White Balance : HJKL

White Balance is something that defines a picture. The human eye is very versatile when it comes to adjusting to the lighting conditions. You can actually try this out to get what I am saying. Take a red cloth and cover a window (during the day) with it. Now make sure that one eye has the red glowing (from the light from the window) cloth in it's background and the other doesn't. Now see a white sheet of paper (or even a visiting card) placed right in front of your face, about a foot away. Now look at it from one eye, and then with the other. If done correctly, you should see the same piece of paper in two different colors. The camera on the other hand cannot adjust that well. I have realized that pictures clicked under white light have a tendency to be cooler than you want them to be. I am really lazy when it comes to post processing, and prefer to leave most of my snaps untouched, unless it's a shot (not a snap) and prefer to tinker with the white balance on the camera itself. For eg, when clicking under white light, I make the picture a bit warmer by setting the WB to 'Flash'. This one though is warmer by virtue of post processing.

Show me the money.

It's been a while since I bought my 50mm (f/1.8) prime lens, and fell in love with it. The love for bokeh has finally worn off, though I am forced to keep the aperture wide open to take advantage of the fast lens. Anyway I leave you with one of my early pictures using the lens. It was a cloudy day and I sprinkled some water over the leaves for special effect.

Steady, steady.

A tripod is an essential piece of accessory in a photographers kit. I have often had difficulties clicking pictures in low light, but have figured out ways to keep the camera steady. If you are clicking pics with exposure times over a second, it is essential to take care of the shake caused, when you click the shutter release. An easy way to avoid that is to use the timer option of the camera. When set at a 2 sec timer, you have a good two seconds to click the button, and get a good grip of the camera before the picture is clicked. Also, if you are clicking pictures with exposure times of around the one second mark, the vibration caused by the mirror would also be a cause of concern, especially if you don't have a lens (or in rear cases even a camera) with vibration reduction. And for this you can use a feature called "Mirror Lockup", which I was kinda surprised to find hidden in my camera as well. What this does is, it locks up the mirror well before the image is actually captured. This way there is no mechanical movement when the image is actually clicked. The Live View option of your camera could also be used to solve this problem, but for some reason, it just doesn't do it for me. Anyway, I leave you with two images, both derivatives of the same picture. One slightly touched up, and the other a highly touched up picture, the result of an exploration session of the Adobe's Lightroom.

Waiting for the rains

Here's another picture, which could have been better, but unfortunately isn't. Though I did get to learn new things clicking this one. I faced one of those situations where there was too much light in the background, and too little illuminating the subject. This is where the in-built flash came in. However, with the solution came another problem. The shutter speed went down to 1/200 th of a second. With the ISO as low as I could take it, and the shutter-speed s fast as it could be, I was forced to play with the aperture, thus increasing the depth of field. Lesson learnt, I think, I am gonna invest in a neutral density filter.

Introduction - Let there be light

Well, I've always wanted to have a photo blog, but I never really had a camera that could click half decent pictures. So now that I have bought a DSLR (a Canon 550D, with the 18-55 kit), I thought it was finally time to start my very own photo stream. So here I am, clicking and publishing anything and everything. Well okay, maybe not everything, but I do intend to upload a lot of crappy clicks, and to prove my point, I leave you with a picture of a bulb clicked in broad daylight.