In His Own Image -II

I havent grown much from my previous post on the same genre of photography - portraits. Its still people I know, I like, and connect with - that makes it a whole lot easier to capture their moments and expressions.

The dude of sandy Doha - Sandeep

Silent aspirations and Secret ambitions - Sadhana

Eyeball confrontations of a curious kind - Nithya

Arun, Praveen and Ravi - three friends at the crossroads of life

Dreams in a Desert

One of the most exciting days I have lived thru- a night's stay in a desert camp. Accompanied by my old schoolmate Ajay, we started from the skyscraping city of Dubai, we were taken farther and farther away from civilisation and closer into the desert. The first offer was some dune-bashing adventure on four-wheel drives which was one exhilarating ride - needs to be experienced to be understood.

Then in a desert camp we stayed in the evening, watched a belly-dancer perform, ate a sumptuous dinner and spent the night playing party games and going for long walks in the dead of the night, and even wrestling with our feet in desert soccer.. Fortunately for us there was a merry group of expatriate Indian families based in Dubai, who stayed overnight too, and offered great company.

After all the fun of the previous night, I got down to business, woke up at 5.45am and struggling against the chill and the wind shot a series of photographs covering the camp and the desert around it.


Sleeping Dune and Rising Sun




Subdued by Helios

Across the sea

Cornered !



Hook up on a Shisha
Lost in time, but found again




All hard work for a deserving breakfast



A solid friend in an unforgiving terrain and an unforgettable adventure

A dune-bashing experiment

Taste of adventure


The G-forces


No Traffic jams here !


A modern caravan on a frequented path



Who is the ship-of-the-desert actually ?

Costliest yacht ever anchored !

Unlike the patterns of desert sand..

Three Musketeers ? or மூவேந்தர் ?

சென்னையில் ஒர் மழைக்காலம்

சென்னையிலும் ஒரு மழைக்காலம் !!

Camerathons

This year has been a year of marathons for me-before you start to wonder what kind of devil has gotten into me, its not always the running type, but other types of marathons too. Surprised ?

Canon conducted what they call a photo marathon a while ago, which was well attended by a trigger happy battalion consisting of 600+ SLR-toting photographers with fancy L-series pro lens to serious amateurs with the newest prosumer cameras. The task was simple - one theme to shoot for every three hours, and four themes for the day. But the transport, locations, scope and means were left to the imagination of the photographers, and so were the ways to counter the pain in the limbs and lower back at the end of the day !

The first topic was the toughest one for me - 'Faces'
In a city of 4 million people, there were faces all around me. But somehow I'm yet to crack the code of successful portraits of complete strangers, especially the candid variety. So I resorted to my best resort - allegory and abstract.


Flight to the end of the tunnel



Unity


MAD about ONE



The second theme was outrageously simple ! 'Power - simply RED'.
For a moment, I considered buying some kinda cheap red filter and shoot the same things that I always shoot. But then I managed to put a special filter to my eye, which would only look at and respond only to red coloured subjects.

Fuzzy Red Holes


A little red corner


Melonious dunes


Strumming in Maroon


Simply Red




6 hours of photographing was already draining, especially on a warm, humid, hazy Singaporean day. The third topic demanded more of such outdoorsy photo-taking - 'A Slice of History'.
We started a trek along the oldest parts of Singapore's 200 or so years of history, shooting the last remnants of old preserved buildings, and the reminders of Singaporean history.


Suspended Animation

Eternal wait

A colourful lesson in history


Raffles Realms



The day was coming to a close, and so was my energy and enthusiasm to continue with the fourth topic which is quite an obvious one- 'Darkness'.
Fortunately I was shooting some extra unrelated shots throughout the day and picked up a few for this topic, and just spent a relaxed evening doing a peaceful activity - shopping :).

Can cause other darknesses


No Flash please

The Biography of a Flower

The beginnings as a bud



Time to blossom



In full bloom



Arranged in a Bouquet



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The photos were taken in a dance programme called "People get connected" on 17 Sept 2006, at the colonial-age Victoria theatre in Singapore.

Being a part of the audience and shooting moving subjects at higher shutter speed, shot hand-held with a telephoto zoom without image stabilisation, in an ambience of choreographed indoor lighting simply meant one setting- exclusive use of ISO1600. The biggest surprise to me, was the low noise in the images than what was expected.

All the photos went thru Photoshop Elements, basic fixes lke crop, levels, contrast and saturation. But the 'Time to bloom' had a bit of shake due to the subjects' rythmic graceful motion(also called dance!), and I amplified it with use of radial blur in photoshop.

Monochromatic Dreams

I was talking to a friend recently about black-n-white photography, and started to give some examples on how they could be interesting. While searching for pics from my own collection, i took my older colour images and desaturated them to present them again. And voila ! I start to see a different world..













Thanks Ajay, I learnt to see my own photos in a new colour.. :)