TRAVELLING AGAIN...

I am travelling again. This time I am headed to North Eastern States of India. I shall spend a few days working on a biodiversity project at Eaglenest National Park, Arunachal Pradesh. Later, I hope to visit some beautiful landscapes and monasteries of Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, then head to Assam's Kaziranga National Park and may be a few more places in Assam. I intend to take a day-long or few days of boat trip on Brahmaputra if such a thing is possible. As usual, I look forward to getting more photographs. For the next two weeks or so, this blog will see intermittent updates, if at all.

A LANDSCAPE IMAGE AND ABOUT COMMENTS AND CRITICISM

This is one of the images of Ramaganga river at Corbett National Park, taken early in the morning almost a month ago. I liked this image and posted this on a photography forum. It is from the critiques that I realized that I had conveniently allowed the mood of the image to supersede all the problems that the image had.



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Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 100mm, 1/750sec, f/13, ISO 200, -1.5EV

Infact, I had turned a blind eye to the negative aspects, deciding to go with the good overall mood of the image. Interestingly, I got some honest feedback that helped me understand the problems, and is a learning that I can apply the next time I shoot - something that does not happen often. Read the thread here.

A COMMON STONECHAT @ CORBETT NATIONAL PARK

Image of a common stonechat, a common bird at Corbett Nationl Park



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Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 400mm, 1/500, f/8, ISO 200

LEXAR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY WEBSITE

Lexar has a Digital Photography website that is a must see for everyone. The site design is awesome and so are most of the photographs featured. The website has - like many other DP sites - tips and articles on digital photography. They have an impressive set of profiles of professional photographers, and their galleries leave you breathless. There are also weblogs written by many professional photographers which are worth visiting. The website is well packed and very useful, but could have been much better with a discussion forum.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND FALLING PRICES

The best thing about Digital Photography is the rate at which the prices of memory cards keep falling. Film prices would never have come down the way the price of memory is faling. It probably won't be long before you find Compact Flash cards that offer store-all-you-can-shoot kind of memory for a few hundred dollars.

It is probably not long ago when a mere 64MB memory card would have cost more than what a dSLR now costs! I was contemplating on buying some more memory cards, and decided to lookup prices at Adorama. It was good to see prices falling to half the levels it was a year ago. A 4GB Sandisk card today costs almost the same as what a 2GB card had cost me a year back. But interestingly, the capacity of memory cards has not increased very much in the same time. You still don't find many cards that can hold beyond 8GB. But I guess it won't be more than a year before you can find 16GB cards commonly available in the market, and not more than two to three years to be able to buy that 16GB card at around $150 or less.

WILD FLOWERS

Another of my favourite images from Corbett National Park. I am not sure what the flower is called, but the grass is elephant grass. I think it would have been wiser to shoot at a wider aperture to get a shallow depth of field.



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Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 330mm, 1/500sec, f/8.0, ISO 200, -1/2EV

PROBLEM WITH FEEDS

Those who have subscribed to RSS/Atom feeds for Digital Photography World may have faced some problems in the last 24 hours. I was trying to use feedburner for creating feeds, and goofed up in the settings which caused the problem. It has been set right now and should be working fine. In case you are still facing difficulties, please do shoot me an email and I shall try to look at the problem.

WILDBOARS GRAZING BY THE RIVER

Another image from Corbett National Park, India.



Click to see larger image.
Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 400mm, 1/500sec, f/8, ISO 200

TRAVEL, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND SENSOR DUST

Here is one more post on the problems I faced when I was travelling. Staying away for a month and visiting a few places that include some wilderness and national parks means you should be ready to face some dust on your sensor. Jeep rides in national parks can be dusty affair, and if you are like me who don't mind changing lenses very often(and hence risk dust) to missing out an image, there is no way to escape from dust. I considered carrying my sensor cleaning kit, but it contains inflammable liquids that are not permitted in a flight. With sensor cleaning kit ruled out, the only other option was to make some effort to save the camera from dust. I did try to keep the camera covered as often as I can but that was not sufficient. As the days progressed, dust levels on the sensor also progressed. Finally I gave some thought about it and decided to shoot as wide open as it makes sense. So in the last few days of my journey, I switched to aperture priority mode(from my usual program mode) whenever there was ample light, so that I don't unnecessarily shoot at a smaller aperture. It did not mean that I always shot wide open, but when f/8 made sense, I could prefer that over f/11, which camera would suggest in Program mode when there is ample light. That way, even though I could not escape completely from dust, I could reduce it by a good degree. I still ended up with some landscape shots that had visible specks of dust, which I had to remove with Photoshop.

When I returned home, I made a sample dust map of all the grime that the sensor had accumulated, in various apertures. The pictures below, taken at f/22, f/16, f/8 and f/4 respectively show how much difference does the aperture make. Dust is very prominent and obvious at f/22. At f/8, you still see some when you look carefully, and it is hardly visible at f/5. Staying as open as possible helped me reduce some post processing or loosing some good images because of dust.


Sensor dust map at f/22


Sensor dust map at f/16


Sensor dust map at f/8


Sensor dust map at f/4

STORING IMAGES WHEN TRAVELLING

When I made a decision to travel for a month, one of the things that worried me was about storing all the images that I shoot. I only had CF cards that could accommodate 3GB and that was not sufficient. I do not have a laptop, and even if I did, it would be difficult to carry one when you are travelling. Some of my readers may remember that I was contemplating on buying a memory device which could hold 20-40GB. I asked fellow photographers from my city about what do they do when they travel. Some of them said they travel with their laptop. A friend and professional photographer, Alok suggested that I consider carrying a CF card reader and burn the images to CD as and when the card gets full. It seemed to be a better idea than investing a few 100 more dollars when I have already spent a lot on my digital photography gear so far. Most of the internet browsing centers in the places I was going to would facilitate burning a CD for as little as Rs.10-20(USD 0.25 to 0.5) and that seemed inexpensive and convenient. So I carried my CF card, and a 25 CD case(which made storing the CDs easier), and it indeed turned out to an easy and inexpensive way to store images. But it is important to scan these CDs before loading them on to your computer, since I figured out that some of the CDs were infected with viruses. It is also necessary to figure out in advance that some one offers CD burning services at places where you go, otherwise for which it may turn out to be a disaster!

INTIMATE MOMENT

I spent nearly 45 minutes watching these monkeys and looking for a good post from them. It paid off with this image, and a few more interesting moments.



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Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 150mm, ISO 200, 1/250sec, f/5.6

SINCE LAST ONE MONTH..

One of the first things I did after returning from my month long journey was to check for all the things that happened in digital photography since then. It does not look like there was anything exciting. Canon's much awaited replacement for 20D, EOS 30D has not exactly found anyone excited. It is unexpected that there is little that is actually added from 20D to 30D, and what is surprising is that the sensor remains the same as that of 20D and there is not much change in the price tag. Whatever be the case, if the list of popular cameras on dpreview is any indication, people are still interested in the new Canon EOS 30D, with 30D getting highest number of clicks in the last five days than any other camera.

A LONG JOURNEY AND MANY PICTURES

I am back from a long journey through the mountains, foothills and the plains of North India. The month long journey was enjoyable and exciting and I am back with around 10GB of images. I came back home and one of the first things I did was to scan through the images. I was pretty happy, as I felt that the quality of my images have improved fairly. Here is one of the images taken at Corbett National Park on a foggy winter morning two weeks back.



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Exif: Canon EOS 350D, Canon 100-400L at 100mm, 1/350sec, f/9.5, -1EV, ISO 200

This blog will return to seeing regular updates for coming couple of weeks. I shall be back to travelling again for a 2-3 week period which will notice another lull here, but I shall resume to regular updates without any interruptions after that.