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

Playing with Light

Light is essence of life so is it for photography. I had to make a quick trip to Mysore on Thursday. Way back spent an hour or two at Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary - made this image there. I had an opportunity to make this same image from the other side (front lit) but decided to spend my time and energy perfecting this image. Good thing is dragon flies return to the same perch often and stay there for quite long time. I had time to try different flash out put levels. For this image use a very little fill flash using built-in flash of my Nikon D200. Click on the image to see larger, better defined version.

Macro/closeup photography is a different challenge compared to wildlife and bird photography. The latter needs quick response make meaningful image. While macro photography needs enormous patience. Our subject stays more or less there but getting the right depth-of-field and composition is quite time consuming. We need to carefully visualize and execute. Normally I have to spend quite a lot of time to make an image. When done properly we may end with a very satisfying image.

Away for two weeks...

Last couple of weeks I was at China. Unfortunately I could not access blogspot.com. Looks like the site was blocked most of the time. I visited Shanghai and Beijing. At Beijing I went to photo mall on Wukesong road. An amazing place with more than 50 photo outlets. Ended up buying SB-800 flash. Tried Arca-swiss Z1 monobal in a shop - an amazingly smooth new ball head from Arca-Swiss - even better than my Arca-Swiss B1 (but its changed quick release mechanism I did not like it much). Prices in China are slightly more than B&H price. Language is a **big issue**. No one in store knows english. The way we communicate with shop people is using a calculator !!

They type some price, we type some other price... after some amount of binary search we will agree upon a price -:). If you have to communicate some thing which goes beyond capability of a simple calculator(!) then you need to write them in english on a piece of paper. Very interesting experience indeed..


OK, finally back home y'day night...

Western Ghats in Monsoon

Two weeks back me and Ashwin Bhat visited a few places in the Western Ghats region. We visited Gudavi Bird Sanctuary, Jog Falls, Unchalli Falls, Sathoddi Falls and Magodu Falls. From a photography perspective it was a very good trip. I learnt a few important lessons. I was very interested in capturing Monsoon mood inside deep jungles of Western Ghats. It was an amazing experience. But capturing the mood in images and photography in general was not yet all easy. We (VMR, Ashwin and me) spent some good amount of time in rain inside the jungle near Unchalli Falls. Inside the forest, blood sucking leaches were every where. There were ticks, mosquitoes.. you name it. Yet the desire for capturing the Monsoon mood stood above all these. I just got away with three leaches climbing my legs.

I must admit I did not succeed in making some images which I had visualized (will reserve them for next trip - may be) but there were interesting lessons. First I was not prepared for taking care of myself and equipments. Lenses were fogging very quickly, lenses and cameras were getting wet, during trip to Sathoddi, my Lowepro bag got exposed to rain. Fortunately I had a plastic bag inside the side pouch which prevented water getting inside the bag. Leaches were every were - I was often thinking about them than about photography. At the end, I got used to it. Light was not at all ideal, exposures were very tricky - light meter may or may not help. Challenges were many - so were opportunities. But I could not make use of it fully. Hopefully next time I will be better prepared.

Some more images are at my home Nature Lyrics

Processing Feelings

Processing our images keeping in view of feelings portrayed - My new article is here at -

http://www.naturelyrics.com/articles/process_feelings/process_feel.html

Hope you may find this useful and let me know your views.

Thank you !
Ganesh H Shankar (http://www.naturelyrics.com)