Spain Redux IV: Churches

Right, so, between my fascination with Gothic architecture, stained glass, and generally pretty buildings, there were a LOT of churches and cathedrals in my photos. However, I'm going to be kind and do this as a series. And not cheat and do em all at once so I don't have to shoot for 2 weeks either. To start with, here are some churches from the towns and villages I visited. The first is the abandoned church from La Ermita de Trigueros del Valle, where I took the gorgeous one of the grave and the sunspot. I just love how the stone in Castile is honey coloured - it's called piedra dorada, or golden stone. The other two are a church in a town in the northwestern province of Galicia (home to the shrine of Santiago or St. James, also known and the Moor-slayer, and the final destination of those who walk the pilgrimage of El Camino de Santiago, or St. James' Way.)

Spain Redux III

Here we have a very classic green fields of barely in May photo (someone suggested I sell it Microsoft, but then they already have one exactly the same, no?). The second one is the equally classic, golden fields of wheat, and since this was in July I was lucky to catch any. It was so spooky, because one day we'd drive past a ripe golden field, and then suddenly, the next morning it would be harvested, as if by magic, because you never say a human being in those fields! Animals were equally rare.

Spain Redux II

Apologies. Kitteh gets swept up by work every so often. I know, the horror! Coming up today are scenes from urban and rural life. I'm trying for a contrast here.

The first is the view from my friend's terrace. From what I recall, I was trying to get the street dragging the eye out to the horizon, through a maze of red brick buildings.
The second is a deserted street in the  village on Ampudia, because it was Sunday afternoon. We did eat some awesome cheese though. Seeing echoes anyone?

Read all about it, read all about it.

Unfortunately, that's all I could do since I missed the live show.   This picture is of today's front page of all the three papers we get at home: The Hindu, The Times of India and Mathrubhumi. Enough has been said all over the press. But my personal lil' note to the lil' man:
Sachin, you make me smile.
:) 

Notes: Different sides to the master at work. Worked?

Spain, Redux I

Back on 2005 I made my first trip to Spain, and my friend's kindly parents would take me out to see the countryside and drool over Gothic churches. I shot a total of nine rolls of film in something like 15 days. That's 324 photos on film, all of which I then had developed. I recently had em scanned and then sat and fixed them, so expect a series =) This is my absolute favourite from that set. It is an abandoned church in the village of La Hermita de Trigueros del Valle. It was the first time I ever attempted a sunspot, and I was so very thrilled with my success. I had a lot of sunspots on that trip, and they soon became one of my favourite things to do with light.

This better SAJ? For those interested, I twiddled with the curves, in GIMP, to make the shadows darker. I'm not convinced I like it more though, cos I like the bricks and the grass and the green barley in the pic on top.

Cold December Night

Okay okay, so it was January. More from the foggy wedding in Delhi! This is the huge spotlight and down below three sigris lying there waiting to be refilled.

1 by 2, pliss

Quiz: vaaat eeet eees?
Clue: Joyous goods from keralam-returnees.
Ok, fine, answer: aunt's mutton biriyani (frozen)

Out of the massacred ziplock bag,
Into the steamer,
Onto the stove,
....
et, voila!

A ready meal for hungry father-daughter combo.
Put your hands up for the homeland!

Note: Ok, I removed the first pic, because it was a shoddy, lazy one. My conscience couldn't take it. 

And for today!

Choppity choppity the chocolate.

Blue Lagoon

Well not really, it was peach vodka, and there was no Brooke Shields, but still.

Sunday nooning self-portrait

Yaaawn.
Snap, snap.

Notes: tired out, not ready for day yet look. Of course the fabulous bed hair helps me thinks.

Mungi been SO bad

and shall make up for it by not putting cheat pics and getting back to the swing of things this week onwards.

The view from this tree was just SO pwetty, I got lost stopping and staring. Or something like that.

Kitteh, I'm coming homeeeeee.....


:)

Dripping Evil

Cooking blog! But this one I actually took for here.

Reflections

Apparently all I needed to motivate me was taking a break. Heh. In my defence, yesterday was a truly vile day, for absolutely no reason.

Today we have spent the day listening to lovely music and rootling through ancient photos, scanned from prints mind you. These include various travels, including a whole set from Europe in 2005. While I am amused at the naivety of many of the pictures, I'm also happy to realise I could frame well back then, even if I was terrible with exposure; and some of those pictures are breathtaking. Another day, however.

Today we have two pictures from a visit to Yosemite national park in March of 2007, and a bonus just-cos-iz-pwetty one. The first is half dome rock reflected in mirror lake. Whenever I hand this print to people they look at it upside down. Hee.

The second is a rainbow in the basin of Lower Yosemite falls. My sister took a ridiculous Hindi movie shot of me with my hair everywhere and the rainbow behind me. That is not for such a forum however, heh.


Up top, the majestic Yosemite Falls, framed by redwoods. *sigh* WannawannaWANNAGOBACKTHERE!

White Balance (aka neutral balance and grey balance)

The very lazy MinCat has decided to follow through on her promise! To begin with, look at this post, where I whine about white balance.

Whaaa....? you gurgle, wossat? Yeah, I know what you mean. Until the day I just could not get the colours right on one of my photos, I always ignored it. Well, I had also started shooting in the NEF (RAW) format, which meant I could do more twiddling with the picture, so I also wanted to learn about it.

So what exactly is white balance? 
Used, as we are, to the human eye and its miraculous processing of images, we don't realise just how many things it does inside our heads before we register an image. For starters, it can have so many distant bits in focus at the same time. It also fiddles with contrast and the like to make sure we get silhouettes or fingers of god. One more thing it does it make sure white is white, or grey is grey, so all colours look normal. It's only when we try and replicate these things with a camera that we can literally see the difference. Like below:

Essentially, the key here is the colour temperature. Scary though this might appear, it simply means the range of waves emitted by an object, assuming it absorbs all other light coming into it without changing it in any way. (This is important because thats the only way we know that the light, and therefore the spectrum of waves, coming out of the body is wholly intrinsic to the body itself, instead of being, for example, the light reflecting off your glasses.) The higher up the scale that the range is, the bluer the light, and the lower down the scale, the yellower. So called white light, or neutral light is essentially a replication of daylight - personally I think of it as a mixture of white and yellow, and have also found that such a mixture gives the best approximation of daylight.

This light, in the picture, is a yellow bulb. This means, it emits more yellow light than any other kind, which means it should leave all objects with a tinge. It does indeed, only the human eye sorts that out, leaving my blue curtains blue. The camera, however, cannot do that, so it makes the curtains a sort of steel grey. Once I adjusted the white balance and colour temperature, however, they curtains looked blue again, like they do to my eyes. This can totally ruin a picture, especially a low-lit or a specially-lit portrait. Sometimes the sun can affect your landscape pictures too.

Most of the time white balance is automated by your camera, and it's only occasionally that you need to fix it yourself. The advantage of shooting in RAW mode is that you can fiddle with the balance after you've taken the shot; while shooting in other modes mean you have to try and set it before the shot. Imagine you're taking that picture above without the RAW option. What can you do to make the white balance work?

For starters, you could scroll through the white balance options on your camera, and pick one that gives you the most realistic result. Enough experimentation with the same object in the same light will give you a good understanding of how your camera works. Another option is to include a grey or white object in the frame, which should give the camera a clue about what the neutral colour is, and then the auto white balance will work. However, it's not always possible to do that, which is where the other methods come in. If you haven't managed to fix it before you shoot, then your best bet is to fiddle with the colour temperature while in a photo editor like picasa or GIMP. (More on those guys later.)

Here is a nice tutorial that's more technical, if you like. If you want more, there's always our dear friends Theodore and Evadne Google!

Sorry

Kitteh needs a time out. Normal service will be resumed on weekend. I hope.

Weddings

This photo I took at a friend's wedding in Delhi. The thing I love about Indian weddings is the medley. There's all this colour, and hundreds of relatives, and so much food and chaos and kiddies running everywhere, and everyone is wearing colour. But gold, red and yellow sort of form a theme. There's the gold on jewellery and clothes; red for the bride's clothes and bangles, the flowers, and all the kumkumam; and the yellow in the haldi, the marigolds, and faint traces on the skins of the bride and groom if they were suckered into a haldi ceremony. That's why I love this picture: it sort of brings everything together in one fell swoop, and to me is as representative of the Hindu wedding as a bouquet of white roses, or a veil is of a Christian one.

Life lessons, Himalayan style

Pic 1: holding on
Pic 2: growing up
Pic 3: self-defence (dangerous beauty-  definitely a keeper)

Notes: In all three was fiddling with zoom and soft focus.

Good Day(s)

 

This is Tanuja. Affectionately called Tanu. 

She is stuffing her face joyously with Good Day biskoot.

This pikshur is symbolic.

In the words of The Beatles:

"..you've got to admit it's getting better, 

it's getting better all the time...." 

:)

*Note: cheat post. But I'm getting there, I'm getting there.....

BAD MUNGI!

REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD MUNGI.


I shall keep posting old photos then. Humph. Though, many of them are only just seeing light of day...er...screen.

A friend of mine told me to start taking photos that could be sold as stock around events, the closest one at the time was Valentine's day. Nevermind that I didn't do anything with the photos, I still took some.


This one was taken one handed and at a very awkward angle. Yes that is my hand. Personally I'm impressed any of it is in focus!

This here is a necklace my grand aunt made (extra pimping wherever possible!) It was lying on the table and the sun was catching the orange beads so beautifully I couldn't resist.

A picture of the reason I couldn't take a picture last night

Smoking a cigarette. I ended up doing a whole set of smoke photos, which are insanely difficult and much more effective in black and white, in the dark with a spotlight on them and without anyone breathing in the vicinity. I specially like the little rolls in the BW one.

Fog.

Winter's officially gone here in Hyderabad, which makes me so very sad. It was a pretty nice one this year! Though my winter well-being might have something to with the two visits I paid to Delhi, where I got to prance about in the fog in the middle of the night, taking photos of course. It was incredible. The effects of the street lights just blew my mind, acting like clouds and creating this fingers of god look, and when I tried the pictures black and white, they could have been of a bright, sunny day. Though, with the equipment I have, achieving this on a bright sunny day would only have happened with the loss of a retina! I've got them paired up in diptychs, for contrast. Let me know which ones you like better in colour and/or BW!

Numaish!

Every year Hyderabad is home to two wonderful exhibitions. The first, and the newer, is Shilparamam, which is an exclusively handloom and handicrafts exhibition that lasts only fifteen days. The day after it closes Numaish opens. Now numaish is not just an exhibition, it's an experience. It is the all-India industrial expo, and you can literally buy anything. Name it, they have it. It is a gold mine for things like nested little plastic boxes (Amma's favourite), silver jewellery (mine), chikan emboridery (everyone's), and tons of street food. It also has, appliances, land, cloth and clothing, shoes, a toy train, a funfair, every imaginable Chinese good known to man, every thing you could possibly need in a kitchen or a house...you get my drift. Usually we try to hit each exhibition twice, and numaish has even gotten three visits since it lasts for a month and a half. It's an insane experience, because by evening it is a mass of bodies all scrambling about. We always plan and go early, in the afternoon, and try and leave once it gets dark.

This time, we went really early, at 2pm. We found a parking space by the gate! We were so happy. When we emerged, at 8pm, we saw, to our horror, that the approach road was a sea of bodies. Seriously. And my poor lil car was floating in the distance! When we got to him, we had to back him out and turn him around, all the while enduring the insults and abuses hurled at us by the street vendors incensed by my temerity in parking there. Many many many adventures (all involving a press of bodies on every side of the car, and some involving reversing down a narrow lane lined with parked motorcycles while being passed by more motorcycles and unable to see most of the six children directing me), and forty-five minutes later we emerged and went home.

After soaking my feet for an hour, I was energised enough to contemplate my loot, and of course, since I had forgotten my camera, photograph it. Et voilà medames et messeuirs. Notice, if you please the row of chappals. Yes, I bought six pairs. Sigh. I've already worn two, in my defence!

This one I took to capture the textures: raw silk, chikan embroidery and bead work. The colours also, with the white sari and it's shadow embroidery; the gentle mango-milkshake yellow and the vivid red.







And this one I took for the lovely clashing jewellery, all of which clashes with the box.

Kitteh Sowwie. Mungi was in town.

For all three of you who follow =)

The Mungi came to town! We were lost in yards of material, stacks of shoes and piles of jewellery. And some food. And many endless naaansense things. However, I *do* have posts for all the days I missed, unlike *some* people who have mostly missed a WEEK! You know you get no more days off for 6 weeks, right Mungi?

First off we have this beautiful cauliflower. Now, I have never been a big fan of cauliflower if not smothered in cheese, but age is finally getting to me. I actually love it steamed. Yes, really. I know, I don't believe me too. But it's true. I'm lucky to live in Hyderabad, which has such beautiful fruit and vegetables, and this here is the cauliflower I made into alu gobi the other morning. I really wanted to catch the delicacy of that leaf, both in colour and texture, and the tiny droplets of water on it.

Oh please, I love you SO, pleasepleasepleeeeeeeeeease?

This is Sudoku, Suku for short. Suku is one of my doggies. We used to call her DisneyDog when she was a puppy, because she just sits there, stares up at you with her big melting brown Labrador eyes and makes these faces that are ooooozing cuteness from every pore. Can make you a titch nauseous too. Hee. She also raises her right paw delicately just off the ground and crosses it over her left leg and holds it there. Ooooozing cuteness. She is also very stupid: in the four years we've had her, I have tried and tried to train her, but she just won't learn. Haiku (Haku), her sister, on the other hand, learns really fast.

For example, there was time I used to come home late most nights. This meant I'd have to park the car outside, open the little gate, slip in, grab the dogs, put their chains on, tie them up, and only then open the big gates and park the car. The first few times they were full of glee, YAY! 1am WALK! YAY! However, once she cottoned on to being tied up Haku began to walk resignedly over to where I tie her and wait patiently to be set free. Suku, however, to this day, excitedly yanks me in the direction of the outside, convinced she's getting a walk. Mutt.
And yes, the focus is supposed to be on her nosie.

She is also, despite the cuteness, the sneakier and snarlier of the two. Haku can fix you with her yellow-eyed stare and some tiny furry mammal in your distant evolutionary past begins to chitter and scream and tell you RUNFORYOURLIFE, but to this day she has never even snapped at a single person. Not even thet vet on her fourth injection. Suku, however, will slink about and look cute and wag her tail, but if she is the slightest bit startled, snap!

Aw sorry, didn't mean to run on. I *heart* my doggies. =)

I'm late, I'm LATE!

Mostly cos I didn't have time to download photos onto comp before I left for work, and then was too sleepy when I got home. However, here is yesterday's photo. Or do I mean the day before yesterday's photo?

I was wearing these dangly earrings cos I had time to get dressed up, and then when I was lounging in the evening I hung them off the trusty hard-drive and tried to get nice photos against the lovely dark wood table. Target: dangle, and glints.

Then I tried with my necklace. This didn't work out too well, so instead of the pendant dangling we have the pendant lying amidst the snaky coils of the chain.

Twilight

From my balcony. It overlooks this lake, which sits right behind several IT Parks, and every evening, at twilight, there's this gorgeous effect of the fading sky and the lit buildings. 'Course it gets better at night, but those will takr their time coming.

Ze goddess

Yup, while cleaning up Picasa I found the pics of her concert. How could I not put them up? This is also note to self to try and fiddle more with camera for night shots and otherwise. I tend to thrive on daylight. Which is why if I miss taking my shot before the sun goes down, I... uhmm... save the day by putting up older pics? :) Well, this shall be inspiration enough.

Notes: Of course at any concert, part of the rush is also the mad crowds you're surging along with. I like how in some of the snaps, even though she's in the foreground there are parts of heads and hands here and there in the frame. Apologies if they shook slightly, but it was way hard holding a camera, whipping head about, screaming at the top of my lungs and desparately trying to ignore an urgent need to pee after being two ciders down and stuck right up in front by the grates (which was awesome until the sensation kicked in and the reality of the distance from the loos hit).

Tarazaaaaaan

No, no, no nekkid pictures of people swinging about. My flat has a little entryway outside the main door, and the New Flatmate has it all set up with plants and the like. Coming in I noticed the pretty creeper with its little white flowers shining like stars on the trellis.

The point here is to get the feeling of the creeper swinging down at you, almost as if someone had untied it from the top and it was falling onto you. I also wanted the depth that shows the chick blinds behind the creeper.

Ok, fine. Cheated too.

Righto, my time to fall prey. Today, while sorting the monstrous mess I've made in Picasa, in an attempt to organize my photos, I couldn't resist picking from the lot. I did well to take only two. These are from my trip to Thekkady and Kumarakom with my family last year.

Pic 1: Thekkady lake at 7 am on an August morning
Pic 2: Decadence defined- Kumarakom

Notes: I just felt like putting up some landscape shots, hence. The first I love for just the blend of water and sky. The lake was so perfectly still that the mirror image was startling. The second for its almost postcard like quality- all the elements in that frame work very well I thought.

Light and Shade

In the process of my hard-earned Saturday lazing in bed I noticed that my new pretty bedside lamp does wonderful things with my curtains.

But wait, you say. What curtains? That's why I love this one, it almost tricks you into thinking the curtain is just another side of the lamp. Light, check; shade, check; perspective, check; texture, check.

This one is a little better with showing the play. For one thing, I wanted the fabric to show as fabric, and the patterns of thick and thin, and the wave on the curtains, to show up, sort of like relief. I also really wanted the blue to show up, which was the hardest part of the entire thing, because the white balance on my camera went nuts and it kept showing up as steel grey. ANNOYING. 

I realised that the problem was the temperature, but then it was a problem getting the light to glow in that warm way while keeping the blue. Phew. Finally did it.

Foot fetish?

You know in those quizes when people ask what is the first thing you notice about someone? Well for no apparant reason, I always see the feet. I still can't quite figure out why, since I don't have a shoe fetish or anything remotely close to it. Humm... anyway....

I was napping last evening when I suddenly looked down at these joothis sitting below the window as the light came cascading in. And the rest, as they say, is history.

They were my sole buy from my trip to Amritsar last year. Surprisingly comfortable, shoe-bite less so far, and actually make my pretty ugly feet look dainty and delicate. After all, if not for the land of joothis, where else could I possibly find a pair that worked for me?

Notes: Wanted to get the light filtering through the cutouts in the joothis themselves (pic 1), and their shape (pic 2) - In the 2nd angle, I thought the  almost aladdin-slipper like shape came through. Did it?

More material!

Inspired by the mungi. From my last trip to Shilparamam, which, in my defence, I only looked at yesterday!

Cheating?

Ok so this one is was for the food blog, because I made random pulao, only it didn't turn out too well so clearly I'm not posting the recipe anymore. Didn't want to miss in my first week!