Cubbon Park Coolness
There was a vintage bike owners' meet-up at Cubbon Park that i stumbled upon this morning.
There was a vintage bike owners' meet-up at Cubbon Park that i stumbled upon this morning.
The human eye is incredible because it can discern ranges in exposure that are beyond the capability of today's cameras. You look at the moon and at once, you can see the details within the moon (the rabbit on the moon) and the glow around it. Cameras fare miserably at this. At normal exposure, all you get is a washed out moon with a little glow around it. Underexpose it and you get great details within the moon, but all the glow around it is lost. Overexpose it and the glow is radiant, but there are no details at all. A simple image search will show you what i am talking about.
Yesterday, apart from being a blue moon, the moon was also at its biggest and brightest for the year. I wanted to photograph it as close as possible to how the human eye sees it. Knowing this was impossible with one shot, i set up my tripod and captured multiple shots of the moon at different exposures. My assumption was that once i was done, i could simply use a HDR creation software (like qtpfsgui), combine the images and get the perfect exposure. It was only after i got the images on the computer that a fairly obvious thing struck me. The earth moves. And fast. All the images had the moon at slightly different positions; these differed by mere pixels, but that was sufficient to completely confuse the software.
To save me time and accommodate for my lack of patience, I settled in on two images. One was made at -5EV exposure and the other at +4EV, with all other settings the same. The first image got the details within the moon and the second one got the glow fairly well. I used GIMP to create two separate layers with these images and lined them one on top of the other. Finally, i adjusted the exposure of this composite image the best i could, in aperture.
Here it is:
Next stop, photographing the moon with the stars!
Trees of various hues, swaying to the summer songs of the birds, stand in a guard of honour as you enter. Turn your gaze upwards and little streaks of joyous colour whiz past, linger long enough to earn your gasp and become a blur of vividness yet again. Heaven? maybe not, but it certainly comes close.
Take a walk in the woods and the sea of green is punctuated with the effulgent colours of the elusive butterflies that captivate you the moment you set your eyes on them. Trek to the top of the hill in the early morning and witness the halo of mist around the other hills, which descends as rapidly as the sun rises in the sky. In the night, the innumerable stars beaming down on you like diamonds carelessly strewn on a velvet carpet will take your breath away.You feel so insignificant when you are in the company of such unbearable beauty.
Trek through the jungle. If you are lucky, you will notice the fleeting glimpse of the spotted deer or the glaring stare of the extremely curious sambar deer. If you are not, you will hear only the hoofbeats or perhaps encounter the great indian gaur boring down on you. Any short trip will be incomplete without a glimpse of the several exotic birds - from the scary crested hawk-eagle to the incredibly attractive black headed oriole, from the magnificent racket-tailed drongo to the innocent looking brown hawk owl.
My advice to everyone planning a weekend trip - Don't come here. Its an addiction which will leave you with severe withdrawal symptoms when you quit.
Photography is easy. Almost everyone i know does it. It is probably the perfect thing for a programmer - the general demographic of people i know. A camera is a sufficiently curious piece of technology to tweak around and experiment. With the entry costs extremely low (more so if you are 'onsite') and the desire to get away from town on the weekends, photography is a growing hobby. Stumble into a conversation among a bunch of photographers and you will hear phrases like 'depth of field', 'low f-stop', 'level correction' or '50 to 500 telephoto'; phrases that will make no sense if you aren't in the coterie. Don't be surprised if you find a group of men comparing the size of their lenses. All you have to do is get a hang of these technicalities and you are welcome to the club.
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