Vinayak Hegde

I did not have many plans in Tampere and had left it open-ended. When I was choosing hosts on CS I was looking for people who were interested in photography. Marek was a good photographer and offered to host me. I was lucky as Marek has two very talented friends – Alexsi and Tuomo who were good photographers too. In the evening, Marek and I went to TUT (Tampere University of Technology) campus where Alexsi was developing photos of their recent trip to Bulgaria and Slovenia. Alexsi was a film photographer and was manually developing the film himself . The film developing process itself is very laborious as you have to soak the film in water and then developer. Then made wet in fixer to fix the image. Finally the film is left to dry. After drying the developed film can be scanned into the computer. Quite a big difference from the digital photography that I am used to.

While Alexsi was developing the film, Marek called another friend, Tuomo who had just bought a couple of flashes and a reflector/diffuser combo (the round diffuser is seen in one of the images below). We moved to the TUT Campus to take some photos. First we shot some photos near a cliff nearby. As the natural light faded, we moved into the campus nearby which had bare concrete walls. Since I had never worked with external flashes, I was initially volunteered as the model. Some of the photos came out faurly stunning. Then we took turns being the cameraman, model and spotboys .The results were fantastic.

Me	Alexsi

The setup for the photo session is shown below with one flash getting triggered from above and one from the side onto the diffuser to cast soft light on the subject. We kept adjusting the intensity and the distance until we could perfect the light setup. The inspiration for this was the strobist blog. Do read it if you are interested in flash photography.

The Hawaiian islands are situated in the middle of the Pacific ocean and were formed by volcanic action. In fact even today new land is being created on the Hawaiian island due to lava flows and it it sno uncommon to see live lava flows “wash away” the ring road that circles the Big Island. The Big Island is actually the biggest island in the US and bigger than all the other islands combined.

This photo was taken in April 2005. More technical details about the photo at my photoblog (click on Image Info).

Everywhere we went on the South Island, New Zealand, we saw two things consistently, neat haystacks arranged on a farm and lots of sheep. New Zealand has the reputation for having more sheep than people by a large margin (it used to be 20 sheep : 1 person). Shot in Feb 2008.

More technical details about the photo at my photoblog (click on Image Info).

Recently a colleague bought a top, which had a elegant swivel mechanism and was made of wood and coloured with lacquer. It was aesthetically crafted to look like a dancer. I was playing around with the 50mm f/1.8 lens and decided to take some photos. It was a indigenous toy made in Channapatna. Searching I found that this craft was almost extinct and was protected by a geographic indicator. More on this in a detailed post by deepsan.

I had visited a similar factory in Thane near Mumbai as a child where tribals made warli paintings and lacquerware toys (though in a style different from channapatna). It is alive and well but as it is inevitable, the younger generation is not very keen on learning it and the art is slowly dying. One of the bad effects of globalisation is homogenization of communities.

Recently I went over to the Strand Book stall’s 60th Anniversary sale which is on till Dec 28th. There was a decent collection of books (though not more than the typical 20% discount). Among the books I bought was ‘The book of Indian Birds’ by Salim Ali. This book brought back fond memories of my childhood. My parents were members of BNHS (Bombay Natural History Society) and regularly took me out to talks and slideshows (Salim Ali was associated with BNHS for a longtime). It is a nice guidebook with lots of interesting information though by no means exhaustive.It contains informative entries on more than 500 birds found on the Indian Subcontinent. I used it to identify the Small Bee-eater in Udaipur and the River Tern near Bhadra Dam in Chikamagalur.

I took this picture at the Maharana Pratap Memorial (Moti Magri) overlooking the Fateh Sagar Lake in Udaipur. The Small Bee-eater (Merops Orientalis) is distinguished by Reddish Brown head and neck and it’s tails fears which prolong into blunt pins. You can see the Bee-eater actually has a bee in it’s beak. It found all throughout the Indian Subcontinent.

The River Tern (Sterna Albifrons) can be distinguished by it’s yellow beak and black cape and is a noisy and a gregarious bird. It is found all round the Indian Subcontinent (except Sri Lanka) and usually seen near river banks and lakes. This picture was taken near the Bhadra Dam (We stayed in the nice Jungle Lodges log huts nearby).

The pictures have been crossposted to my Photoblog