Moon Rise | Bandipur

Moon rises signalling the end of day and the forest plunges into silent darkness.

Moon Rise | Bandipur

Monsoon Greens
It is always nice to make images once monsoon starts.

An Evening in Kutch. A B&W image from Kutch trip.

Montagu Harrier
This harrier gets its name after the britain naturalist George Montagu ( source wikipedia ). True to its harrier nature it flys low scanning the terrain for potential prey. This is a male montagu harrier. He was quite tolerant about our presence. After making the regular images with clean background at eye level was trying out some approaches to make some different images. A cooperative subject is a prerequisite to try something different in the field. In this scenario moved myself on the ground so that there was some grass between myself and the harrier. The idea here was I wanted to sandwich the harrier between the blur from foreground grass and the background blur.

Naliya Grasslands @ Sunset
A lone chinkara stands amidst glowing grass at sunset. The glowing grass is due to the setting sun at horizon. I wanted to include more of the horizon but could not because I was using prime lens. One of the disadvantages of using prime lens. Nevertheless of all the images I made in Kutch this one is close to my heart and is my favorite from the trip. Happy Diwali Everyone !!!

Here is one more Bhadra backwaters mood in the morning.

Corner of Solace
One of the B&W images from last weekend trip to Nandi hills.

Now and then I like making images in B&W. If you think about it you might agree that B&W somehow has the capacity to take you back in time and remind us of simpler times. BTW in this image there is some dust spot on top right of the frame. Looks like the camera sensor has to go for cleaning :)

Morning Mood @ Bhadra backwaters
Actually this is an image made using the telephoto lens. Saw couple of fishermen rowing towards the otherside of the dam backwaters early in the morning.




Evening Mood @ Bhadra backwaters
Saw thousands of river tern's gliding over the choppy backwaters of Bhadra in the evening. They never seemed to settle down in their roosting site till the sun went down completely. Not sure what is the reason for this behavior. I was in the boat and the group of terns kept going in circles. I wanted to make an image which captured the sense of movement. Made lots of images with the settling sun silhouetting the tern's and on the other side where they were illuminated. Of the lot liked this one. The original raw image has more contrast. As part of processing reduced the contrast till the mood became muted.

"Our Home"

Waiting for Sunrise
Last weekend at Turahalli there were lot of drongos. Common subjects gives more opportunities to try out different things while making images. The rarer the subject becomes there is a tendency to make perfect portrait of the subject and not look beyond.

Moody Morning @ Bannerghata

Caught in Tentacles
Made this at Bannerghata on Sunday. Seemed like an unusual perch for pond heron. Though I had the option to go close decided to step back and include the tree branches which were spreading out like tentacles.

"Woods"
Image inspired by the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.
There was no snow nor it was evening :). The road you see is safari track in BR hills but the above poem is the closest association that came to my mind when i was actually processing the image. I am usually in a dilemma about the processing such images that have some inherent mood in them. Usually worried that my processing will spoil the original mood that was there. Felt in this case the association with the poem helped me set a reference point and gave some alignment about how i should go about post processing this image. The poem itself is from 1922 and in alignment with
that set the image tone to sepia and even left the noise as is to give a matt finish to give an "olden" time look to the image.

Misty Morning @ BR Hills
I just love this image. This is my favorite image from the trip. No processing at all. The moment I saw the water hole being covered with mist I knew if I get the exposure correct then the image will take care of itself. Took multiple shots with different exposures. Was not sure which one would recreate the actual mood. One of them turned out ok. Just converted the raw image to Jpg resized and posted.

The third INW photographers meet is going on at Gir. I had to miss it because of product release reasons :(. In any case Kalyan varma is giving a live commentary on the proceedings here. So while people are shooting at more glamorous locations like Gir I made this image at home today morning after it had just finished raining and when the light was becoming better.

Preserving the Mood
As a part of post processing in Wildlife photography one of the first things we do is increase the contrast. Contrast increase is good for most images and it makes the overall image vibrant. Since the camera renders the image at 18% gray especially when shooting raw the image to start with the image has a muddy look. Contrast increase is what removes the muddy look. We typically use levels or curves to improve contrast. Over time it becomes such a regular practice we end up blindly increasing contrast without bothering about the end result. For the following images I started in the similar direction but I realized after finishing that was not the result I liked in the image in the first place. Let us look at each image seperately

I had made this at pench. I had posted this sometime back. Since it was winter the hoopoe's were coming on to the safari tracks to get the warmth coming from the rising dust generated by passing jeeps. With the dust cloud the visibility was poor and it made the overall scene dull. This essentially was the mood in the image. Increasing the contrast removed the mood.


One more image where I avoided increasing the contrast. The egret was fishing in the evening light. The light was fading. The overall setting was dull. To bring out the same mood in addition to not increasing contrast converted to black and white also.

Some flowers in the morning light. Dont know both their ID's. Again these are fairly common once you step out of the city into the outskirts. But that again is the beauty of morning light. Even common subjects stand out generating a moody feel forcing oneself to stop and take a closer look.

Stachytarpheta Indica
Yes that is the scientific name of this plant :( Really wish there was a common name to remember this plant easily. I see this in large numbers the moment I step out of the city. One thing with them is they have stems with just violet flowers with no leaves on the stem. I have always felt it should be possible to make interesting images with them. Last weekend in Valley school got some time to experiment in the morning light. The following images are the same it is just that they have been processed differently.

This is based on the usual processing steps. Improve the contrast to remove the muddy look from the unprocessed image and then apply sharpening. Though it looks good does not convey the mood what I was seeing.


Like this better. Instead of applying curve to increase contrast used the inverted S-curve to make the image look even more flatter. I like the shades of violet partly in focus and partly not in focus in a misty setting.


Blogger's resized image in the thumbnail does not look great :( Click on the image to see the bigger version.

Suspended
It has been raining and the thick clouds was a good setting to make some images. Usually when sky is used as back drop the contrast between the sky and the subject is high. The digital sensor usually cannot accommodate this tonal range. To workaround this one option is used to use neutral density filters to reduce the contrast between sky and the subject or use flash to handle this scenario. In this case I had used flash. So now the sky is exposed using natural light and the plant is exposed using the light from the flash. Without flash in this scenario the subject would appear dark as a silhouette. When I looked at the plant against the sky it had a painting feel so to retain the mood did not sharpen the subject.


Another variation. Realizing the importance of a solid tripod. The lens is not a image stabilized lens and because the subject is close even a small shake gets magnified.