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.

Five YouTube Channel that a Photographer must subscribe

If you are just like me who doesn't have any time (or money :'( ) to attend any Photography Course, fret not, IIN is there!!!! Jokes aside, today Internet is such a medium that one can learn anything and everything, if the desire is there and Photography is no exception. In fact, there are so many high quality materials and tutorial videos freely available for teaching Photography, one hardly has to spend any money (apart from the internet bills that is) to learn the art.

There are many quality websites that give some very good tips and tutorials but in this post, I shall concentrate only on the YouTube channels. There are many good channels available that offer quality content and advise on Photography. In fact there are some illustrated photographers who have managed to build their entire career out of the publicity they have received by making YouTube videos. Their channels have millions of viewers (literally) and upload videos almost everyday. Not all the videos may be useful to us, but it doesn't hurt to watch and in the process, we may get something in return as well. So lets go and take a look at the following channels-

How to get better in Photography

I vividly remember when I first got my "serious" camera, a DSLR. I always had a knack for image-making and even when all I had was a Kodak P&S, I used to shoot many pictures. Thats how I realized that I am being limited by my camera. So, when I ultimately made the jump to a DSLR, it didn't take long for me to understand how it works and within a day or two, I was shooting away like crazy, subject or composition be damned. Naturally as all of you may have experienced, getting honest feedback is a tough job. If you show your photos to your immediate friends and relatives, they all will praise them just to make you feel better. And if you post your pictures in dedicated photography forums or Facebook pages, very very few will take the pain of telling where are you going wrong, because you are new there and the experienced photogs don't want to hurt you by giving negative feedback. So, long story short, after a month or two, I almost shot close to a thousand photo, but all of them were crap, literally.

This is not only my story, but I reckon, anyone starting out in the field of photography is bound to have the same experience. We shoot anything and everything but don't realize where we are going wrong or why our photos suck while some of our experienced friends can take the same picture and their ones look much better. In this post, I am trying to decode this mystery of how to get better in photography. This may be a long(ish) post, so please bear with me. Lets get started-

An escape route from Kolkata..and a unique view of Victoria Memorial

Those who are from West Bengal, or particularly from Kolkata, the place Canning holds only one meaning. Thats the place where all the domestic helps come from!!! I never went there before, and due to this reputation, the image that came to my mind about Canning was not so flattering. So naturally when my friends Anupam suggested we go there for a photo shoot, I was a bit apprehensive. But since Anupam was so persuasive, I couldn't say no and decided to go. Boy, was I lucky to accept his offer. Because not only the place is extremely picturesque, the journey to and from Canning was a great fun.

Canning is situated at extreme south of West Bengal, and the river Matla flows through it. During the rainy seasons, one can get gorgeous cloud formations and outstanding colors during the golden hours. We mainly concentrated on shooting landscapes by the river bank. As expected, due to the continuous rainfall, the river bank was extremely muddy and slippery, making the task of shooting more difficult. After we packed up that day, we were covered in mud upto our knees, but when I look at the images I got that day, I have no repentance. Time permitting, I am raring to go there once again and shoot some more images. I am sharing some of the images I took that day. Please share your feedback and comments on the images.

When the day ends