Hint of colour

You know I realise that there are wideangle people and there are telephoto people -- that is, people who tend to prefer wideangle lenses or people who tend to prefer long telephoto lenses. I'm firmly in the wideangle category and I usually have more shots at wideangle and medium telephoto focal lengths than at the full 200mm end of my Nikkor AF-S 18-200mm.

However, occasionally, I actually do find a chance to take a shot at 200mm on my lens, and this is one of them. The two people standing there are actually way up at the roof of a building and I was on the ground. I noticed how striking the image was with the lady in red against an almost completely monochromatic background of metal sheeting. Of the two shots I took, this one seemed to me had the best composition. It would have been better I suppose if the two people were looking towards the camera instead of away, but I couldn't very well shout and ask them to look my way! :)

Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Dom Panorama

As the few readers of this photoblog must have noticed by now, I'm always enamoured with doing panoramas of the places I've visited. I guess it all dates back to an article I read, when I was a teen, in Practical Photography about a so-called Hockney Joiner. For those not in the know, David Hockney is a famous British artist who also took photographs and created what is called a "Joiner" -- the thing about Hockney's joiners is that they were simply brilliant -- they didn't join properly and in fact were shot from different positions and focal lengths then joined together into a collage. The brilliant part is that even though they were put together in a seemingly haphazard fashion, they actually made sense as a whole. Very interesting!

Anyway, it was because of Hockney Joiners that I started taking photos in school and joining them up like this, although unfortunately, none of that work still survives today since it was all on film and prints and is now lost somewhere. As a result of this, I've had an interest in making joiners ever since.

While my shot of the Kohln Dom in Germany is far from being a Hockney Joiner, I really like the weird perspective this particular one gives me. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6VR

Having a nap

I thought this picture was pretty cute -- the baby seems to be extremely well rested! Anyway this shot was taken at the Dom in Cologne -- the father obligingly allowed me to take this photo. D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Cologne Bierhaus

On the day of our arrival in Cologne, we stopped by at various pubs for food and beer. Now I don't normally drink, but the beer in Germany is so good I really had to make an exception. Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 12-24mm f/4

Ledge of lenses

I'm pretty happy with this shot I took at Photokina in Cologne, Germany -- it's perfectly framed and exposure was good and the focus was very sharp. This isn't such a big deal normally, until you consider that the photo was a grab shot in dim lighting conditions and I only had a split second to shoot off two frames of this lady before she walked away. The only thing I don't like about it is that it's practically an ad for Canon lenses. :) Nikon D200, AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR

Leafy Symmetry

Sorry for the lack of updates -- I recently switched my main monitor from a regular LCD monitor to a HDTV and am still colour calibrating it and tweaking it properly for Photoshop and critical work.

Anyway, here's a shot I took only a few days ago -- this photo is almost a straight conversion from an NEF of my Neem tree sapling which I'm trying to grow. The reason for this shot is that I was struck by how symmetrical the leaves of this sapling were. The standard set up here for shots of this type -- I had a wireless SB600 flash behind a translucent Ikea breakfast-in-bed table and used my favourite 60mm Micro-Nikkor for the shot. The thing about macro is that you really have to control framing, focus and depth-of-field carefully --this shot is actually as framed in the camera, without any cropping at all. As for focussing and aperture, I shot a number of images at different apertures till I could get all the leaves at least mostly in focus. Nikon D200, AF Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8.