Water crystals photography

I was going through the Photo-Blogs of one of my customers in Japan, and I saw some snaps of snowflakes which he had clicked. I was amazed to say the least as I had always thought that snowflakes were microscopic and needed microscopes to view and photograph. Apparently, I was mistaken. So, once I returned home, I tried to photograph the ice crystals which had condensed in and around my freezer. Though they were not of the hexagonal fractal types, which we normally associate snowflakes with, I got some good shots. I used my reverse adapter along with a Nikon Autoextension ring to really increase the magnification.
These are the snaps I got:

Smoke photogrphy..

Ever seen smoke rising.. We have studied that air is all around us. We can feel it, but we can't see it. And air moves in different mysterious ways of its own. From a gentle gust of breeze to the most powerul of tornadoes. Causing that little thuds of turbulence in an aircraft to the drag caused by a passing vehicle, air moves with different speeds and power. But, we can't see the movment, unless that is we have some thing visible floating in the air, like smoke or mist.
And to see smokerising, the little twirls of turbulence, or the smooth rising of non turbulent air, is a beatiful sight in itself. The difficulty in photographing smoke is that, one needs to have special arrangements to photograph it, like a pitch black room without visual disturbance, a black background to avoid lights bouning out, an eternal flash to illuminate just the smoke. In short, it requires a proper studio :)
Since I dont have a studio, I tried and improvised. Thanks to my brother in law, I have an external flash ( a very old National PE 205). However, I dont have anything to fire the external flash, so have to fire it manually using a  small red button on it.
So, I set up my tripod, lit an incense stick, turned off the lights and sat midway between the camera and the incense with flash in one hand and the remote control in the other. and got the following shot.

Then I got a spoon from the kithcen, and tried to see how the smoke is influenced by obstacles.

And then I photoshopped one of them to reveal some interesting figures..

 Kindly leave your comments :)

My photostream.

You can find my snaps on Flickr: My Photostream. Only snaps and no blabber there.
Till next time, ciao.

Self portraits

I have been following vlogs of some professional portrait photographrs for some time now and I am really amazed at the different techniques they use and the scope of individuality there is in shooting a portrait.
Guys, check out dom bower vlogs on youtube.
However, for an awesome portrait an external flash is absolutely necessary as the worst place for a flash is on top of the camera where the default one is put. But, as I started looking for flashes(or speedlights for Nikon), I came to know that they are insanely expensive.(INR 35K for one and I need 3 of them at least :( ).

Before I spend that kinda money on flashes and stuff, I thought I will first try out some of my ideas and see if they are possible. So, with a Nokia N73 for flash, and my D60 on a tripod I started clicking a series of self portraits. The following snaps were the one which came out pretty good considering the light source and considering that the shutter was a whopping 1 sec(to sync with the cell flash). Please leave comments on what you think.. :)

droplets...

This happened just on a whim of mine... I had just poured milk from the milk bag and was watching the last drops dropping, I got an idea. That is to try and capture the drop as it strikes the surface...
So I set up my tripod, mounted my 50mm reverse(for macro) and sat with a dropper in one hand and the camera remote in another.. After about a zillion tries I got the following two shots which had some action.
Next step is to capture a drop dropping on a surface. The wall of the drop as it splashes is what I want to capture. Meanwhile, the following snaps are all there are.

Photoshop..

For the past few weeks, Ive been busy looking at the snaps ive taken last year and trying to "Photoshop" them. Initially, I always thought of Photoshop as something to create "special" effects in your pictures, or you know trying to make movie poster like images with blending image etc.

I also thought that using photoshop to enhance or edit your snaps so that you shortcomings as a photographer are not highlighed is like cheating he people who admire your snaps. As in if photoshop is all you need for good snaps, then everyone would be a good photographer. So, I used photoshop to just convert my RAW files to jpeg and thats it. No editing whatsoever.

Recently, I realised that I can use photoshop for some "artistic" effects. I have seen grayscale images with maybe a rose in color and that effect is not real. I mean the viewer knows its not real and still it looks so appealing.I realised that photoshop can be used to enhance your images, to create a form of art which is much more than photography.So with this thought and photoshop in hand I dived into the loads of RAW images I had and have the following results.

I still beleive in the picture being original, so if you see motion blur in my pics, its not photoshop blur, its an actual motion blur :)

The Sun...

Ive always been amazed by the snaps of sunrise and sunset and would wonder how in the snaps I saw, the sun would be this brilliant orange disk just about to set. In the snaps which I took with my digicam and earlier point n shoot film cameras, all I could manage was a white/orange dot or a small orange disk when zoomed.
Also, I was very wary of pointing the camera at the sun directly lest it burns my sensor or the camera.
However, once I discovered the funda of long telephoto lenses and got my very own 200 mm Nikkor lens, I gave it a try and amazing results ensued.
I realised that to get the best snap, I had to keep the f stop really high to get a pinhole aperture and the fastest shutter speed possible which in my case happens to be be 1/4000th of a second.
This causes the bright evening sun to look a reallly good orange with the clouds intersecting it and creating the following snaps :).

My equipment (from left) 55-200mm F4-5.6 Nikkor, Nikon D60 with a 50 mm F1.4 Nikkor mounted on it and a 18-55 mm F3.5-5.6 Nikkor.

Some snaps of a sunrise from the land of the rising sun:

Excuse the wires and the big power thingy..