The Elephant Parade : Mumbai 2018

With the novel objective of raising awareness for elephant corridors across the country, The Elephant Parade India arrived at Mumbai this month.
Along came exquisitely designed and painted elephant replicas, each having an interesting story to its own. Apart from being an awareness raising tool, it is also an amazing means to showcase the artist’s expertise and talent. I met with the following elephants at the Phoenix Marketcity at Lower Parel. The elephants shall be on display in various locations within the city and details can be found here.

Iridescent Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

Black Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

Blue Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

Black Shiny Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

Brown Exotic Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

Green Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

Black Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

Forest Elephant from Elephant Parade, Mumbai

These beautiful elephants are also available for sale using the website mentioned earlier. It is my recommendation that you go and have a look at these elephants as and when possible.

As a note to my readers who may be in Mumbai from 14-18 March, a set of these exquisite elephants shall be at the Bandra Fort during the above mentioned days. The opportunity to capture stunning photos is quite an unique one.

A trick to reduce the influence of crowds on the photo is to have a long exposure. The elephants being stable are sharp while the crowd fades away due to them moving swiftly. In case there are posey people in front of the elephants, they shall show up.  There shall be ghosting, for sure. This is the minimum hassle method to obtain a clear picture. Drawback being it can be used only when you can shoot a long exposure, meaning, day time shots are not possible. For the daytime shots, you can set your tripod and take a series of shots and then use the “Median” command in Photoshop to eliminate the crowd. Ghosting shall be minimal.

Go have fun, use a different technique and share your results in the comments below.

Cheers!!

 

AtoZ Challenge: D – Double Exposure

Double Exposure

The origin of this interesting bit of art probably occured when someone, while shooting film, forgot to forward the roll to the next empty slot. As they shot, the already exposed negative got re-exposed and the photos superimposed creating something interesting and Voila! double exposure is born.
Now a days, we dont need to fiddle with the films, maybe just a bit in the digital darkrooms to get ourselves a nice double exposure photo. Some cameras and apps on phones allow you to take amazing double exposure shots.

Bike, Open Roads, Double Exposure
The shots here are proof of concept shots of double exposure.

Man, Moon, Double Exposure
The thing about double exposure is that one must be able to blend the photos and make some sense out of them.

Go ahead and make wonderful surreal photos and share them away!

Last time, D was for Depth of Field.

Glimpses of Mumbai – Nana Chowk, Grant Road

In my previous post, I mentioned that I take a tiny hop to a place to shoot a very particular signal, well, this is the one. Whats so special about it, you may ask, well, it was a pre decided and pre conceived shot. I knew the angles, knew the locations, just went in and took the shot.

Here are the results.

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The first photo is a product of a merging of 4 photos shot in quick succession from the same location, settings unchanged and then merged in Photoshop.

The next post, is one that is long overdue. I climbed the top floor of the site of my work, with the camera and shot Mumbai. The results, shall form the next post. Keep an eye out.

Cheers!!

Light Trails

Photography is all about how you play with light. Whatever be the kind of photography you do, light is the essential common denominator, be it portrait, landscape, macro, or any other thing you can think of.

Light trails are a mix of use of depth of field, controlled shutter speed and ISO. Along with the basic trinity, you also bring in creativity, and different props. The understanding of how a shot is being taken, or how it should be taken, is paramount while doing light trails, light paintings and such.

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Its not always that a slow shutter is all you need. Sometimes, varying the light source also helps.

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In the end, all that matters is, that you must have a lot of fun.

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Have fun experimenting with different light sources. Understand this, when your shutter is open during an exposure, any and every movement of the light source pointing towards the camera, shall be captured by it. Use this to make shapes, letters, drawings .. the possibilities are limitless.

Good luck.

Cheers!!

Proof Of Concept: Levitation

So, when someone asked me if I could make some tricks with the camera, I said, lets see. So, here I am, making my dear brother, who is holding the Tamron 150-600mm monster, levitate.

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Dont worry, no dark arts at play here. Its a very basic case of merging and two photos, shot at the same location, same settings and then a case of precise masking. Try it out with different backgrounds and poses, for much more amazing results. Below are the two basic files that had been used for the shot.

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Go stun someone, cheers!!

Proof of Concept!

So my dearest cousin showed me a photo. It looked awesome and had clever use of photo editing tools too. She said, “Bro, how is this done? Can you too do it?”
I got the concept all right, but was a little skeptical. Still, no harm in giving it a shot! A little tweaking and a few repeats down, I got the proof of concept shot pretty clear.

This one, is for my dear cousin 🙂

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Photoshop, really is amazing! 🙂

Cheers!!

Peekaboo!!

I dont take selfies often, but when I do, they are a bit…shall we say….uncommon!!

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I saw a similar photo while browsing through the internet, and creating this was not tough at all. Two separate images merged in photoshop, thats all. This is an example of Double Exposure though. Some cameras, the high end ones offer this function in body, others, like me, we merge. For perfection, ask someone to take the shot, selfies, can actually be a bit tricky 🙂

Happy Shooting. Cheers!!