An experiment with light

Wrote on the wall with my phone. The minimum shutter speed allowed by my cam is 15s. But chdk helped me reduce it further to 60s. :)

The effect I used in many of my pics

You like the effect on the second image? This works great when you have lots of green leaves and flowers around in your photo. I've tried this same stuff on portraits also and they also looks great. If you have 5 mins and Picasa installed in your pc, then i can help you get that.
Here goes how i did it.
1. Open the image in Picasa - Editor mode
2. Go to tuning and increase the highlights and shadows. While increasing highlights, make sure that you dont increase it so much that you loose necessary details of any bright regions of the scene. And while increasing shadows, dont make the scene too dark. Make sure the subject of the shot is still well exposed. (You may find the flower a bit over exposed in this pic. But am still okey with it :) )
3. Go to Effects and add a glow to the image. The default settings would do. If you are finding that it was blurred too much, then reduce the intensity a bit.
4. Go back to tuning. Increase the shadow a lil more. Also the highlights. (Am not sure whether you'll need this step)
5. Go to effects and use image sharpen once.
6. Click saturation and reduce it till you find the resultant image appealing!

If you happen to turn some of ur mediocre shots in to great ones using this, then i too wanna know how they look like now :)

Happy shooting!

In Perspective

One of the four minarets of Taj Mahal. A clean blue sky normally makes the picture look wonderful. If you are not able to get one, then there are several ways to put in a better sky in the pic. Click here for a tutorial on how to replace your sky using photoshop.

In this pic, I didnt require any photo editing though. :)

My trip : Sikandara

So lemme start posting some picks from the pics i had taken during my one week trip to delhi, agra n manali. This one is from Sikandara, Akbar's tomb in Agra.
I'd like to give a tip here. While taking pictures of buildings and monuments the alignment of the frame makes a great impact. A tilted picture doesnt give the same impact as a straight well aligned and symmetric picture. So you should take care of how you hold your camera. If you are not able to judge your alignment, switch on the grid option in the viewfinder or the lcd display. This helps a lot to position the building in the frame and also its straightness.

Happy shooting :)

How to take picture of Moon

I had been experimenting on how to take well exposed and sharp pictures of moon. After many failed attempts today i found out how to. So here goes how i did it.
Here are the features in your camera that you need to set and why you need to set it
- Enough of optical zoom or else lots of pixels so that you can crop down your moon so that it fills the picture area. I've got 12x optical zoom and 8 meg pixels in my Canon S5IS. Take the picture in the maximum of zoom and maximum of pixels.
- Set the metering mode to Spot metering mode (for me, metering means some feature in your camera which decides how much light is needed to expose your picture properly and also which decides the colour balance for your scene). You can read more about metering here
- '-1.5' exposure stop. Exposure control lets you specify how bright your scene is. If you let your camera choose the default exposure stop ie; 0, then you wont see the black spots on your moon picture and it will become completely white, just like a white circle on a black background
- Focus. Manually set the focus to infinity. For our lil camera moon is almost at infinity distance. This will give you nice, sharp picture.
- Open up your aperture to 3.5 or 2.7 (i dont think its so necessary, the less open your aperture is the less will be your shutter speed)
Keep the rest of the stuffs like, ISO, shutter speed etc to auto.
Once you have all the settings ready, you need something else too..... the moon :D Aim your camera, get it inside the small rectangle in the middle and SHOOT! Hope you got it right! :)