Thoughts Decoded

Digital Camera is a boon for photographers like me. Whatever I have learned about photography is through some articles and lot of trial and error.

I have a semi SLR camera from Canon (SX100 IS). I tried lot of permutation and combination to get my snaps right. My camera gave me a lot of flexibility in experimenting but with some limitations as well.

I take this opportunity to share some basic tips of photography.

Following are some of the snaps I have clicked and little description about them.

Moon has been my favorite subject for photography. I had to do lot of trial and error to get these snaps. According to me taking a snap of full moon is difficult. If you observe the two photographs you can see the difference in the shadows on the moon. In the first photo the shadows are prominent. In the second snap the shadows seem to be black spots on the moon. These snaps required a lot of manual control of the camera such as ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. The auto settings of the camera would give you a white circle of the full moon snap and the half moon may not be bright enough. I had to keep my ISO settings to the minimal as higher the ISO, higher the noise (digital camera’s limitation).

This was taken during the sunset. The sky was looking amazing. The clouds gave a nice perspective of the sky. The challenge was to get the silhouette of the buildings and also the colors of the sky. To get the silhouette the shutter-speed was increased. To get the colors the aperture was to the maximum and the ISO was 200.

The color of the wings and the balancing of the bug made me take this snap. To get the detail of the bug I had to change my camera settings to Manual focus (It helps in focusing on a specific object). Due to this setting only the bug and the stick are in focus, whereas the background is blurred. This setting helps in giving the photo a nice depth.

This photograph was a lucky one. There was lot of lightning. I wanted a snap of the lightning. This snap was taken at around 9 in the evening. The sky was totally dark. I did not have a tripod with me so I kept the camera on a car top and waited for the lightning. I had to wait for around half an hour to get this lightning in my camera frame. For this snap the shutter-speed was 13 seconds. To minimize the noise the ISO was lowest and to get maximum light the aperture was highest.

This is one of my favorite snaps. The red lines are nothing but the tail lights of moving cars. As this snap was taken in the night I had kept my ISO to the lowest. To get the lines I had kept the camera shutter open for around 13 seconds.  Since the photo was taken on the highway I could get nice straight lines of the lights. The highway was very smooth and free of potholes. I had tried this snap on the city roads but could not get these types of lines, thanks to our roads.

The above snaps are the result of macro settings of my camera. Due to this setting you can go as close as 5 cm to the subject. I was lucky for the spider snap as the spider did not move during the snap. Otherwise the snap could have been ruined. The best thing was that I did not have to go anywhere for the spider. The spider just appeared on my office desk. Fortunately I had my camera with me. The second snap is that of rain water collected in the blossom of the lotus. This was taken at a resort near Pune.

This snap was a result of the zooming (optical) capability of my camera. The Kingfisher was around 50 feet away. The 10X optical zoom helped me in getting me a clearer and closer view of the bird. As it was daylight I did not have to make any drastic changes in my camera settings.