Life inside the gates

palm-fisheye-hdr-bilateral.jpg
Originally uploaded by Dopeyrizer.

An HDR fisheye view to Palm Meadows community under cloudy skies of dying monsoon season. About 500m in each direction, India.

Saturday morning outside the Palm Meadows gates

Sat down outside the Palm Meadows (community where we live) gates to capture a little taste of India. The contrast between life inside the gated community and what goes on outside is truly striking - smells, sounds and sights are totally different. While I definitely like the real India it's also nice to be able to escape from it when there's just too much of everything to digest. Some of the "models" that noticed me taking pictures were less than amused by the photo shoot, but most people just smiled.

Mysore photos without a clever title

A slide set of photos from our trip to Mysore this weekend. More explanations to follow when I'm a bit less tired. Zzzzzzz.

Fly me to the moon, let me sing among the stars

moon-1080p.JPG
Originally uploaded by tormave.

My DSLR photography 101 continues with trying to get a good picture of the moon. I've been taking quite a few moon shots this week with the 70-300mm lens and this is the best one yet, shot from our upstairs balcony with the camera on a monopod.

The moon is surprisingly bright so that even hand-held shots come out allright. This was shot at shutter speed 1/320s, focal length 300mm, aperture 1/8, ISO 200.

Our house, in the middle of our street

IMG_0606.jpg
Originally uploaded by tormave.

Got a Samyang (although my lens says Rokinon) 8mm F/3.5 fisheye lens delivered yesterday. I got it from USA through Indian eBay, which offers a sort of overlay on US eBay to order stuff to India. The prices shown are in rupees with taxes, customs, shipping and everything and payment can be made straight from on-line banking. It seems to work amazingly well considering how many things here really don't.

Got home before dark and took my first photo with the lens. The result is quite heavily photoshopped as there was just no way to get the lighting correct with such a big viewing angle (almost 180 degrees horizontally). While I was getting the sky show some colour I decided to go really overboard with the rest of the picture too. It looks like a HDR image, but it's really all from one exposure. I did try exposure bracketing and HDR software, but the surface texture of the house and the palm trees swaying in the wind made this a ghosty, noisy mess.

The picture somehow reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, in a good-ish way.

Bhannerghatta slide show

Eye of the tiger

IMG_0361.jpg
Originally uploaded by tormave.

Visited Bannerghatta Zoo today with the family and carrying the new 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM zoom lens that came yesterday (Indian Ebay)., While on many photos I made silly rookie errors some came out pretty amazing (to me, at least). This one I like the best by far.

Here is a white Bengali tiger disturbed by the safari bus full of pretty loud Indians and us of course. Tech details: ISO 125 (auto), aperture 7.1, shutter speed 1/250, focal length 150mm. Having a good camera to the zoo makes the whole thing that much more interesting. The Tripadvisor reviews on the zoo were a bit of a mixed bag but at least I really had a blast with all the photo opportunities.

The whole album is visible at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kindadopey/sets/72157624598828147/.

Something Finnish winter and Indian summer have in common

08082010070.jpg
Originally uploaded by tormave.

Winter cycling in Finland is a major drag due to the sharp stones spread across the roads and bike paths. Flat tyres are a constant nuisance. Mountain biking in India surprisingly has the same drawback - there are very sharp needles on some plants and trees and once you run over fallen ones punctures tend to result.

The ride I was on was quite fast that for me after almost a year off the saddle so the stops to fix punctures were welcome breaks to get my breath and legs back.

Crosstown traffic

You're just like crosstown traffic 
So hard to get through to you 
Crosstown traffic 
I don't need to run over you 
Crosstown traffic 
All you do is slow me down 
And I'm tryin' to get on the other side of town...

Me and the farmer

The papaya tree in our yard is soon ready for fruity harvest. For a Finn (or at least for me), having fruits grow near where you live is a pretty special thing. A couple of the papayas we'll soon be eating are properly huge too.

Playing around with DSLR

My father used to have and SLR camera when I was young. It was fully manual of course and usually the feeling when getting the pics back from the photo shop was that of at least a mild disappointment even when trying to shoot normal scenes.

After a couple of hours of playing around with the 550D it seems the automation makes much better settings choices than I do, but it's still fun to have the fully manual features there for old-fashioned tricks like this, new way being achieving the same with Photoshop of course.

Water + sand = art

Here's a couple of beach snaps from our recent visit to Khao Lak. Tidal waves make interesting things happen to the sandy surface. Just chilling out on the beach away from the office gets at least me into the right head space to notice these things. Good thing I was carrying a camera.

Taking more and more of these kinds of pseudo-artsy snaps got me all geared up to buy a DSLR. Then last Friday I figured out that the longer I am without one in this part of the world where every day something special seems to be on display, the less value one will eventually have when finally end up buying one. So now I'm anxiously waiting for a courier to show up with my 550D with 17-55mm optics so I can  spend the evening pressing all the buttons to see what they do. I bought one from Indian eBay, which weirdly feels less risky than getting one from a camera shop on the street. Somehow an online shop feels more solid in this place than one made or bricks and mortar.

This wouldn't really be me if I didn't research this online first. At length. I want to do video too so the options were luckily a bit limited, but there aren't many reviews on the net about either of the two products I haven't read before making the purchase decision (and re-read since).

Which brings me back to the topic of art and photography. Being and engineer the whole thing turned all techie as soon as I really got going, which I guess is OK for an engineer. I think despite lugging much more gear I'll be stuck with the pseudo-artsy genre. At least there's going to be all those buttons to keep me occupied.

Sneaky pic

A picture taken of a cool motorbike rider dude from the backseat of a car through its' tinted windows via the rearview mirror of the scooter rider in front of him. The silly American-style safety warning was an unforeseen upside :-).