Understanding white balance

Hello friends. In my earlier post I discussed about shutter speed, aperture and ISO. Hope you have experimented with the manual setting a lot and have taken a lot of test pictures. Basically those are the most important three things you need to understand to take a good photo. But there is another setting which is also very important to take beautiful pictures. And that is known as 'White Balance'. Unfortunately, most of us amateur photographers tend to ignore this important thing, set it on automatic and start shooting. In this post I am going to explain what is white balance, why it is important, how to choose white balance correctly. So without wasting further time, let us start-

What is white balance-

In layman's language, we can say that white balance is the in-built color correction  feature of our camera. In other words, white balance is nothing more than an adjustment to get the color you want. Still confused?
This example will clear the confusion:- Suppose you are in a room with white walls and there are some bulbs in it. One tungsten bulb, one CFL, and a tube light inside a somewhat grey casing. Now, if you take turns at lighting one bulb at a time,and taking pictures of the walls, you will notice that the white walls do not appear white anymore. The tungsten light makes the walls look like some shade of orange, while the CFL makes the walls look bluish. White balance comes into picture at this moment. It warms or cools the color temperature and renders the wall white in the final image. (Warming color temperature means adding a reddish hue to the picture while cooling color temperature means bluish hue). Consider this example-

Different shooting modes of a camera

In this post, lets discuss about the different shooting modes that are available in most modern cameras. So without further ado, lets jump on it.

Shooting Modes-

So what is a shooting mode? We just take pictures of things, what mode has to do with it? Natural questions that come to mind. So make things clear, at the outset, let me be clear that if you are absolutely in ease adjusting the three pillars i.e Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO while taking pictures in Manual mode, you may not care about the other modes. Full manual mode is always the best option. But unfortunately, we as amateur photographers are still not that much comfortable in using the full manual mode all the time. Then the shooting modes come handy. They are basically some preset settings that are most likely to fit some defined situations. Take a look at the mode dial of your camera. It should look something like this-

   

Street Diary from the City of Joy- Part 1

Kolkata (or Calcutta, if you are still suffering from the Colonial Hangover) is popularly known as the city of joy. Now that name definitely baffles many, and maybe rightfully so. When an average person visits from abroad or even places like Bangalore or New Delhi, the first things that he notices are dilapidated buildings, pathetic public amenities, lax public administration, potholed roads, overflowing drains etc etc etc. Add to that the perceived laziness and "chalta hai" attitude of the city dwellers, now can we really blame outsiders?

I am not just making things up. This was exactly my story four years back, when I shifted to Kolkata from Bangalore. The familiar sense of despair and frustration quickly engulfed me in. Add to that the daily grind of travelling in over crowded metro/bus to and from the office, and you have enough ingredient to make even the most cool person lose his sanity. 

How to use the Light Meter and Exposure Compensation function

In my last post, I discussed how beginners like me learn to use the manual mode in our camera. However, I realized that, in order to understand the concept fully, we must learn how to use the in-built light meter of our camera. In this post, lets shed a bit more light on questions like, What is Exposure Value, how to read EV meter and what is exposure compensation. These things are critical to a photo and if your exposure is not right, then even a potential award winning photo will look blah.

Exposure Value

If you want a geeky answer to what is exposure and want to learn complex formula consisting of various Latin alphabets, head over to Wikipedia. But if you are like me and want a simple idea, just keep in mind that exposure simply means the amount of light allowed to fall on the sensor during taking a photo. So a properly exposed photo means one where everything is well illuminated without burning or darkening something. Over and under exposed photo means excess light and inadequate light respectively.

So now you know that Exposure is about the amount of light allowed onto the sensor which determines the brightness of a photo. Now, the next question, "How do I know what is the correct exposure for a photo?" This is where the EV meter comes into play.

Shooting in Manual Mode

Hello friends. Before starting this post, let me assume that you could muster the courage of reading through my long and rather boring post about buying a new camera (I know its too much to assume, but whats wrong in hoping ;) ). So, inspired by my post (and almost 100s of similar articles & blogs), lets assume (here we go again!!!) you have bought a new ILC. May be a DSLR, going by the market sentiment.

So congratulations on getting the new DSLR camera. Open the box carefully, take out the camera with that smug smile on your face, fondle it like a new born baby and carefully take out the other accessories that came with it. Insert the Memory Card and the batteries. Now switch it on to see it coming to life for the first time. Now take the first shot with this baby. But wait!!! There are so many dials and buttons here!! Which one am I supposed to press? How to activate the flash? How do I auto-focus? Then the instruction manual comes handy. I understand which button does what. I also learn the functions of the command wheel, learn how to zoom by twisting the zoom ring on the lens, perhaps even take a shot or two using the Auto mode on your camera. And everything ends there itself. Oh its so confusing!! Why did I buy it in the first place? My old P&S camera was so simple!!!

Some random shots from AHSI Annual Flower Show at Alipore, Kolkata

Every year, The Agri Horticultral Society of India (AHSI) organizes an annual flower show at its premises located at 1 Alipore Road, Kolkata. What makes this show special is the fact that it is the World’s oldest Flower Show in existence. Since the early part of 1828, ever year (barring 1940), this competition has been taking place as a prominent fixture of Kolkata’s happening. This is a gala event where around 2000 entries and 16,500 exhibits including edible vegetable are on display. First Annual Exhibition of vegetables was held on 9th January, 1828 in the rooms of the Asiatic Society under the auspices of the then President of the Society Mr. W. Leycester. 

This year (2015), this event took place on 5th-8th February. I was aware of the show, but being the lazy bum as I am, I would have almost surely skipped this but for one Mr Subhadip Mukherjee. He is a very good friend of mine who happens to share a lot of common interests with me, photography and travelling being two of them. He is also an avid blogger and you can read his blog here- https://subhadipindia.wordpress.com/. He literally dragged me to the location, and after reaching there, boy, I was glad he did. My situation was almost like a child in a candy shop. There were loads of different types of flowers and even vegetables on display there. I thanked my stars that I carried my trusty Tamron 90mm Macro with me. There were simply too many photo opportunities before me, and in the end I really thanked him with my heart. I am sharing some of the images I took that day.

Busy Bee

Buying a new camera

Since this is a photography blog, so I thought my second post should be something that's a very integral part of photography. After thinking about writing stuff related to exposure, composition and what not, I decided to go a bit closer to the beginning. What's the one thing, without which we can't start photographing? The camera, of course. Now there are thousands of camera models out there, so which one to buy? Before searching for an answer here, I would like to clarify one thing first. Regardless of which camera we buy, the ultimate end result will not depend upon the camera itself. Its a tool, through which we capture our interpretation of the world. So, while its natural to think about buying the latest and greatest camera when we are starting out, its important to keep in mind that just like an expensive pen automatically doesn't transform us into a great writer, a good camera automatically doesn't make us a great photographer. There is a lot of hard work, dedication and determination is needed to make us photographers.

The first post

Hello friends. This is the first post in this new blog. So let me take this occasion to welcome you all to my new blog. To tell you the truth, this is not my first attempt at blogging. In fact, this is the third (hoping to get third time lucky). It is said that we learn from our past mistakes. In my case, I will try hard to do exactly the same.

My first attempt at blogging was an absolute disaster. It was way back in 2009 and I didn't know anything about blogging and I started a blog only because one of my friends was doing the same and it was more of a challenge for me to outdo him. As you can guess, that didn't go very well. It simply had no vision and after some 10-15 random posts (which were poorly written, ill-conceived and in case of one, downright disgusting) and some not-so-kind comments, it died its death. I just decided blogging is not my cup of tea and quit it.