Think, point, click, and crop

Point and click,
Think, point and click
Think, point and click and sometimes crop...

This is how I've slowly graduated in my photography adventures. For the longest time I wasn't too much into photography, but loved to have lots of pictures. That point and click phase passed quickly though, when I realized that half the photos weren't coming out well. Then there was this extended phase where I would think, then point and click. But I refused to tamper with the picture - no changing effects, no tuning, no cropping... nothing... I believed that I would compromise the very essence of being a serious photographer. Because of that, I would end up with pictures (especially the ones destined to be macro pictures) where composition seemed to be thrown out the drain! Here's an example - I had gone strawberry picking last Summer with a few friends. One of them picked up a stick with a small beetle on it and I jumped at the opportunity of taking a picture. But the beetle was so small that no matter what I did, the macro setting on a Canon A530 wasn't good enough to capture it. The moment I zoomed in with the macro setting to capture just the beetle, the focus would go out of whack. I tried different things - even asked my friend to hold the beetle in the sun vs. shade (all this while the poor beetle was trying to escape! sorry!). So finally I gave up, zoomed out and here's the picture...As a memory, this picture was good, but I didn't see any photographic value in it. So I decided to crop it... yes, I cropped! Thank god Picasa asks if the original image should be saved or not.. Here's the result -
Now, I agree that standing on it's own, this picture has a flaw - it is not crisp enough - looks pixelated (is that even a word?!??!). But whaddya think? My friend's hand created the background, the beetle stood out with a fair amount of focus on it, and if you watch closely, you can even see a small water droplet on it's back!!!

I'm in a phase now where cropping a picture once in a while is okay. At least it gives me some lessons in composition and all that! Fraudulent transaction? I think not! :-D

Oh btw, Happy new year! I know it's February, but this is my first post in this new year.

The story of 7 letters and a board

Do you Scrabble?

Well, you ought to try... I am slowly getting the hang of it and it is so much fun! I am perpetually stuck with letters such as A, E, L, and R! The scrabble gods hardly ever smile in my favor (and having a geeky opponent who is really really good at this doesn't help my case either!). While these As and Es help me form good words, they hardly ever make a good score because they all count as 1s! So I end up losing most of the time... but its still fun :P I think the competitive spirit in me keeps me going. Apart from a good vocab, I'm also learning that scrabble needs a lot of thought, patience and strategy...

7 letters & a board - think of the possibilities!

This was our board yesterday - WALTZ and QUIZ were both my words! Yay!
A missed opportunity of a good score? Perhaps. But the game was awesome! ... and guess who won this time :D... Yours truly indeed...

P.S.: The red triple word score square with everything else discolored in photo # 3 - thanks to the Color Accent feature in my Canon Powershot A530.

Depth of field

I may have said this before - taking pictures is helping me learn about photography basics more than sitting down with a book! Here's why... I found my crayons while unpacking this morning & decided to indulge in some artsy coloring. It doesn't take much now-a-days for me to decide to take pictures. These pictures were taken on auto mode - I use a canon A530 powershot to take pictures and didn't see the manual aperture adjustment (am I missing something?) on it.

So here's some color in my life! If you will, pay attention to the subject in focus and how many parts of the picture are out of focus due to the low depth of field...
And here's the art... a top view.
Then I decided to try another angle - a very low one. Here the camera has decided to put everything but the middle portion of the picture out of focus. If you look at the next picture, the bottom part is out of focus while the rest of it is in focus.A low depth of field throws most of the stuff, other than what it thinks is your main subject, out of focus - a great way to do portrait/ people photography. But if one wants everything in the picture in focus, a high depth of field would be necessary.

This one would have turned out to be a fine photo if not for the bottom out of focus part. Oh well...

Digital photography for dummies!

Finally I bought a photography book - the obvious choice was Digital Photography for Dummies. I figured it was high time I actually learned a few things about photography than just being a clicking maniac! I did take a quick class about photography basics a few months ago, but I need something more - like a quick guide with comparative examples - what happens when you take a picture at 1 fstop vs. another.
Another beauty I found was this book - Digital Macro Photography by Ross Hoddinott: This dude is apparently a leading nature photographer who is into macro and has won a lot of different competitions. I liked the book because it gives a lot of examples with particulars about how the picture was taken. The language is easy and the book has great tips to improve shots considerably. Now on to actually reading the book...

Flower power

I was telling somebody about how I love taking pictures and mainly - macro photography. Then that person asked if I specialized in flower photography and I denied it completely (I didn't think I wanted to be typecasted as a "flower person")... But maybe I do like macro - flower - photography... Flowers are just so beautiful and friendly :-) Here in the U.S. it seems like they are more colorful than their counterparts back home, or maybe its just that I'm paying more attention now...

Anyhoo, while coming back from a meeting this morning, I saw a nice garden and couldn't resist taking some (read 134!) pictures. Here are a select few that I really love...Somebody had recently mentioned to me that they like a little bit of cloud cover while taking pictures. Today I found out why! It is awesomely warm and sunny and bright today and so I thought pictures will come out great. But seems too much brightness was undermining the color of the flowers... I'm going to have to delete a lot of the pictures because they are too bright! Oh well...

More pictures here.

Books and a cafe...

Will you believe it if I say that I was not in the mood of taking pictures for the past few weeks because my computer was on the brink of crashing due to not having enough memory! I couldn't download the pictures on my camera and so no way to take new pictures! Now that out of the way (I have about 4gb on my drive now which should give me a few more days!), I'm back to taking tons of pictures!

This afternoon I was sitting in Webster's Bookstore and Cafe working and took a few pictures. An awesome cafe and a great used bookstore makes Webster's a beloved local hangout place. Here's what I have...
I didn't want to use flash, so both pictures are a bit shaky... I should get into the habit of carrying the tripod... Oh, well, some other time :-) I really need to work on my composition - I should borrow a few books from the library and see how the pros do it!

Finding glamor in the mundane...

I admire people who find glamor in the mundane... I had seen a picture of a bridge among Steven Pinker's collection of photos in and near Boston - he's a professor at Harvard and has an awesome collection! I would have seen only a bridge, but Dr. Pinker found out a way to get past the obvious and bring out the beauty in the surroundings. Here's the picture in question. How did he do that? Well, framing the sky, the bridge and the water in right amounts is where the art is. I've been to most of the places he captures, but have not been able to get past the daily routine of traveling thro' these places to be able to notice what now seems obvious!

So coming back to the point - I decided to capture the mundane in the hope of finding something interesting. Found a bunch of keys nearby - they are mundane enough, aren't they? So here's what I tried first - just a top view of the keys...Disappointing, isn't it? I thought so... But decided against giving up! So after trying a few different angles, here's what came up! Not totally glamorous, but more interesting than the first one for sure... So what did I learn today? Of course - the most obvious is to not give up! And something else - finding the best position for your camera lens is the most important thing you'd do. Getting good pictures (even with a digital camera!) is not as easy as point and click as they'd have you believe... it takes time and effort and commitment to the task. Most of us are generally satisfied with run of the mill pictures - nothing really wrong in that - but lately I've tried to be a little more involved in pictures I take and it has been wonderful!