Bananarama Reloaded.....

Retook the pics again this morning. This time with a 55-200 lense to create a background blur without opening the aperture too wide.

Also sprayed some water on the banana tree in an attempt to create a subtle "just after the rain" effect. These pictures have come really sharp, especially because of the iso 100 and the tripod!

(55-200 at 55mm, f/4, 1/20sec at iso100)

(55-200 at 55mm, f/11, 1/15sec at iso200)

Bananarama - Yippee ka ye - The bananas are here!

I planted this banana tree over two years back. We haven't been paying much attention to it lately since it's in the front yard and is out of sight most of the time. Rarely do we water it....the only water it gets is from the rains, although banana trees require a lot of water to grow well. The only sunlight it gets, well, is from the sun. I have fertilized it probably twice in the last two years.

So, it was a a very nice surprise to see bananas on this tree today. Dad told me about it in the morning and I couldn't wait until evening to go check them out. They look so cute and tiny. So many little teeny weeny bananas....awwwww.

I took my camera and tripod out to bananarama this evening to snap some pics. It was only after I uploaded the pics on my PC earlier tonite did I notice the noisiness of the pics. I had set the camera on iso1600 a couple of days back and did not notice until today. I may go out tomorrow and take some better pics of the baby bananas.



(35mm at f/14, 1/13 sec, iso1600)

Have you ever shopped at anazib.com?

How about anazob.com?

Today, I fat fingered (or rather misfingered) Amazon.com and typed anazib.com. Rather than luckily bumping into some porn site, I was taken straight to Amazon.com

Either the developers at Amazon.com are very familiar with fat-fingering and registered these fat-finger domains in order to help fellow fat-fingerers like me.....or...well, they fat-fingered while registering their domain :)

Yeah yeah, I get it, most of them register these kinds of domains to avoid cyber-squatters from taking advantage of them but I was pleasantly amused to see my fat-fingering corrected and sent to where my lean fingers were supposed to take me!

(Is there a record for highest number of references to fat fingering in one blog post??)

(Yeah those are my fingers and my nails and I bite them...so bite me!)

(35mm, f/1.8, 1/400s, ISO 1600)
(I just realized after looking at the hi-res pics that I was shooting at iso1600....no wonder the pic is so noisy!)

I have been taking a lot of pictures...

I have been clicking a lot of pics lately. Over the last weekend, I've probably taken around 200 pics. Out of those, around 25 have come out really good! I think that is a very good strike rate. I have been shooting in full manual mode, with an off-camera flash mounted on a tripod with a shoot-through umbrella.

However, I cannot post any of them here. Almost all of them are photos of people in my life. As a rule, I won't be posting any personal pictures on here (A random guy on the street corner is a different thing....but I have not been shooting outdoors).

I would like to thank the strobist for inspiring me to take the flash off the camera. I really love his website http://www.strobist.com If anyone wants to learn how to light with basic equipment, one must spend some time on his website (that "some" time can very easily change to a big black hole sucking all your time....so just be careful :))

So....what's keeping me busy, really??

Answer's to the right....our twins! May be it should have been a picture with two bottles in the foreground and a couple of boxes of diapers in the background.....but one gets the gist.

And then I check out Ken Rockwell's website. Given, he is a professional photographer and shoots for a living (although I think his website gets in a huge chunk of his overall earning). He has two small kids (yeah, it's mentioned on the bottom of every page on his website - about his growing family). If he can shoot 8 hours or more a day, I should be able to shoot a few minutes.

It's not the time to shoot though. It's the inclination needed to get out of the house and roam around looking for things to shoot. Don't get me wrong, photographs are everywhere. But, the view from my porch is just that - a view from the porch today, a view from the porch tomorrow, a view from the porch a day after. I need to get out! No...it's raining (20%) ....no...I need to cook today (10%) ....no, I need to exercise (0.003%)....no, I need to laze off a bit (69.997%).

(35mm at f/1.8, 1/30 sec, iso800)