Window of Nostalgia

Window of Nostalgia, a photo by hdvegas on Flickr.

This is a picture of one of the ten screen-windows of the Sidi Saiyyed mosque, built in 1571, located in my hometown Ahmedabad, India. This intricately carved stone screen window depicting intertwined branches of a tree is called “Sidi Saiyyed Ni Jali”. I made this picture during my trip to India last year. The title says the rest…

Serenity

This picture was taken near the Guánica State Forest (Spanish: Bosque Estatal de Guánica) which is a subtropical dry forest located in southwest Puerto Rico island.

Quality is more important than quantity

In this digital world, when the price of the memory cards and hard drives are constantly dropping, everybody, including me, tend to take numerous pictures, which we would not have taken otherwise (especially, when using films). As a matter of fact, this is one of the biggest advantages of digital photography. The other advantages of the digital photography include the ease of reviewing, organizing, managing, editing and sharing pictures. There are so many free software and websites such as Picasa, iPhoto, Flickr, etc. that allow us to do perform these essential steps. However, most people ignore these essential steps and their workflow include - clicking, downloading and sharing. We get emails and links from our friends and family sharing hundreds of pictures of their vacations or the events they participated in. The perennial excuse is: “We did not get time to arrange and select the pictures…” But they expect us to spend time to go through and enjoy bunch of mediocre pictures that we cannot relate to.

Quality is more important than quantity. Following is a quote from the book –  “Visual Poetry A Creative Guide for Making Engaging Digital Photographs by Chris Orwig”:  We [photographers] are good at collecting, too, but sometimes we don’t know how to let go. The best photographers in the world drop images in a fury...It is not enough to take award-winning photographs. We need to know how to find them…to proceed by elimination-to know how to discard, as the gambler says, that is the great technique of selection. 

Recently, I was helping my buddy Jacob edit some of his pictures that he made during his Alaska Trip. Below are couple of examples of “before and after” editing of some of his favorite pictures. It is clear how bit of editing – auto toning, adjusting white balance and playing with some of the readily available tools can make a big difference.

In my opinion…reviewing, ranking (weeding out pictures) and editing pictures should be essential part of any photographer’s workflow.

P.S These pictures were edited in Lightoom

Zoey means Life

It has been almost three months since I last blogged. Most righteous thing to do would be start blogging again by dedicating this blog to my beautiful daughter - Zoey. Spending time with Zoey has allowed me to make some amazing memories and images of my favorite new subject - "Zoey". This video is a compilation of some of my favorite images that I made during the hospital stay when Zoey was born.

P.S. The meaning of name Zoey is Life and the origin of the name is Greek.