Slow down [that camera! :) ]

Well, by ‘popular demand’ [you won’t believe how many people actually asked me to do this!], let me present here another of my collection of tips for the everyday photographer! This time we’ll see how to take an interesting picture in an otherwise mundane setting.

Now we all know that there are a lot of situations where you CANT really figure out a decent enough object to snap your camera at. The roadside is one such example, and it is even more of an example if it is not properly lit [thereby making it almost a pain in the photo-clicking-finger to even think of taking a picture there]. But fear not! (for you are a reader of this blog :P)…

A different angle, coupled with a simple setting of the shutter speed + ISO and off you’re ready to go. We’ve already covered ISO in an earlier post, and this time we’ll hint upon ‘shutter speed’.
In the most layed of man’s terms shutter speed is simply the speed at which your camera clicks a picture… a (s)lower shutter speed thus could mean you’ll probably get a picture that’s got a blurry or in-motion kind of effect.

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Check this out. Picture 1 above was taken on a dimly lit road, (at an unusual angle) with only the ISO set to 100. We’ve got a fine looking picture of a car’s headlights there. Now add to this combination, the power of a slow shutter speed and the next car that passed by (in the opposite direction), seemed like more of a rocket in action in Picture 2 below.

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR FULL (2-megapixel) SIZE]

As always. the results ARE but interesting :-)

—Abd elAzeez

[Current thought: Could I be good at this? :D]

The Lonely Fish

There are certain times in life when you don't need to be alone to feel lonely.

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With almost a quarter of a century's experience of being alive, I'll tell you what I've learn't about situations like these. The trick in those times is to keep doing your thing as you always did AND never lose hope even in the least bit... eventually things will fall into place... well atleast they'll all fall into that place where they are 'supposed to be' according to HIS will, and THAT my friend, is what's the best for you and the best for everything else.

—Abd elAzeez

Picture Titled: The Lonely Fish – Oil on Canvas effect

...accept the whole package.

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Here’s one of my favorite quotes on love.
This one was pinned onto a colleague’s desk and never failed to amuse each time I visited him.

A little history to introduce this picture:- It seems this colleague had 'inherited' the picture from another dude who’d left the company a few weeks ago, who himself had inherited it from another person who in-turn had been shifted to a different location in the building. All this, within a span of 6 months; and the pic’s seen em all come and go at the same desk. Besides no one ever wanted to take the picture down from right infront of them.

Now having a camera equipped phone can be a very handy thing when you’re ‘out there in the wild’ as I like to call this world (yes everything is ‘out there’ for me because I believe we are all just travelers out here on our way to a better place.. and that could very well be a topic for a new blog post). So as I was saying, having a good camera-phone at hand is immensely amusing, and if that camera is our very own super w750i with modified cam drivers to get that awesome macro-mode pic, what can one do except keep clicking everywhere :-)

This pic never fails to inspire whenever I’m down in the dumps or feeling low about something in life, simply because in the end most things that we ever feel sad are about those which we love aren't they?

—Abd elAzeez

In Disparation...

Aloha people, today I'll post a couple of pictures taken with different camera settings and lighting conditions. The differences in the output I believe, are very profound.

To begin with, the flower in the first picture was subjected to the LED Flash light from my W750i, thus causing a yellow-ish green tinge to the picture, as also some shadows behind it. The ISO setting on the camera was at ISO 100 which meant that the time the photo-sensor would take to capture an exposure was quite less (in lay man's terms), thus leading to an under-exposed picture with the given lighting conditions. The white-balance setting was at 'Daylight' for this one, causing a mellowed overtone.

The second picture however, used only the lighting from a tube-light right above the subject (yes, it pays to turn off your own light source i.e. the flash at times), and a slightly higher ISO value of 125 (a subtle looking deviation, but very powerful in the given situation) which caused better exposure than the one on the left. This one however was shot in 'Flourescent' setting of the white-balance.

Note that there was no digital editing on any of these pictures.

Click on images for full (2 mega-pixel) size.

—Abd elAzeez

Both pictures taken with my modified w750i [i.e. K750i flashed with W800i firmware] Sony Ericsson cell phone camera .

At work!

If the comedy of errors of sharing a common extension at work didn't provide enough material to blog for, it seems that our hero's Clark Kent-ish alter-ego has something else to brag about.

There's been a spate of unusual visitors at his desk in recent times, and he doesn't seem to waste even a micro-second in pulling out his famed mobile phone cam (Sony Ericsson W750i now with updated cameradriver 1.3beta9 by SPU) and taking that one precarious shot at them before they escape into the eternal oblivion from whence they all seemed to have come from (that is, assuming his boss isn't around right then :)...

OK. OK. Ridiculously framed sentences apart, here we've posted two little visitors from tiny-land that Abd's captured in his cell phone. The 8-legged wonder at the top is called 'Arachnid at Work', while the reptile down below is named 'Thin Lizzy' after the Metallica cover of the track called Cowboy by the band Thin Lizzy (anybody got brighter ideas for a name?)

P.S. Don't mind the image quality please, there's just this much time to pull out the cam, frame the subject, reduce the shutter speed, (possibly) change the ISO level from 100 upwards for that perfect exposure, focus the lens and then shoot... in MACRO-MODE!

P.S.2. Clicking on the pictures will open them up in full (2 mega-pixel) resolution.

Step Away From That Thing!...?

Abd's takes

on Safety Warnings

Safety warnings Safety warnings, everywhere, everywhere
Safety warnings Safety warnings, here and there!

With all due respect, it is still at times a matter of amusement to find an odd safety sign hanging around in the most unusual of places. At first glance, some of these signs seem really out of place and incomprehendible to the (lay?) man… the one who knoweth not much about their necessity. [Why is he called 'lay' BTW? And why a man at that? (That thought may call for another blog post it seems)]

Anyways, there was this one sign our hero —Mr Katîb of course, who else did you expect?— saw on the left wing of the Singapore Airlines plane during his flight from Mumbai to Singapore earlier this year. It said right there, ‘No Step’.

Now why on earth (or should it be ‘why on air’ since everyone was flying?) would someone —happily sitting in the coveted window seat— want to step out onto the wing? Or why would he look for a step when all he could see was a flat white wing? Would it be termed stepping onto someone’s foot if he wanted to step out and use the wing as a stepping stone to reach a better place? What did the plane-makers think of when they put that sign on there? And could there be another such sign on the other wing as well?...

Alas, the universe is filled with baffling mysteries like these and more baffling is the fact that not many people actually realize what silent mockery that is made of them every single time they sit on that window-seat, pull out their camera-equipped cell phones, take a picture of the wing (because that is all you can see there…), and quietly think to themselves ‘yes I am not going to step out there no matter how tempting it is, or how ugly the air-hostesses be’… Speaking of, right after that picture was taken, one of those dames actually asked our hero to turn off his beloved w750i phone ‘for safety reasons, or please step up to speak to the captain’. I guess that is when he realized the ‘no step’ could have been to remind camera-phone wielders that there is a captain on the plane…

—Abd elAzeez

As always, picture taken from Abd's modified Sony Ericsson W750i

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The copyrighted [mini?] series titled Abd's takes, is a collection of humorous blog posts comprising of completely original but wierd/ obnoxious/ unfathomable/ and seldom-light-hearted tid-bits of humor that are a product of my own twisted mind.

Feel free to use them where-ever you want to, just don't forget to 'quote the author' (in simpler terms, mention me!)If you don't, then bad things might happen to you; things like forgetting the punch-line when in the middle of an elaborately told joke, or meeting an audience-member who knows the answers to all of your original 'amusing-riddles'.

:-)

Focus!

Sometimes all we need do is set focus on the one thing that is most important to us.
More often than not we are so engrossed in gathering other 'details' that we tend to lose sight of our main goals, and at times that engrossment is so much that try however we may, we cannot get ourselves to see the main object in 'the big picture' clearly. The best practice to thus follow is set priorities in life, and then focus on them with our best.

—Abd elAzeez

Picture taken from Abd's modified Sony Ericsson W750i (i.e. Sony Ericsson K750i flashed with W800 firmware, customized with W810i sound drivers and Super Camera driver 8.5.2 by ChengRong)