Roses

Bokeh Dance

Bokeh is defined as 'the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, present in out-of-focus areas of a photograph'. 

I've always had a fascination for those soft circles of light in the background and the effect and mood they lend to a photo. 

I learnt that it is the aperture that helps determine what the bokeh will look like and chanced upon the right combination of camera settings for me while clicking these pictures of bamboo. I managed to get a crick in the neck as well, standing there with my head bent back for goodness knows how long. But I didn't mind, as I was happy with what I got for my trouble.

This one is a picture of the leaves of a bottlebrush tree.

Earrings galore!

I recently redicsovered a bead set I had which was lying unused for a long time in some forgotten cupboard and with it, an interest in making jewellery. I began making loads of earrings as they were really simple to make, in fact some didn't take more than a couple of minutes and many times I would quickly make a pair and gift it to a visiting friend before they left. The basic ingredients I used were beads, wire, earring hooks and small pliers. I made other things also, like bead curtains and long strings to decorate doorways, and I tried to vary the earring designs as much as possible, replenishing my store of beads with new ones when they finished.

The materials-

And the results-

White beauties

Buns and Bread

My mother loves baking and her specialty is bread. She experiments a lot with different ingredients and invents her own recipes. Her breads are never the same twice as she adds new and different ingredients each time and rarely remembers the amounts or measurements from last time. Nevertheless, they are each one so delicious, that they don't last very long. Sometimes they are devoured before I have the time to take a picture and sometimes, in the eagerness to eat them, I forget to take the picture! :)

Oven fresh raisin buns baked for breakfast.

Extremely healthy sourdough bread made with a special mix of different millet flours. :)

Project Purple

I read somewhere about ideas for photo projects and assignments one could take up to practice and hone their photography skills. I felt like trying one out and decided on " A color a week". You pick any random color and click photos of that color everyday for a week. It could be of anything, but as it is so restrictive, it makes you more observant of your surroundings (after all, it is not easy and you have to search everywhere for your chosen color), gets your creative juices flowing and you learn how to photograph mundane things in an interesting manner.

I chose purple and started walking around the house everyday for sometime looking for purple things. Sometimes I made great discoveries but many times there just wasn't anything interesting enough.


Day 1

I really like the way the writing fades away in this one.


Day 2

A string of beads that I made to decorate the living room curtains.


Day 3

 Umbrella!


Day 4

 

This is one of the worse ones. The day was almost over and I was out of ideas. Then I noticed that my toothbrush was purple. I clicked the same toothbrush again and again from different angles till I was fed up, trying to get a decent picture, but this was the best I could come up with. One thing I learnt from this is that it is really difficult to make your toothbrush look beautiful. :)














Day 5

Art supplies. I don't know if this is cheating or not, but I did it anyway. :)


Day 6

Only one day left! Its been fun, but for some reason I can't wait to get this project over with. This is a picture of our toy cupboard and I used selective color to make the purple one stand out, because otherwise it would be lost among the colors of the rest of the board games.


Day 7

Another selective color picture! I really like this effect. The fact that I do is also apparent from the number of pictures I have taken with it. :)

And so, we come to the end of this little journey. However, the end of this one is only the beginning of the next. I leave you now, but my head is bursting with crazy ideas and it won't be long before I'm back  with another silly project.

Until next time then! :)

Put a hood on it!

Ever since I got my new camera I have been using the kit lens that came with it. Then, a few days ago I remembered that I had been given an old zoom lens by somebody who didn't want it before I was gifted this camera. 

The lens looked like this-



When I started using it I was puzzled by something: the case or whatever that was at the front of the lens would come in the way and make it difficult to zoom and focus. I tried removing it but it wouldn't budge and gave up afraid that it might break. But I just couldn't figure out why it was there. Finally I looked it up on the internet and found out that the case was a lens hood, a device used at the end of a lens to block the sun and prevent glare or lens flare.
Then I learned a vital piece of information, lens hoods were designed so they fit onto the lens facing outward for normal use as well as backward, so that it occupies less space when stored. So this thing could be removed! I went back and tried harder, and with more confidence, to remove it. Then I managed to attach it back the right way -

The idea is pretty neat, it spreads outward while being used and conveniently fits the other way when not, taking up only as much space as the lens itself.

I felt happy at having solved the problem, or rather, correcting my silly mistake. However, it is only from our mistakes that we learn right? 

Flower Fantasies

As I have already mentioned before, I seem to have a helpless fascination for flowers and can't stop clicking them. Here are some more photos as a result of this madness. :)

A walk under the trees in a wood

I had penned a small poem some time ago that I think goes with this image very well-

 A walk under the trees in a wood,
"Pray, what good will it do?" Why, look around,
the ground is littered with leaves, the earth is soft under the feet,
high above the green boughs meet, and the sun filters through,
leaving dancing spots of sunlight on you. The birds and insects call,
pitter-patter on the leaves the seeds fall,
and all around is the cool and drowsy breeze of the afternoon, whispering of surprises waiting to be discovered.
What good you say? But what better way,
to get a feel of green earth's good magic,
than a walk under the trees in a wood?
 

Stills of Beauty

Nature is always alive with movement and life, ever changing, never still.

The best a photograph can do is capture a single moment, freeze a small slice of time.

That maybe a photograph's limitation, but it is more than enough to get a sense of the breathtaking loveliness of nature and record a unique but fleeting moment of beauty forever.

(ok, maybe not forever. After all, a photo can get deleted, destroyed by a malicious virus, faded by old age, spoilt by water, torn by kids, thrown in the trash, and....anything else? You see, lots of horrible things can happen to prevent it from lasting forever, but I think you get the idea. :))

 

 

                               

Freedom of the Skies

Usually I just click a picture that appeals to me and think about the story behind it later. I weave the words around the photos and not the photos around the words. Even then, most of the pictures have their own story, whether I intended it that way or not.
Unfortunately, this particular picture has no story behind it, or front of it, or anywhere that I can see. I spotted this crow flying across the sky one day while I was taking a walk and managed to capture this perfectly timed shot.
I have put it up because sometimes a photo has to speak for itself.

My experiments with Color

There is a feature in my camera called selective color which allows you to choose a maximum of three colors in your frame and leaving those colors, turns the rest of the photo into black and white. You can also control the range of the shades and tints that will be included. For instance, I chose just red in the first photo while in the last, only three colors (pink, orange and green) were selected, but both the dark orange and light orange were included as shades of the same color.
The different effects that can be created are just endless. 

The Cactus Story

We have two-three different types of cacti and succulent plants in our garden, and there was one variety that used to give beautiful flowers of bright colors. Then, for some reason that I never understood, pigeons attacked and destroyed those plants till there were only a few miserable stems left. They never recovered, never had the chance to, and withered up and died. After that, my mother planted a new and different type of plant in their place, the ones below. The pigeons didn't spare these either but they are hardier and are able to survive and thrive despite the attacks. I suppose it just goes to show- Survival of the Fittest! :)  

 

The picture below is of our aloe vera plant and I don't know if it is a cactus or not, but I put it up anyway because I liked it and thought it would look nice. :)

Copy the cat

This is a picture of Copy, my aunt's cat. He was named that because he looked like an exact copy of his mother. He loves sleeping and spends most of his time curled up on the chairs around the house.

A New Beginning

I got a new camera! Actually I received it as a gift a few months ago and the only reason nothing has been posted about it until now is that I was too lazy to do it.

So now I have upgraded from my humble and small compact camera (a Canon Powershot A530, in case anyone is interested) to a DSLR, the bigger, better and heavier Nikon D5100.
So far, I have had great fun with it and I'm still learning and exploring all its possibilities, which are numerous. The only thing I missed about the old camera was its light weight.  While getting used to the new one, I discovered that I could now easily do things that were difficult before, like taking portraits or pictures of food, for instance.

Some of the first pictures I took with my new camera were of flowers. I have a fascination for flowers and can't seem to click enough of them. :)