A morning on the hill....

Last time when I had been to Nandi Hills (couple of years back I guess!) the garden around the bungalow had attracted me a lot. It was so fresh. I dint had camera then. So whenever I wanted to make some macros or close up photography of flower I always remembered that place. Because of some or the other reasons I could not visit that place for a long time.
Last weekend I was fortunate enough to freeze my plan and sticking to it! :) It was a fantastic day out there. I was sorry for my friend Prashant who drove all the way long to the hill top just to realise that he had kept the only memory card of his camera back at home!
The morning was misty and the sun slowly started peeping behind the clouds as the time went by. Got some good opportunities to make some images which I always wanted to make.


The morning mist had saturated the colors very well and everything was looking so fresh and colorful. I tried out some images of some patterns. Below are couple of them. Even though both look slightly similar, for me they both convey slightly different feel. The first one is more intense in the dark colors and because of that the greens on the edges very prominently stand out, imparting an intense mood through the image. Whereas the second one has more elements and because of its relatively lesser darker region, the mood is somewhat pleasant. just my feel.... taste buds differ! :)





As the Sun started peeping out got some unique lighting opportunity. The flowers were looking so fantastic when the mist was cleared.


After some more experimentations I called it a day. After a long time I had a real fantastic morning!


Hope to spend some more mornings there...

Cheers,
Ash

My experiments with Light!!

Photography is all about controlling light! How much you have the control on it hat much you will have the control on the result that you get. In the cases where we cannot have the control on the incident light, like when we will be shooting in the open area with a cloudy dull sky where we cannot do much other than praying for good light(!), we will stand helpless! But to shoot certain things the same dull light comes very handy to conduct some experiments and get some good results.

  On a weekend in Hesaraghatta Lake area, it was totally cloudy when we landed and light was very dull! The last day I was planning to spend some time in the experimentation with external light source such as torch! Though I dont have a very bright torch, I had decided with whatever I have. So when I landed there I was in search of a suitable subject on which I can start my experiments! Bingo! Only after a few minutes I found a mashroom with a thin and semitransparent skin! I was delighted! Below are the series of images with the explanation on what I tried to do and what I got. You are the best judge to say which one worked and which one are not!

The below image is a plain as is - without any flash or external light source.

 As I said to me it looks 'plain'! Nothing more than that! 

  So decided to lit the subject from sidewise and held the LED torch from the top left corner and you can see the result below- 

 As this looked interesting I got curious to tryout further. The next attempt was to illuminate the subject completely from sideways. Below is how that looks - 

The soft bluish glow that the LED light created gave a very soothing feeling.

The next attempt was to make the subject backlit! I held the torch such that the semitransparent nature of its skin becomes evident and gives a total different view. Here it is -

 So... the same subject, handled in different ways, depending on light the mood that the image imparts changes from angle to angle! 

  Below is another image where the side of the grass blade was purposefully illuminated using the LED and that gave a different feel to the image.

  Another attempt is below where I used three light sources to illuminate this tiny bud from different angles. One from left, one from right and I used a white paper as diffuser to diffuse the light from the flash. Thanks to my friend Pramod S V who suggested the use of white sheet and thanks to him and Naga who held the torches to make this below image.

..... and here are the equipments that I used to make the above image... :-)

  It was a very good learning for me over the two weekends. This is not anything very new or groundbreaking theory that I discovered! Its just my version of it. Many people have tried this globally and our own Ganesh H S has done some remarkable images using this technique. You can find a related article written by him on this topic HERE.

   One thing that I am learning over the time in photography is we should never hesitate to experiment in the field. 

After all photography is not just about 'taking the images', for me its all about 'making the images'.

Cheers,

Ash