Photographs from Old Delhi

I started posting some images from Nepal the other day, and I will get back to more of those, but I felt like getting some of my image from India up first. They are all from Old Delhi.

The person aboveĀ is a chai tea brewer. He has a stall in a little market at the edge of a city dump in Chandni Chowk. As is typical of theses guys, he was outgoing, and gracious enough to let me take his picture. He was very excited that I would buy a chai from him. One of the best I have had, but I had to not pay attention to the cleanliness of the glass.

I found this gentleman next to the Chai stand. He was eying me very suspiciously. I hung out at the Chai stand for a while, before coming back and asking if I could take his picture. I smiled, and nodded to my camera, and he did the same. Suspicion mitigated.

Images from Nepal

 

This picture was taken in October 2010, and yet I am just finally getting to posting these images to the web. Not only this, but this is the first image I have processed in Lightroom 4 and posted to the internet. Woo hoo. Anyway, it has been a long time since I have been in Nepal, and I can’t believe I haven’t managed to get to processing my images. Never mind that this image, and the next several that I will post I already processed while I was in Nepal.

I was in Kathmandu, walking around the Boudhanath Stupa. I looked up and saw this monk. He was sitting at mid level of the Boudha Stupa overlooking the people below. I pulled out my 200mm lens, and took a few pictures before he noticed me. I felt I got a fairly stern look. I then whet up and showed him the back of my camera. He gave me the biggest smile.

Guadalupe River Cypress Trees

Well, how about that, another panorama. This one is from the Guadalupe River. I worked this one area for a long time. Really until the light was very hard and bright. I had trouble getting much I liked. Most of what I liked were ones I converted to black and white. I’ll show those another time. This panorama was taken at the end of our time shooting at the park. I had just about quite, when I saw Josh taking a pano, and I thought, yikes, I almost forgot to take one of those. I had taken several shots across the river about here, but nothing this wide. Truth be told, I pretty much planted the tripod in the holes of where Josh was. Here was his shot. I decided to convert mine to B/W with a sepia tone. I am really liking Nik Silver Effects Pro 2.

Pedernales River Panorama

This has turned into pano week around here. Here is another panorama that I made in Texas of the Pedernales river. This one isn’t quite so wide. I was constrained by the position I chose across from the mini falls here. The big rock on the left and the sun on the right.

Anyway, the Pedernales river was running really low. Very little water. I was told that there was usually a fair bit more water running in the spring. The river basin is quite wide too. One of my earlier panoramas was shot in the opposite direction and shows just how wide it is. The reason for this is flash flooding. It is such a common occurrence, and the water can change so rapidly that there is a sign up at the trail head that shows a before and after picture that is only 5 min apart. The before shows a fairly lazy river, and the after a massive rushing torrent. Pretty crazy.

A Panorama of Josh teaching how to take Panoramas

This is continuing my series of really boring blue sky panoramas. This time I figured that if I didn’t have a really great sky, I would include a bunch of people. Josh Bradley is giving a little presentation on how to take panoramas here. I figured I might as well take pictures of him. I didn’t listen, but I imagine that he would likely have told them:

  • Don’t include the sun – oops
  • Don’t use a polarizer – oops
  • Don’t include people – oops

You never know. Actually, those may or may not be somebody’s rules, but you never know, your picture might be great by breaking the rules.

In this case, I didn’t expose for the sun, I exposed for the people in the middle of the photograph, and let the parts with the sun blow out. I used a little dodging in lightroom to darken some of the left side to help compensate. I also shot at f/13 to try to get that star pattern. I would have liked to close down a little bit more, but my shutter was at 1/60th and with people in the shot I didn’t want to go slower.

I forgot to take off my polarizer. It was obvious in yesterdays post with the very dark sky in the center of the image. In this image, because I never got 90deg away from the sun where the effect of the effect of the polarizer on the sky would be greatest, the sky doesn’t look as blotchy as it could have.

Sometimes people in a panorama can work, but you need to be careful. I took 3 different ones, and in the other two, people were moving around, and the merge in photoshop lopped off parts of people. It would have taken a lot of extra work to use those ones by painting on the masks to reveal the parts of the people I wanted.

In all seriousness, the biggest tip I have when taking a panorama is to level the tripod. This is not the same as leveling the camera. The little bubble on the top of the tripod head, or those little attachments you put on the hotshoe level the camera. You need to level the tripod. Some tripods like my Induro have a little round bubble level at the base of where the tripod head mounts. I loosen the legs a little, and slowly push down on two of them until I get the tripod level. Now when you turn the head, it won’t move up or down as you are turning. Now, if you choose, you could tilt your tripod up or down to get the composition you are looking for. You don’t want it tilted left or right, so use your bubble level in the tripod head or the device in the hot shoe to make sure it isn’t leaning.

Go shoot panos. And for the love of all tripods that are level, try to pick out at least one cloud in the sky.

There’s a Camel on that Enchanted Rock

I was in a bit of a pano mood it would appear. Here is a panoramic shot of Enchanted Rock. This shot was taken only part way up. It seemed to be a good enough view. It does look a little curved like the image, but the panorama exaggerates it a bit.

If you look closely, especially if you click on the image and see the larger size, you can see what I was calling Camel Rocks. The image below is that part of the pano taken up close. If you don’t think it looks like a camel, then you are in direct disagreement with my 7 year old.

Oh, by the way, the dark patch in the middle? I think I had my polarizer on. Not too bright.

Pedernales Falls Panorama

You have to click on this image to see it bigger. If you have the monitor space, I posted it up to 1400 wide.

This was taken not to long after we got to the Pedernales Falls state park area in Texas. Pretty place. This year however, there was not a lot of water. In fact, you could step over or wade through the narrow areas to get around. Other years there is a torrent of water here. There is a sign at the parking lot that shows the water going from not much more than this to completely covering the rock area you see in 5 minutes in a flash flood. You need to be alert. Well, usually. They haven’t had any rain in this area since December. No flash floods this day.

This was an 8 image panorama with the camera turned to portrait mode. Shot in manual at ISO 200, 24mm, f/16 for 1/30th of a second per image.

Texas Landscape Safari Hipsta Style

Here is a slideshow of some images that I took while on the Texas Landscape Safari last week. What is this ‘Hipsta’ style? These are all pictures taken with an iPhone and the Hipstamatic iPhone app. I am using a B/W film that I will blog about later.

And yes, this is a rip off of Josh Bradley’s video. Kinda. He showed me some photographs taken with his iPhone and I was blown away. I loved the B/W effect he had going. I was already taking iPhone pictures, but this B/W effect really got me going. So, with a tip of the hat to Josh, here is my video.

Most of the images are from on TLS. There are a few at the end from the missions in San Antonio.

I will have another video a bit later with some other images. Same style.

San Antonio River Walk

I think the River Walk in San Antonio is pretty cool. Yes, it is touristy, and expensive, but it is pretty cool. I think a lot of cities would love to have as vibrant a downtown area as San Antonio. It’s a pretty walk. Trees, water, rocks, bricks, waterfalls, paths, grass, flowers, and pretty views. The river walk has it all.

We have stopped a couple of times now for margarita’s. It’s pretty nice to be sitting by the river in the shade of a tree sipping a margarita taking a few pictures and people watching.