Cycling along the tree lined roads of rural Normandy

I took this pic of my friend Moi on a cycling trip in Normandy. I’m quite proud of the composition in this pic  The road narrows into the distance in the centre; the left part of the pic has a slightly dramatic band of leafless deciduous trees and Moi strikes a pose on the right on his cycle.  A group of us on a daytrip to Normandy hired bicycles at Bayeux (of the tapestry fame) to cycle down to the D-Day Beaches. We loved cycling in the quiet rustic tree-lined roads of the rural French countryside. We visited Omaha beach and the US War cemetery that features in the Speilberg movie Saving Private Ryan. We later calculated using maps that we must have cycled 50-60km that day as we avoided the busy (and very dangerous to neophyte cyclists) expressway and took the meandering countryside roads instead. Of course we paid for it by hobbling around our hostel for the next two days

The lovely waterways of Brugge

Brugge in Belgium is one of the loveliest towns I have visited. It’s definitely on my “must visit again” list. The town has a medieval europe flavor and draws mostly european daytrippers. It has not yet entered most european tour itineraries in India & the east. Marketed sometimes as the Venice of the North, Brugge is full of quiet canals & waterways that are brilliantly lit up in the night. Brugge used to be the primary port of northern europe and had warehouses and merchanthouses lining these canals servicing ships from 1100 AD to 1500AD. The channel that connected Brugge to the sea silted up after that however & the coastline moved away to where currently the modern seaport of Zeebrugge is located. The bellfry of its curch – lit in orange in the second picturue is the town’s most distinctive feature

Old Pilgrim taking a dip in Mukteshwara Temple’s tank – Bhubaneshwar

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Mukteshwara temple in Bhubhaneshwar is an exquisitely carved and pictueresque small Oriya temple.  It’s compactness almost makes it look like a perfect toy temple. The site is protected by Archeological Survey of India. I noticed this old pilgrim taking a dip in the in the small tank behind the temple. Taken with a HTC camera phone

Chateau D’lf off Marseilles coast

This is a pic of the prison island Chateau D’lf as seen from the sea. It was taken by my friend Chaityana as we travelled by boat to another island off Marseilles. The island prison made famous by The Count of Monte Cristo is also visible in the previous picture I posted here. We were not able to land on the islands as the water was deemed to be too choppy to safely land tourists.

Statue of Jesus and Mary overlooking Chateau D’lf – Marseilles

I saw this expressive stature of Mary and Jesus at Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseilles. This church is atop a hill overlooking the harbor and is dedicated to “Our lady of the Watch” – the traditional guardian of seafarers. The church with its gilded statue of Mary and Infant Jesus dominates the skyline of Marseilles. Its interiors are covered with offerrings from devotees – most prominently model ships. 

The island barely visible in the background is Chateau D’lf – the island prison made famous in the Alexandre Dumas’ novel – The Count of Monte Cristo. You can visit the old island prison by boat on days when the water in the bay is not choppy.

The Car the lady and the tree

I liked the framing I was able to get in this pic – three different subjects at different distances from the camera occupying different parts of the scene.

A Green residential street in mumbai

 

Took this pic of the street in front of my house in a Mumbai residential suburb with the DSLR. Was fairly surprised at how much greenery there is in the concrete jungle of Mumbai. In the top left part of the pic, you might be able to see building with white streaks all over it. These ugly streaks are almost a signature of housing societies in Mumbai. The streaks are from a treatment given to small cracks that let water seep in during the heavy monsoons rains. I’ve never understood why the societies don’t get the walls painted after the treatment.

A Dummies guide to Photographic Mumbo-Jumbo…… and why you need to know it.

I have always been puzzled by the multiplicity of numbers “Photographers” spew out when asked how they took a photo – “I took this pic at a exposure 1/30 sec and 5.6f using an ISO of 400″ . Of course, as I can’t let my macho “Knows Photography”  image suffer, I nod intelligently and change the topic . 

When I have to take a difficult pic without flash indoors or at night (to capture the scene’s own lighting), I make a show of setting the manual mode on the Digicam, twiddling various knobs and buttons which change these numbers……….. and end up with an image that is shaken or is too dark

I got hold of a friend’s DSLR camera yesterday & decided to end my ignorance once and for all I made a score of indoor shots of this vase with fake pink flowers among other things. Here’s what i learnt - 

The pic on the right is shot in “Auto” mode. The camera fires off the flash because there’s not enough light in the room to get a good pic. The result is a bright image – but one in which the vase looks very “flattened”. This is because the scene is being blasted by a lot of light from quite close. The soft light and shadow areas that form in diffuse indoor lighting and create an effect of depth get lost. With the flash, sharp shadows of the object also fall on the wall if it’s close behind as in the pic above.

Getting a good indoor or night image without flash is relatively easy if you’re willing to lug around and whip out a tripod everytime you shoot pics. However, if you’re with a group, such behavior would usually be deemed extremely anti-social Getting a good pic without getting booed for the tripod involves understanding & manipulating those Exposure, f number & ISO settings

Exposure is how long the camera allows light to fall on the digital camera’s sensor – usually expressed in fractions of a second. When there’s less light in the scene, the camera needs longer to collect enough light for a bright pic. However, the longer the exposure – the more likely it is that your hands will shake & blur the image. This phenomenon is largely statistical in nature apparantly & how “steady” you are with the camera has little bearing on it. Unless you have a good image stabilizer function in the camera or lens, odds are 50-50 that exposures longer than 1/30 of a second will have shake. Learn more about this here.

The f number indicates how large is the hole (aperture) through which light falls on the sensor. Larger apertures (represented paradoxically by smaller f numbers) let more light fall on the sensor. Aperture Size also determines something called depth of field – this is how much of the scene in front & behind your main subject is also in focus. This becomes very important if you are taking close up shots.

You may have guessed by now that in the Auto mode,  the camera senses how much light is it getting from the scene and adjusts the f number & exposure time automatically for a satisfactorially bright & non-shaken image. It turns on the flash if it finds that the exposure time even with the largest aperture is too long to avoid your hands shaking. That’s why you end up with either shaken or too dark images if you turn off the flash manually and shoot.

The way around this is to play with the ISO setting. The ISO number defines how sensitive the sensor is to light – higher numbers mean more sensitive. The more sensitive the sensor, the faster it can collect enough light to get a satisfactory image. Normally, cameras shoot at ISO 200 or at most at 400. If you set a higher ISO, you can use a shorter exposure time. 

Thus, I shot the left hand image in natural ambient light of the room – by pushing up ISO to the 1600 setting. This allowed me to use an exposure time of 1/10 of a second at the largest aperture – giving reasonable odds of getting a non-shaken image. I use the manual P mode which allows you to choose between different combinations of f numbers & exposure times. The higher ISOs however can also make a picture look somewhat grainy as in my pic above.

So that’s what you need to know about photographic mumbo-jumbo  :-)

Millet fields in Laddakh

I came across many millet fields while trekking in Laddakh. Millet is the chief grain crop of Laddakhis. They cultivate it in the summer, irrigating their fields with meltwater from the mountain glaciers. The meltwater is brought down to the valleys by a series of irrigation channels, dug over centuries and painstakingly maintained. The person tasked with overseeing the irrigation system enjoys considerable importance in the village

The Flowery Ashtray

I noticed yellow flowers growing in a crevice in the limestone hill across from Acropolis in Athens. Looking closer, I found cigarette butts stubbed into the grass growing in the crevice. I was intrigued by this contrast.