to be the studio subject (I somehow am now not liking the word “model” for the women I photograph) and that he wanted to try out the lights which I had recently acquired and it was implied that I could use his D70.
From 3:30 to 6:00 we tried three different setups. butterfly lighting, modified butterfly lighting and something of a cross between kicker lights and rim lighting. Nivedita, to say the least is an unconventionally beautiful woman….
The experience for me with no puns intended was “Enlightening”
Hmmm… now that I just re-read the above – I do have a reason to want One more Sunday 🙂
P.S. Verdict on lights useless lights fit only for a useless camera like mine
