Nothing to say...

....just sit and watch in peace...

Stolen joke #1

(Well aren't they all stolen?)

A photographer goes to his friends house for a party, and decides to bring along his camera. He takes a bunch of photos, and then a few days later he prints them out. His friend’s wife, who hosted the party, calls him up and thanks him for his photos saying, “The photos are so great you must have an amazing camera.”

The photographer’s annoyed, but he doesn’t say anything to her about it.

That next weekend he’s over at his friends house again for dinner. As his friend’s wife is clearing the table he looks at her and says, “Dinner was excellent, you must have some amazing pots and pans!”

I got this one from one of the comments posted on this article

More bananas!

The banana tree seems to be producing bananas non-stop. Every other day I go check it out and there is another bunch of flowers blossoming that would eventually bear fruit. I'm not counting my bananas before they are ripe though.

Random facts about a Banana tree....one tree produces only 1 set of bananas in it lifetime. After bearing fruits, the stem that produced the bananas dies and is replaced by one or more stalks.

I can already see 3 more banana trees coming up from the ground! Makes me wonder whether I should have planted this a bit farther away from the wall....

A more technical explanation can be found here

Expired medicine is not always a bad thing...

One of the piglets has a fever and bodyache. Looking through the medicine cabinet, earlier this afternoon, I found 2 bottles of ibuprofen and 1 strip of acetaminophen that were past their expiry date by a few months.

Bad thing? Need something on a rush, you don't have it (Luckily, had one strip that was just a month away from expiring)

Good thing? Well, might be a waste of money....but not having to use it so much so that it expires? I wouldn't mind spending a few bucks on that anytime instead of having to use all of it!!!

*Touch wood*

(35mm f/1.8, 1/40sec, iso400)

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)

Candle holder lady, meet my 35mm af-s. 35mm af-s, meet my Candle holder lady.

Got my Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 AF-S lens a few days back. I'm thoroughly impressed with it. I did not realize how much difference a f/1.8 makes when compared to a f/3.5. Here's a typical, really blurred out background. In this case, the candle holder lady is just a couple of feet away from the most comfortable recliner in the whole wide world.

I have been using this as my primary lens these days. I'm not sure how it would fare when used for landscape and nature photography. Might take it out for a shoot one of these days. It has been a long time since I've been on an outdoor photo shoot.

Family and work priorities have taken up most of my time but that is an excuse in the best sense. I can always make time to do what I really want to do. I still play tennis for a couple of hours every weekend. There is no reason why I cannot find an hour during dawn or dusk (more likely dawn) to go do some shooting.

Long time no see!

It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog....almost 6 months! I hope to start posting regularly starting this week. Let's see how it goes!

The candle holder lady

This our candle holder lady. I had gotten her from the dollar shop a couple of years back. Since then she has been standing on our mantle with her bouquet of flowers. Pretty isn't she? She has been lit may be twice since we had her. She surely looks pretty when lit up!

Guest in our bathroom

We had a guest in our bathroom the other night. I was ready to take a shower and find this guy on the bathroom sink. He was bright green in color. I really wanted to take his pic at that time but I was all undressed and the camera was in the other room.

By the time I was done with my shower and had grabbed my camera, he had changed colors! The guest you see in the pic looked bright green in color may be 15 minutes before I took this pic of him!

My wifey is way too scared of anything that crawls or moves or flies that is not human or machine (I think I covered all the exceptions to her scare list). Hence, after I dressed up, my first task was to take this guest out but I did not feel like killing it....afterall he was the subject of my photograph. So, I took a inverted plastic cup and a paper plate to scope him in the cup and let him go out in the lawn. He seemed kinda slow though....probably was his hibernation period?

Muhuhuahahaa...Dirty laundry is haunting me!

The basket full of clothes to be washed was lying on the table waiting for me to pickup and put in the washer. Snapped this pic while zooming our the lens to give the effect of..of...umm.....the basket actually haunting me in my dreams...."Come....Wash me.....now"

On that topic, I find that ad about the GE Washer Dryer very irritating "6 Months of laundry can be a scary thing" In this ad there is this huge ball of laundry chasing the family around and then finally the washer comes to the rescue. The biggest selling point they focus on is that the washer comes with a reservoir that can hold up to 6 months of laundry detergent!!

Big deal, if pouring the detergent was the suckiest part of doing laundry, I would have been washing clothes all day!!!!

My attempt at HDR imaging

This is also at the park...just a grill. Took two exposures, one at f/22 for 1/140s and the other at f/22 at 1/10 sec. Both at ISO 400, 18-55 at 18mm. Then used HDR editing software to blend the two together. Looks kinda surreal, doesn't it?

Phillipe Park

I was at the corner of this road to the right taking my pics of the rising sun. Looking at this pic, it shows how beautiful the eary morning light really is. If I take the same pic around 60 mins later, it will look bleh but this one, I really like. It actually looks like early morning (it might pass as a late evening too)

(18-55 at 55mm, f/22, 1/3s, ISO 100)

And here's the same one in portrait. In this case I like this one better than the landscape. It seems to visualize the beautiful morning sky a lot better than the landscape version. Thoughts?

(18-55 at 55mm, f/22, 1/30s, ISO 100)

Portrait v/s Landscape - part 2

Same day, slightly different location, around 30 mins after sunrise. Here's a pic in landscape....
(18-55 at 55mm, f/22, 1/20s, ISO 100)

Oooh how I wish I was in the boat instead of that guy in the left! This boat was circling around the bay that morning. If they were on the job I would like to have that job...especially if it pays well!!

(55-200 at 200mm, f/29, 1/60s, ISO 400)

Same view but a different perspective. I'm not sure which one I like better. Most of the landscape pics I have seen have been in well...umm... landscape orientation however this and other pics I took on this morning seemed to look very good in portraits too.

(18-55 at 55mm, f/22, 1/13s, ISO 100)

Here is the original version of the pic.

It was a very beautiful view of the sunrise. The weather was also very lovely. These days are the best days to be in Florida. If you ever decide to visit Florida, do so between November and February (or March).

We have a few chilly days when the temperatures do stay in the 35 - 45 range but other days its in the 50 to 70 range all through these months. I think this day it was around 55 in the morning. I was out there in my shorts and wished I had worn my trousers instead.

(18-55 at 18mm, f/22, 1/13s, ISO 100)

The dawn of a new year....

The morning of January 1st 2009. I was up almost all night on the 31st so I decided to make the most out of it and head out for some early morning photo shoots. It wasn't all that early a morning but then these days the sun rises at around 7:30'ish. I left home almost around 7:00 AM.

I headed out to go to Phillipe Park in Safety Harbor, FL. This park is about 6 miles from home. I don't know why I don't come here more often. I have come here for a couple of birthday parties but both of them have been in shelters that are away from the water. Once I've been here just to hang around but it was a chilly day and we did not stay around long enough to enjoy the views.

It's a beautiful little park with lots of walking and jogging trails and some beautiful views of the upper Tampa Bay. I've heard that you can also see manatees swimming it the bay if you are here at the right time.

About the pic - It has been cropped a lot to highlight the sunrise. I'll post the original pic in the subsequent posts. I think this was my first ever sunrise photo shoot. I have not been a morning person in the past however since the past 4-5 months, I have been up by 6:00 AM almost every weekend.