Art of Lighting

Raspberry and White Chocolate Mousse

razipix — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:16:07 +0000

Here are some pictures from the recent attempt by my wife at Raspberry and White Chocolate Mousse.

Raspberry and White Chocolate Mousse

Blue Moon

razipix — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:58:31 +0000

This was a once in a blue moon opportunity. I had two parties to go on the New Year’s eve but the full moon was very nice to miss. I took the longest lens I have (70-200mm 2.8L canon) and took this picture. It wasn’t coming out correctly at first, later I took the tripod on the driveway and took this without the slightest vibrations but somehow missed the crystal sharp focus. Here it is ..the first one with 2600K temperature and second with 4000K both zoomed in to the max 200mm.

Blue Moon

Full Moon

Tomato Bread

razipix — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:49:00 +0000

I don’t know if its coincidence or what, but after the food series competition started in Cognizant’s Photography club, I am more interested in that area now. As with the Chaat item, this particular item is prepared by author and owner of Thefoodielovers.com For receipe, you will have to navigate to her site.

But I can post the technical details of the photo here. Using the DIY lightbox that I made some 2 years ago, I focused the 1000W incandescent light from about 45 degree from right and used a reflector from about 0 degrees on the left. This made sure there are no dark spots on the bread.

Once the lighting is setup, I used a plain white chart as the base to reflect more light up and have a glow effect. Here are the photos:

Tomato Bread (Whole)

Pie cut from the bread

A slice of the bread

Interiors

razipix — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:45:10 +0000

Interior photography pose its own challenges.

Firstly, getting the contrast right is a trial and error method. By this, I mean not letting the required details in the dark parts of the photograph vanish in the darkness and at the same time keeping the highlights not burnt is a big challenge. Luckily there are pre-shoot processes and post-shoot processes that eases the task to a certain level.

Second, there are issues of different color temperature lights acting on the subject (objects inside the room). To get a balanced view, different options from correcting the temperature in the camera to turning off certain lights or closing the screen/blinds will have to be tried.

Third and the most important of all is the distractions. Too many things in the room, the viewer’s eye wander around the photograph to settle. Too little things, the photograph becomes uninteresting to the viewer. So keeping an balance in the photograph is necessary.

Here are my attempts at interior photographs:

Dining table

Family room

Master Bedroom

House entrance

BAPS Temple

razipix — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:19:44 +0000

This series of photos of the BAPS Temple near Aurora, IL was taken sometime back in early summer of 2009. The day was pleasant with good sunlight for outdoor.

The temple has amazing architectural work involved, but has no photography policy inside the temple. So these outdoor pictures are the ones that one can use to image the amount of work that would have gone in to build it…

Now some photos :-

Front View

Full View

Side View

Peanuts

razipix — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:40:53 +0000

Receipe: 1 cup of salted peanuts from SAMS. Thats it!

Peanut A.K.A. Groundnut

Fallen

razipix — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:39:14 +0000

This fall, 2009, was more of fun than photography… but still managed to get some get some pictures that are worth sharing. Here are some…

It took some time to find this perfect color changed maple leaf. Placed it against the paved road and clicked. Nice contrast and uniformly lit sky worked for this.

Red leaf on tar

For the next one, I took the leaf and placed it against the dry leaf stems. Did some “photoshoping” to unsaturate the background. The result is this:

Red leaf on dry stems

Next one is related to the topic but not specific to the season. The water droplets fallen from the tree above our parked car had formed a beautiful pattern. Again, an overcast sky made it easier on the sensor and very less photoshoping yielded this:

Water droplets on red metal

Chaat Time

razipix — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:55:08 +0000

Cognizant Photographers Club announced “Food Contest” and I knew I had to participate in that. I have been shooting every bit of bread, corn flakes, water melon etc for last 1 year after I started watching “Iron Chef America”. I remembered a close friend of ours here who is a great cook. We made a deal. She will prepare food and allow me to take photos (and taste as well ) and I will let her use the photos for her blog (http://aromasfrommykitchen.blogspot.com). Do visit. There are some amazing recipes.

So the first part of that is the Chaat Time. Here are the photos:

Tomato Chaat

Sev Puri

Are you hungry?

Timed Exposures

razipix — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:27:39 +0000

Over the years, I had tried my hand in different long timed exposures from velvety white water falls or stream to a recent experiment in tunnel.

Here are some of the better photos from each photo shoot along with EXIF details.

This was taken recently on the way to Duluth in a about 1/2 mile long tunnel. With a EF17-40mm lens set at 40mm with an aperture of f4.0 and shutter speed of 0.4 seconds, this was exposed to +0.25ev.

Tunnerl Timed

This cotton candy like firework was captured in Dells, Wisconsin a few years back with my 10D. Taken for 1/20 seconds at f/4 with an ISO of 800 at 70mm focal length.

Fire Candy

Skiing & Snow Boarding are the popular sport in MN, for at least 6 months, which lately has gone up to 8 months. There are many ski areas and Afton Alps is a one near by which has beginner to pro level course. There are also contests held where the skiier has to cross a water pond cut in the middle on the way down from the hill. This was taken with a shutter speed of 1/90sec at f/13 with a 73mm on the lens.

Snow Boarding

This lightning picture is a HDR taken in 2006. It is a combination of 4 different exposures taken in 30 seconds shutter speeds with a 50mm prime lens at f/11.

Thunder Bolt

What’s a Timed exposure article without a seamless flowing vevetty falls, right? Here it is. Its taken in Gooseberry Falls, Duluth, MN. This is a HDR of 3 different exposures. The 0 eV was taken with 17mm lens at f/22 for 0.3 seconds.

Gooseberry Falls

Saint Paul Cathedral

razipix — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:58:10 +0000

Cathedral of Saint Paul, MN was the dream of Archbishop John Ireland who secured the site in 1904. The construction started in 1907 and went on for decades. You can see why it would have taken decades. Situated on the highest point of Saint Paul city @ Summit Hill, it stands 306ft tall with a seating capacity for nearly 3000 people. It is a true piece of French architechture built very futuristically taking ventillation, heating, accoustics, accessibility etc into consideration.

OK. Enough with the history, lets see some photographs.

This one taken at night with an exposure of 20sec and a fisheye lens.

This one is taken from the steps at the entrance. These exterior is all granite from Saint Cloud, MN.

The Sanctuary with a 4 sec zoom out exposure.

The last one is a combination from 24 different photographs. It has 8 different angles with 3 exposures each combined to give a HDR. All these 8 HDR images are then woven together to get the 180º field of view both horrizontally and vertically. HDR is necessary here since there is electrical lighting and windows that let sunlight in at near the top that had exposures ranging from +0.5 to +1.5ev and at the vertical bottom there are dark woodden chairs which contribute to -1.0 to -2.0ev. So I had to compromise on the exposure a bit and take a +1.0ev, 0ev and -1.0ev for the HDR with Photomatix. Photoshop CS4 did the trick for stiching together the 8 different HDR tiffs.