Showing posts with label Nikon D3100. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nikon D3100. Show all posts

09 November 2011

Wordless Wednesday but with words:Bazaars of Calcutta



linking this up with B&W Wednesdays at http://www.measamother.com/
Yesterday,my bestfriend and I(I often wonder if that sounds too puberty-ish?Then I'm like,who the hell cares?Who else has your back?)  took a sudden and utterly unplanned to our favourite part of the city-New Market in Esplanade.If you ask around in this part of the world,the men on the street hardly know the meaning of the word,but,to them 'splanade is the place for all things cheap,shady and occasionally good.New Market (or less popularly Sir Stuart Hogg Market) is over 200 years old,has been burnt twice in whole or partially,yet it still stands as the busiest and the most cherished shopping district of Calcutta.It was built at the time of the British Raj and inspite of it's antiquity, nobody blinks an eye about the word "new" still forming a prefix..I guess  it's just one of those places that never looses it's charm no matter how old.Some of the oldest shops of the city are in this district-and if you look around under those huge Victorian ivy-laced buildings you may see the foyer of the Oberoi Grand is still cobbled, though with  no hooves to strike an archaic symphony.The clock-tower ,you would be glad to know,has chosen not to run off  -horses or no horses,evening rides or not- and still tolls faithfully at each hour.

rookie attempt at perspective

After some time of usual public embarassment(crazy lady says whaat?) and aimless roaming- we slunked into a narrow,barely there lane and found these beauties.


This has to be my favourite shot of the week.Reason?Can you guess?5 points to Slytherine if you guessed "bokeh".






Showcasing it at show off your shot-http://www.andthen-shesnapped.com/

The bazaars in my city are noisy and often too crowded.But at the end of that jostling is a thing of beauty-the colours,the deliciously spice tinged aromas,the people and their niceties -you just want to get lost in it-even if you have  nothing to jingle in your pocket but a lone rupee.







Linking up with :

and then, she {snapped}
Adventures & Misadventures of Daily Living
and then, she {snapped}
Black and White Wednesday

07 November 2011

In which my friend goes LUMOS!


That thing in her hand which looks like something they would sell at Olivander's?That's a cracker.Fizzle,pop!
This photo was entered into the iheartfaces Photo challenge at www.iheartfaces.com


This is my favourite shot from this year's Diwali.For all my overseas readers,Diwali is an Indian festival,popularly known as the "festival of lights" and celebrated around mid-October or mid-November for various reasons.However,in modern times the return of Lord Rama after 14 years of banishment in the forest is held as the principle cause for all the ladida.Thousands of diyas(purdy lights in earthen vessels with oil) were lit and lots of hot Aryan women thronged the streets to welcome him back to civilization .On Diwali light triumphs over darkness as good over evil and everybody ushers peace and prosperity into their homes.That,friends is only the tiny curled corned of the 's' in shabang!
In India,fireworks and crackers are legally available to the public(yaay?).My friends are avid cracker enthusiasts and they had bought a butt-load of them to be sent scampering into the sky over to my place.Frankly speaking,the hiss and spit and the crackling scares me(you have to pay me to go anywhere near naked fired,water or high places-dear lord,what else did I leave out?) and I just usually stay out of the way.While they were busy doing what they were doing, I scoured the skies for pretty lights with my camera in vain.Turns out you need a hot damn bit of luck to predict from which direction somebody is going to light up the sky,position yourself and take a decent shot.The Calcutta Diwali night scene isn't really similar to Sydney Harbour bridge on New Years.Tragic.
Back to Earth,when I first took this shot of Andy's I was kinda impressed with myself(amateur,yo!) as she was moving a lot(like a hell lot,down girl!) but her face seemed to be in focus with a nice blurry movement about her hands and body.Also,I'm bad with low light pictures(remind me to buy a tripod) but this has turned out to be a nice candid shot of hers as she usually is-buzzing,bubbling and popping with energy.It was just today that I noticed how "lumos"y this looked and at times-happy and beautiful as she looks,(here) she could give Bellatrix a run for money with that insane laughter tugging away at her face.
My second favourite is quite the unimpressive one-but as it is I'm obessed with bokeh.I'd exchange my pants for some decent ones.No,really!

I might make this my wallpaper one of these days!(you want?)






Linking up with:
www.iheartfaces.com
and then, she {snapped}

06 November 2011

Sundays at home

Sundays at home are never lazy on account of my dad's military rule.The guy never,ever sits still.He is either fixing or cleaning something or the other,or tuned in to his work.And me?I be the laziest person you've ever laid eyes on.I'm a truckload of lazy.So,today dad as usual was  drilling away at something(huge D.I.Y guy) and that seemed to cause a spot of tension in Gypsy(furry creature).I was rolling around in my blanket with a cup of coffee checking and re-checking how fatal a blow  the url change hath dealt to my blog.After a while I felt motivated to do something and so I grabbed my camera and found that my dad wasn't a half bad subject this morn.The natural light  coming in from the window was an added bonus.

Dad at work.

















His usual expression on seeing a pair of idle hands(usually me)
And me,with my new glasses!(Oh,a mirror photo-how original!)
I got new glasses-my eye is actually better now.Couple of months ago I had surgery in my left eye.Wearing wrong specs had resulted in ugly bulbous things that not only drove me to a pirate patch but were a bitch to have hanging around my eye.Hence,surgery.Apart from the doctor's suggestion, I understood that the glasses were not right for me because I could not manually focus with my camera.My eyes hurt and I usually left them at home resulting in even blurrier shots.What a pain.The new glasses solved all that.A thousand pagan Gods saved the day.
My dad used to freelance as a photographer when he was young.He was,and still is brilliant at it.Shooting in film,he had his own darkroom-I don't think I'll ever have that kind of patience.I am pretty happy shooting in digital-though I hear shooting with a  manual film camera is even more fun and challenging.I have to try that sometime before I reach a point in life where hobbies not only take a backseat-they are politely thrown out of the car.
I also had plans to watch a play today-however it didn't occur to me that shows for a stalwart production like King Lear need to be pre-booked.FAIL.The evening wasn't entirely wasted though-Bug(boyfriend extraordinaire) and I rolled around our usual rug of funny,heh.

How was your weekend?



07 October 2011

Imagine if it were Christmas for 5 days...


 In India,we Bengalis are the most festive of the lot.And now it's time for the biggest festival of all,the descendance of the Mother Goddess from Heaven to Earth with her children.Durga Puja.Five days of celebration when one entire race goes bonkers.I have pictures.Voila.
Arti-or the ritual of offering prayers,light and incense to the Goddess.

A  traditional Durga
..to be blessed



A themed idol.

*All pictures clicked by me.Donot copy/use without permission

The city dazzled with lights,the roads resembled a serpent in motion if seen aerially.I hate crowds and congested places and the themed idols don't attract me much.I prefer a not so quiet time with chosen friends instead.However,now that the five days have passed,I am filled with a sense of  gloom that I didn't go out as much.But then,all in all it was a pretty happy five days.More pics to come :)

26 June 2011

Digital Extension- or how my gadgets echo my personality

  ..not by Dan Brown,but by me.

This is the story of a little girl who got lost in the woods one day and stumbled upon the world of gadgets.It wasn't a gingerbread house and she hasn't encountered any witches so far,but it has been a fascinating journey to say the least.
That little girl is me(where "little" is open for debate)

To introduce myself,I prefer sign language and brandishing a few crazy pictures to give you an idea of my heightened mojo because I can talk about  anything in the world with non-sensical allusions,except myself.For a pseudo,selfrespecting narcissist-that is a hurdle. I don't have a time machine that would speak for itself- that I parley with King Tut on weekends and go Desi on apparels with Gandhi and have coffee on one of those Boston tea-parties.Yet I try,and this is me trying.

I’ll be there for you( whether you like it or not)
I’ll be there for you to reckon with-online.2pm,2am.4pm,5:30 am. My misleading statements may hoodwink you into thinking that I’ll be a valuable addition to one of those Outsourcing units .It may or maynot be so-I'm mostly leaning towards maynot. I feel as if I’m missing a limb or all if  the dreaded “connection failure” dialogue boxes pop up-truth be told I have a strip of sorbitrates within arms reach for emergencies such as these.So I decided to cut loose and get myself a smart phone.

My Nokia E-5 is not an i-phone and I’m only 30k richer in the bank accounts (for now-that’something I don’t remember having 30k..)My networking jobs are done with élan and ease.I’m notified of new tweets or emails on my homescreen.Facebook and Twitter are just a few pattering of buttons away on the trusted Snaptu.Texting is so much easier and less tiring with the QWERTY keypad.Hell,I could go on without seeing my friends for weeks,yet I must leave my digital signature imprinted on them-and in this my phone is stuck to me like walls to Spiderman’s thumbpad.

Also,remember what phones were originally made for?Talking.Yea.I’m the passive aggressive caller.The first words that Alexander Graham Bell spoke into the phone(and et voila!it worked) was “Please come Watson, I need you!”(pun unintended,ofcourse)-yea I’ll do that to you if I have your number and we are kinda close.You can do that to me too.

I tunes
If you were born in the nineties,or survived it-you must have had walkman,right?A sony one most likely.I did,too.AA bateries and fluffy earphones were my personal nirvana-whether on train rides or on the treadmill(fat kid,yo!).
I buffered the whole Cd-man era and landed up with an ipod 4g.Elcectric blue and sleek,a mixture of rounded and sharp edges-it is me all the way.
The Show off
Everybody does that right?Especially if you’re thirteen.I couldn’t complete a single game without a cheat,yet for a brief time I rejoiced having  Gameboy Advance to tote around.However for a change,I did get to the end of NFS underground and Castlevania on this.Woohoo.
Not to mention my killer instincts while I brought down ducks on T.V,with vengeance!Duck hunt anyone?

T-200 Cyborg father(I could only be kidding,but you never know)
This one is a valuable inheritance,folks.
I’m pretty sure the man never sleeps.He is the last to go to bed and the first up.Has the heart rate of a 25 year old and at 55 not a single grey.He is the exact antipode of my lazy junk-food eating self.I’m pretty sure I’d be snowed by  30 and dead by 35.Macbeth and Banquo folks-extension of my personality in a grotesque,intimidating way.

Vintage Vogue
To pick up on the history strain,to be tongue in cheek and with a sub-sandwich with satire sauce in hand,let me tell you Skippy,I'm a history nerd.I positively weep with pleasure and am besotted with dusty old magnanimous world-changing events.
Treaty of Versailles?1919.My Ram? 1 Gb DDR.
Pearl harbour?7 December 1941 (ironically the day my parents got married 40 years later...hmm.)
My processor?3 Ghz..single core!
Eichman!Roschman!
Windows Xp!Sp 3!
Get the drift?I'm a good person to have under an invisibility cloak or on wire on a history exam(tsk! ).But heavy core push-me-down-heave-ho-digital lifting?Not enough protein shake.

Au contraire, I remember having a computer in the house for as long as I can remember.My dad had one of those gargantuan floppy booting ones in the late-eighties to early nineties.Later on we moved to one booting a windows 95 and I remember fighting with dad to play Minesweeper (scoff!?don't!) or that pixelly Prince of Persia thing.Our home was one of the firsts to get one of those crackling dial-up VSNL connections in the city .I played spongebob and barbie flash games and bumped up the telephone bill, and when dad upgraded to a broadband connection I’m pretty sure I threw a party.
On a serious note dad’s old lenses are kind of a treasure trove.If you’re a photography geek you’ll appreciate the value of film cameras , 55mm micro nikkor and a  slightly different 70-210 zoom lens and the lot-all back from the 80’s alive,kicking,wooing.
There’s a mixture of old-school and  rambunctious farsightedness in me and instances such as these allow me to reflect how, even if on coincidence,my personality dictates and wraps my head around the things I use.
A Picture is a Thousand Words or The Pathological Picture taker
..And with two cameras strapped to my hip,it becomes a whole lot easier.
My first digital camera ( not counting the two meg one on my old Nokia n-70) is the Canon point and shoot-it gets the job done at a party or wildfire outings with friends.But if you’re int aesthetics like me,a DSLR is all the way to go.
I have been shooting some with my dad’s old Nikon f3,but I lack the patience of clicking,waiting and then being totally shocked at how bad the pictures turned out.I’d rather see it right then.Since I’m just learning the ropes and am majorly impatient,digital was the way to go.So, early this year dad got me an entry level DSLR a NIKON(ofcourse) D3100.

And it was a good buy ,for,in a Nikon you can use lenses from far back in the 50s since they haven’t changed their mount (the ring where the lenses make themselves comfy).And,like my Nikon,old and new, you won’t find elements of radicle change in me.Whimsical on other accounts,but not on my outlook or the way I see the world.Change if  be,must be gradual, easy to deal with and logical.Those are the fixed elements in me and it feels good when you have something in hand which reflects your personality.

This post is written for Indiblogger's Change is Easy  contest sponsored by Dell Inspiron Laptops.Change is easy?Dell makes it seem so,in a practical enough way with oodles of oppurtunity to personalise.Human beings are multidimensional and the Change is Easy line of laptops reflects that very strain in everyone.It reflects your individuality.It shows how alike you can or want to be.It's the Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of modern technology with much less toxic and much more fascinating consequences.

What do your gadgets say about you?





16 March 2011

Big Girl Camera


My Nikon D3100 with the 18-105mm lens.


Big Girl Camera
+
Dad's Old Lenses


The 55mm micro-Nikkor lens(among others)


=


1 new hobbiction!(thats hobby +addiction) 




Light painting!Something I'm having fun with.Say hello to low shutterspeed,flash light and sleepless nights! :)



Basically I take crappy photos..but hey I'm learning!But then I'd say I've improved..for even a year ago I set things in motion with my camera..things that didn't even move.Like mountains.Woot!


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