India Daily Photo » Technical

Magic minutes

bharath — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 06:07:07 +0000

It helps as a photographer if you aren’t one of the lazy types. Good photographs, especially landscapes are best when they are taken during what is commonly called the “magic hour” – those precious few minutes before sunset or the ones immediately after a sunrise. The relatively low angle of the sun means objects are lit more “front on” giving one a rich, brownish golden hue. And when you live in parts of the country or the world that have some haze and mist around these times, it is even more important to get off your backside and exploit the conditions. Here are some great examples of the magic hour photos from the photo blog –

The making of ‘Steam’

bharath — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:59:16 +0000

My dad walks into my bedroom and asks, “Where’s the Zenit?, Are you still using it?”. I confessed I hadn’t used it much in the last year and that it still had a roll of B&W film in it. “Well, why don’t you try something out tonight?”, he prodded. And so it began!

I found my mom cooking and just about to put the pressure cooker on the stove. After two minutes spent convincing her that I was up to some good, I quickly setup the scene. The Zenit was mounted on the tripod, with the Helios 50mm lens pre-fitted. Next came the lighting that you see on the top-left of the image. Found an old, disused, but still working emergency lamp (with fluorescent tubes) and slapped on a lamp shade around it. This was to diffuse the light and not shine on the cooker harshly.

And then basically waited for the steam to escape! Every time the cooker whistled, I shot off a frame with varying settings – open up the aperture, change the shutter, change the metering spot etc; And since we have a cooker that goes whistle at least 20 times, I had plenty of chances to get it right :-)

The hard part came after the shoot. Where to develop the film? Good quality manual film processing and that too for B&W is very hard to do in India these days. But there are a handful of places left and one such is Karthik’s in Chennai. So, off went my roll there, with the finished strips arriving a week later. Once the strips came back, I ran them through the excellent scanner at Victory Labs in Ameerpet, Hyderabad.

And there you have it – Steam!

Print Your Lens Hoods!

bharath — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:24:32 +0000

Yes, that’s right! No more lugging around that infernal piece of plastic that always sticks out like a sore thumb in your backpack. Presenting lenshoods.net – these guys offer a variety of printable lens hoods. Download the PDF file, print, cut and slap it on!

I have made three of them so far, all of them for the Pentax 18-55 kit lens and they work like a charm. About the only thing you need to make sure is that the paper you use is of sufficient thickness – normal pieces of A4 won’t do. I went down to my local stationary shop and picked up dark grey card paper.