Composition - as I see it

I have been thinking about writing my views on composition. Of late my commute time to office has exponentially increased! This gave me some time to crystalize some of my thoughts during these long journeys. I got up early on Saturday to give these thoughts a shape in the form of an article. Here is the link to the article.

As always your thoughts are welcome.

- Ganesh H Shankar (Nature Lyrics)

Micro Arts

During last weekend I had to visit my in-laws house which is situated in foothills of Western Ghats bordering Karnataka and Kerala. I just carried my macro related equipments and thoroughly enjoyed the trip from photographic perspective. Mostly I spent couple of days photographying frogs, dew drops and other very small life forms. Most of the images I made during the trip are beyond life size using either 55mm extension tube (two pk-13s) on my Nikon 105mm f2.8 AF Micro lens or using 87 mm extension tubes (added 32mm Kenko on top of two PK-13s. It was just fun. But believe me, compositions are just not easy. With such magnifications we spend lots of time getting the basics of composition and dof right. At times it may be very frustrating.

Some more images from the trip are here. Enjoy !

As always, click on above images to see them in larger size (I hate the blogger's resizing algorithms which compromizes quality of the image posted).

- Ganesh H Shankar (Nature Lyrics)

Mutation, Natural Selection & Lessons from Nature

During my pre-university days I did read about Darvin's theory on evolution but at that time my focus was getting better marks than appreciating and understanding theory. Though I understood it then, I did not appreciate it. Now I can appreciate it !

I have been visiting rocky mountains in places like Ramnagar and Savanadurga. Close inspection of these rocks reveals an eco-system which has beautiful adapted to those rocks to survive. I am sure this has happened over millions of years. Look at this image of grasshopper above - what a camouflage ! How did grasshopper develop those colors and patterns of rocks ? Darvin's theory on mutation and natural selection can beautifully explain this. Mutations of genes causes changes in characteristics which may be heritable. This results in a new offspring with different characteristics. Success of this offspring in passing on its gene to the next generation is governed by natural selection - survival of the fittest. So my guess is over millions of years mutations caused changes in appearance of these grasshoppers - those inheritable characteristics which resembled patterns on rocks got passed on to offsprings which then had better survival rate. This continued and today we have a grasshopper which just can't be found when sitting on these rocks ! Nature has found a global optimum !! Here is another image from Ramnagar -

Though not as camouflaged as the grasshopper my feeling is in a few thousand years this too can't be spotted on the rocks. Here is one more from Savanadurga -

Interestingly nature is solving an optimization problem of arriving at life forms which can survive in its habitat. Scientists took this clue and arrived at an optimization technique based on this principle to solve real life optimization problems. This is known as Genetic Algorithms(GA). It is observed that GA has a tendency to settle down at a local optimum. My feeling is nature can't tolerate local optimum (look at the grasshopper!). If this assumption is true then GA is an inferior imitation of what nature does. I think nature knows best about how to cause crossovers and mutations which eventually results in global optimum. As we speak nature is working on finding a global optimum for we humans - going by current trends in all probability it may be our extinction...

- Ganesh H Shankar (Nature Lyrics - My home)

(You may click on the above images to see larger versions)

Shutter Speed

What is there to write about shutter speed ? If the speed is say 1/500sec it simply means shutter gets opened for 1/500sec and then closes - right ? Wrong !

I recently bought a SB-800 speedlight for my camera and was trying to go through sync speed related information. I wondered what is the limitation for supporting shorter sync speeds. This resulted in some reading. I read lots of articles about front and rear syncs - no where science part of it is clear till I came across this link which beautifully explained how the shutter works. With this explanation of how shutter works the limitation of flash sync speed made all the sense. This may be a useful information for you too !

(Click on above images to see them in larger size. You are welcome to visit my home Nature Lyrics.)

- Ganesh H Shankar

Picture and Personality

Images we make express how we portray what we see or what we visualize - in some sense it is "our truth". I would think deep inside such creations embedded are our own personality, our value system and our behavioural signatures. This expression may not happen during initial years of photography since we are busy imitating our favorite nature photographer in getting that clean nice backgrounds. But as we progress in learning to see things in our own way our own individual traits starts emerging and can be seen in some corner of our images - may be a pattern emerges from set of our images. Given ten images each of a boy and a girl, both nature photographers, it may be possible to correctly guess whether they can get along together in life ! In hand writing analysis (graphology) people use such characteristics like direction of writing, space between letters, cursive or not, size of the letters etc to guess personality of people. Though not proved scientifically they have statistical backing for success of such methods. I would think image analysis can be as accurate if not more.

Other day this thought occured to me and I spent some time looking at some of my favourite images to analyze them to understand how my compositions relate to my value system and personality - I could clearly see some of my known strengths and weaknesses as a human being subtly portrayed in some of my creations. Let me not talk about how I did that! - which is not the purpose of sharing this whole thought.

That said, I am not at all interested in viewing/analyzing images from that angle - my purpose in photography is to visualize and create to satisfy my emotional hunger and not behavioural analysis. But such relations appear very interesting.



Ganesh H Shankar
You can click on above images to see larger versions
You are welcome to my home - Nature Lyrics