Archive for the ‘ 365 Project ’ Category

24. Fruit of Wisdom

While randomly wandering down the thinking lane I suddenly got this idea. I thought of what could be inside a human mind (Philosphically). And somehow I connected the story of Adam eating the apple and gaining wisdom to what is inside the mind- An Apple.

Initially I thought of capturing a side-silhouette of a person as it would be easy to post-process.

But after transferring my images to laptop I found this image better for the purpose.

After a lot of work in Photoshop I got a nice result

23. Fire Inside

I tried to keep eyes sharp and it was not easy. It was lit from above with a torch.

Some other shots:

Selected shot:

I was appearing a little bit congested so I added some more black background in post-processing.

Final photograph:

22. The Magician

21. Dilemma

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”    

~Elliott Erwitt

This photograph originated from a sequence of events which  led each-other to finally emerge as a photograph.

I was doing photography to cover an event when I noticed some wooden rectangles which were framing people to give them a separate space of themselves. I took some shots and looked for some other similar framings. That is when I noticed this gate. I observed it for nearly 20 mins and then took 1 trial photograph.

After this I decided to make  better use of it and asked a girl to stand at the gate.

I noticed the glow around the edges of the girl. It was due to the difference in the light intensity on opposite sides of the gate. Light was more intense inside than outside. I decided to make use of it and even exaggerate it. So I switched off some lights on the outer side.

Now to take the photograph to next level I had to decide on what I want to highlight in this photograph. After some thinking I decided on showing it as some kind of dilemma of  ‘to enter or not’ . I switched off some more lights but had to change the model as the girl got busy.

I tried various poses and positions as I had no idea how to depict ‘dilemma’ of taking a decision. Again change of model as this boy also left.

I wanted to try more but the lights had to be switched on. After analyzing all my shots I shortlisted the above one to edit.

 

20. Coffee shack

In the series of my HDR images, I tried taking HDR without sunset. HDR photographs generally have bright colors and huge details. So I decided to shoot one of my favourite places: Coffee Shack of IIT Bombay, as its colors are very vibrant and I like its hut shaped structure.

As usual I started with a trial photograph with a quick understanding of the place.

The lights were very low as it was nearly 6:00 PM. I liked this view of the hut but din’t like the gutter cover. So I decided to change my position to a closer point.

Now the hut was looking slightly disproportionate, so I slightly changed my angle.

This frame looked nice to me, so I fixed my tripod and shot 6 photographs at different exposures. They were merged by using Photoshop HDR pro to get and HDR image. I tried using Photomatrix ( a separate software which specializes in making HDRs ) but couldn’t get the hang of it. I am still not able to create HDRs as I see on internet but I have improved.

19. Bouquet

Another smoke photography result but this time  I left a little smoke in the background to make it feel like real smoke.

 

18. Smoke Bath

Building on my experience of capturing smoke I tried to shoot some real-life situations. I used torch to light the smoke.

1. The background light was disturbing

2. Smoke was not well-lit

3. The expressions on the face were interesting.

4. Black and white medium would look better

5. No focus on the subject

Did some editing in photoshop like making the background black, sharpening and some increase in contrast.

Final result is:

17. My body is a cage

This photograph is inspired from the song “My body is a cage” by Arcade Fire. The technique to take this kind of photograph is simple. The lights should be  behind the subject and a semi-transparent cloth. I got an added advantage that the cloth I used had an inbuilt texture in it.

This was the initial shot. The major problem I observed was the intensity of light source. Other thing which could be improved was that area of contact of hands and cloth.  So, I increased the light intensity and ask the model to apply pressure only on the selected parts.

16. Not so clean air

I am doing some more experiments with smoke like trying white background( in Photoshop) , using flash and spending time refining my skills. I shall write a more descriptive blog post about it soon.

15. Sunset at IIT Bombay

Its a HDR panorama.

I made HDRs of individual elements and merge them to make a panorama.

Photographs at different exposure of Sunset part

Sunset HDR

Photographs at different exposure of Main Building part

HDR of Main building

Final photograph

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