Calcutta Instameet 4.0 and a tough decision

We all must have come across such situations in life where we have to take a tough decision. Such a situation is never easy. Its very taxing on your very soul. I faced one such instance this Sunday. But before I write down about that, time for a little back-story.

Even though I love to shoot, due to my hectic work schedule, I was not getting enough chances to go out and shoot. It happened many a time that I was determined to go out on a photo walk with friends but was forced not to go due to some other work. So, when I heard that an Instameet is taking place in Kolkata, I was determined to not to let go of this opportunity. But in this process, came the tough decision.

You see, for someone with a punishing week schedule, weekend unwinding is sort of a must. Accordingly, I went to a friends place (Which, incidentally is quite a bit far from the designated meeting point) on Saturday night and after some heavy.. err.. relaxation session, I was sleeping like a log. So you can well imagine when I woke up at around 7.30 on Sunday, how I was feeling. I was faced with two choices, go to the Instameet or sleep for some more hours. And since you are reading this post, you can well understand which decision I took.

Now don't laugh. That was a serious challenge for me to wake up and join the team at the designated time. Thankfully, Indrajit Das (who introduces himself as BongBlogger) gave me lift and that day I learned a new life-skill, dozing off while sitting at the back of a speeding motor-bike. Thanks Inrdajit for that. After reaching the point, I was relieved to see many familiar faces. Subhadip , Tanayesh, Prabir da etc. I suggest, you should read Subhadip's blog post about the Instameet. He has done a great job of covering the whole meet in a concise way. So, I am not going to write in detail about that. Just sharing some of the images I took that day.

How to choose a tripod

Hola amigos, como estas? Now that I have shown off my Spanish skills (thanks to Google Translate), lets get down to business. In this post, I am going to discuss about tripods. Now, when you are just starting out, discussing about a tripod may seem a little odd. In most cases, when you are buying a DSLR, the shop keeper will be more than happy to include a free tripod in the deal to sweeten it a bit.The shop keeper will be happy that he didn't have to reduce the price of the camera and you will also be happy that you have received a tripod for free. It's a win-win situation for both right? WRONG. Before diving into the details, let me inform you at first that those tripods are good for nothing and using them may do more harm than good. At best those el cheapo tripods can be used as flash stands but never ever mount your camera on them. Why you may ask. Read on to find out.

So basically a tripod is for mounting your camera on top of it. The most basic and absolute necessary function of a tripod is holding the camera steady when the shutter is pressed. The aforementioned cheap tripods fail in this very basic function. In most of those tripods, you can visibly see the shake in the tripod when the shutter is pressed. So there goes your photo straight to the trash due to camera shake. Not only that, using those tripods can potentially destroy your camera. Normally those are made of aluminium and are very lightweight and wobbly. If you are not holding them, they can easily topple over and destroy your whole equipment. So, in nutshell, never ever buy cheap tripods, not even one is being given to you free of cost by the seller. Take something else, like a memory card as that will be more useful than these good for nothing trash.

Now since that is out of our way, lets discuss things in detail. You may be surprised to know that how many different kinds of tripods are there in the market. There are the normal tripods that usually come with a Pano head, then there are more professional offerings where the legs and the heads are sold separately, there are carbon fiber tripods which are extremely sturdy and lightweight, there are video tripods which are specifically designed for video cameras and so on. Instead of trying to discuss them all at one go, lets break up the discussion in various parts of the tripod. 

First Impression- Tamron 90mm f2.8 AF Di Sp Macro

Whats up guys? I am a bit excited about this post as this is going to be my first product review post. Recently I was diagnosed with GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) and as a result, had to get something to quench my craving. So I got myself a new Macro lens and since I am not at all good in taking macro photographs, I thought of taking some photos of the lens itself and make a new post. But before I begin, I should make this clear that, this is not a detailed, in-depth review of the lens with lots of stats, MTF charts and whatnot. You will find many such reviews online. I am just sharing my first impression as an amateur.

I got myself this lens only a couple of days back. I must thank Mr Prabir Bhattacharyya, a senior photographer, for accompanying me and giving me the final 'push' for buying this piece of glass. (He is a veteran bird photographer. You can take a look at his flickr link here) Though I am not skilled enough yet to take proper macro shots, I still got this lens for using it as a standard portrait/close up lens for taking photos of flower, food etc. (Plus at around 20k, I didn't have much to lose anyway :P ).

How to take sharp pictures

Hello friends. Its been a long while since my last post. In the meantime, I was bed-ridden with Typhoid and those who are unfortunate enough to suffer this horrible disease know fully well how weak it leaves you. It has been almost a month and yet I feel that I am not fully fit. But the show must go on and hence this post. Honestly speaking,  I was kind of getting lost thinking about the subject of my next blog. Then one think stuck my mind, why not write about something which affects the quality of the image a great deal. You must have noticed one aspect in almost every pro level photo. They are sharp. Super sharp to be precise. Open up any fashion magazine and you will be amazed with the amount of sharpness and detail in the images there. Thats one of the key elements that differentiate between images taken by us amateurs and the professionals. Now of course they do not shoot with the likes of Nikon D3300  or Canon 750D with the 18-55 kit lenses, but still, if we keep some important things in mind, we too can take sharp images from the modest gears we own (ok,  not as sharp as the Pros, but lot better than what we generally get).

Tips on Nature/Landscape Photography

Landscape photography is a fascinating world in itself. Those who are unaware of it may think that this genre of photography is very easy as all one needs to do go to a beautiful location and shoot. Wrong. In fact, in many cases, you can take liberty with your composition in street or some other kind of photography, but when it comes to landscape photography, you have to be careful about every element in your frame and their composition. Otherwise your images will turn out to be the same Ok-Ok kind of landscapes that we come across everyday on various social networks.

For a landscape to look stunning, a number of elements must be present in the picture and more importantly, they must be in sync. Generally when one goes to a stunning place, people tend to stop thinking and just point the camera and press the shutter. The result becomes evident when we often hear lines like "The photos are nothing, you have to be there to understand the beauty" or "The place was really stunning, the camera couldn't capture it". A photo doesn't become beautiful just by itself. You have to work to make it beautiful. I am a complete novice, but still, during the last few months, I have done a bit of homework and in the process, learnt a few tricks about landscape photography. Just sharing them with you all now as I have always done. Feel free to add some points or to ask any questions in the comments. I will try my best to reply. So now lets get started.

Decoding Photographic Jargon

We all have faced this scenario some time or the other in our life- We are sitting in a group with some other people, who happen to share a common interest. And while they are talking among themselves regarding their interest, they are using some strange words, which do not make any sense at all to us and we just sit there, awkwardly smiling like an idiot, trying to figure things out. That, my friend, is Jargon.The dictionary definition of Jargon is- "special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand". Photography, being a unique blend of art and science, has its own fair share of jargon as well. Whats more troublesome is, almost all the photography websites use them extensively while discussing things. So, unless you are well aware of them, it becomes very difficult to even comprehend what is being spoken about. So, this is my own feeble attempt at decoding some of the most commonly used photography jargon. It is impossible to cover all of them in a post, so I am concentrating on the widely used ones. If you want to add or contribute some others, feel free to do so in the comments.

How to read a Histogram

Man I hated Histograms. Back when I was in school, they seemed stupid and pretty useless and I loathed making them in a class. Now fast forward almost 15 years and now I am a changed person. I love Histograms and use them extensively while shooting photographs. Surprised? Well read on..

If by any chance, you have missed your school (or slept through the periods) and do not know what a histogram is, here is your chance to learn it again. A histogram is a display of statistical information that uses rectangles to show the frequency of data items in successive numerical intervals of equal size. In the most common form of histogram, the independent variable is plotted along the horizontal axis and the dependent variable is plotted along the vertical axis. 

Still not clear? Well a histogram in a digital camera is exactly the same thing as explained above. It shows the distribution of tonal range of a particular digital image. Histogram is one of the most important advantages of a modern digital camera as we can manage our exposure very easily by reading the histogram. Actually, in modern image processing softwares, there are separate histograms available for each individual colour channels (Red, Green and Blue), but we shall not be looking in to that aspect in this post and will be looking only at the unified histogram. So without further ado, lets get into decoding Histogram.