The Art of Seeing

Here's a cool site filled with nice free Photoshop plugins. Do you hear people talking about Photoshop as the Digital Darkroom. Well, here's one reason why.

The sky grad filter plugin available in the site produces nice effects like below. To otherwise accomplish something like this would need several varieties of quite exotic filters.

This is a local church just a few blocks from my home. Taken at night, rebel ti, velvia, tokina 19-35mm zoom, tripod. This is one of the few night shots I have done.

New England's weather is becoming nastier by the minute. Cold, Rain are the precursors to sleet, snow, hail and general misery for another 8 months. It also means fewer chances to go outside for photos. Here's one taken cooped up inside my apartment. I like the abstract pattern. The unreal colors are produced because I accidently shot a few pictures with tungsten white balance. At the end I liked these pics more than the one taken with the correct white balance. Canon 20D, Canon 100mm macro, Tripod, f/22.

Had a spectacular lunar eclipse show last night.. But my $%#^% 500mm
Mirror lens on D70 images did not turn out well.. so.. here is a image taken using
nikon 80-200mm f/2.8/handheld before that.. Check this link for info about moon marks..

camera is up for sale.tears...

Velvia is wonderful to use. The bright rich colors it produces is hard to duplicate with a digital camera. So when I came across this article I was eager to try it out. It is very simple.

Select Image->Adjustments->Channel Mixer.
For Red Channel, choose +120% for Red, -10% for Greeen, -10% Blue (Total 100%)
For Green Channel, choose -10% for Red, +120% Green, -10% for Blue, (Total 100%)
For Blue Channel, choose -10% for Red, -10% Green, +120% for Blue (Total 100%)

Voila!

Note: You can increase the strengths of the adjustments, making sure you total 100% total. See effects below.

Someone once said that if many monkeys were left alone with a typewriter after banging it long enough one of them would produce a work like shakespeare's. I just wonder if they can do the same given a camera become Ansel Adams. :-)

Taken at Singapore's Tiger Balm Gardens, Rebel Ti, Canon 100mm macro, Velvia.

Saw this tiny guy on a grimy window.. Picture taken using Nikon D70 + Sigma 105mm Macro at 1:1 stacked with Nikon 50mm f/1.4 reversed. The magnification is about 2:1. Applied unsharp mask and curves in PS.

Adobe calls it the Digital Negative Format DNG. They describe it as "the
public, archival format for digital camera raw data". This format is a
industry wide standard Adobe is pushing digital camera manufacturer's
to use in their cameras instead of their own proprietary RAW, CR2, NEF
format. The rationale behind this is of course that a common format
has a better chance of surviving for many many years than a non
standard camera manufacturer specific RAW format. Photographers would
be more secure storing their data as DNG rather than some RAW file. I
can clearly see that things Adobe pushes as becoming popular quickly.
So this is something to keep an eye out for.

Also note that Adobe offers a free standalone tool that can convert
any existing RAW file into a DNG file. Anyone planning a long time
digital archival strategy for their invaluable photographs should take
a hard look at this.

Look at this. I was driving with my family to mysore when I noticed this scene. It hurt my eyes literally! My only greivance is...this happens to be the only snap that I shot of the area. Handheld, 35 Mm Kodak Negative, Nikon N65.

Glad to be here..
I stumbled into photography a couple of years ago and I never have let go of it.

Equipment I use
Bodies
Nikon F80 35mm
Nikon N65 35mm
Bronica 'C' 6x6 Medium Format

Lenses
Nikon 28-200 3.5-5.6D
Nikon 28-80mm G
Sigma 28-90 3.5-5.6Macro

Bogen Junior Professional Tripod, and bunch of other little stuff.

More updates soon...

This was one of my earlier attempts at macro photgraphy. [F80 with 28-105mm in
macro mode using Velvia 50]. Come to think of it, that 28-105mm nikon lens is
pretty good for a zoom and does quite decent macros..ofcourse, no match for
a true macro lens. I did get a 105 mm macro lens later.

This was a fun picture to take. A shot using my 20D with the 100mm macro lens. This is a simple toy which has bluish liquid floating in water and it tumbles out and moves over these slides when it moves from top to bottom. Some colors removed in photoshop.

I shot this image at twilight using Nikon N80 28-105mm Nikkor lens @ 28mm using Fuji Velvia 50.
Velvia has a tendency to color shift under low light conditions on long exposure. In fact magenta filters are used to compensate for the color shift. But, Velvia 100 and Provia 100 do not have this problem. I liked the effect when I got the slides back :)
As so many have said before, there is nothing like Velvia :)

Here is one of my first outdoor shots with the 20D. Since I didn't have a Grad Neutral density filter, I shot two shots of the same scene once exposed for the foreground and once for the background. They were merged in Photoshop and then changed to B&W (plan to add an article about this at some point). I like the results.

Ok, Lots of things happened.

First, the site has been moved from photography.thezeal.com to www.thezeal.com/photography. This shouldn't affect anyone, since there are redirect scripts that should redirect people automatically. These redirects would be around forever. Why the change? Mainly because there was no stats information when the site was hosted as a subdomain.

Second, well I have taken the digital plunge. Got the Canon 20D. Quite Nice! Very fun to use so far and a great tool to learn as you get instant feedback. The image quality has been excellent. Look at this full sized jpeg from the camera. Pendant.jpg Warning 2.5 MB download. This was taken with the Canon Macro 100mm @ISO 100. Very smooth.

Third, once again an update to the links page. Changed the script. Check it out. You can even rate how good each link is. How cool is that ;-)

Fourth, made the entire site powered by blogger and almost into a photoblog. After using HTML and every other solution inbetween, I have given up. I think this is far easier to use and maintain. Also only this way will the banana, err I meant Anis update the site.