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The reason why I love this so much is because I see it as art rather and not as an activity. A photo should be able to evoke feelings, and make you wonder and contemplate both the beauty and mystery of the visual infront of you. It comes more from experimentation than following the rule book.

Well, to the other novices around there, few things I would I want to share:

1. Change the height from which you take the shot. Oh cmon! What’s the point in showing the world what they already see. Ever imagined a how the world looked liked to a dog? or to an eagle? And sometimes, just tilting the camera could mean a lot of fun. Try it. Seriously.

2. Please don’t take photos that the have your subject right in the middle. Its actually a photography tip I later found out called the rule of thirds though I figured it myself. It says if you imagine the frame to be divided into equally spaced 9 boxes grid, then the subject should be at the intersection points of this grid lines. Checkout out your digicams. They definitely must be having a grid option. Turn it on.

3. Use macro. Macro is a focusing option for shooting objects very close to lens. Well the point is not to take microscopic pics but to exploit a factor called ‘depth of field’. Put simply, DOF means whats in focus and whats not. When in macro, the DOF is very shallow which means the objects you focus on will be sharp, everything else is not. This creates an awesome blur effect around your subject. And sometimes taking a out of focus photo is itself beautiful. It just reveals the subtlety without giving away details.

4. Have patience. Professional photographers wait for months to take one photograph and I’m not exaggerating. If you want proofs, look up Discovery’s Planet Earth or Life.Also, to take a good photograph take time to set up your camera and tell the people who are asking you to “hurry up” to shut up. After all you are taking their picture. You have that right.

5. If you are making videos, believe me there is no point shooting a clip longer than 15 secs, unless and until you can’t miss portions of it. Seriously no one wants to watch a passive, oh-so-boring, long pieces of composition. The trick lies in creating lots of interesting short clips. The visual should linger in the viewers mind for very little time and vanish. I made videos as long as 2 min with no clip in it longer than 7 secs. And it turned out good. If you want an example try this great video at Vimeo. http://www.vimeo.com/8728416

6. And yes… Experiment! Always.

To wind up these are the few better pics I found on my harddrive.

Well, not going very far, this is what I managed in my college hostel corridors. Not indelible though. Come next year, they will all be whitewashed without the least consideration for the art, leave alone appreciation.

Where: In the air!

How: Camera set to long shutter mode photography.With shutter open for as long 20 to 60 seconds, the camera captures all that happens in this time span. So with a light source moving in air, we can draw any shape in air!

Challenge: How fast can you draw? Ya. and how big? and top to it all how the hell are you to know that it is going to end where it started!!

Here is small video we made after putting together some photographs in video sequence.