Singapore, March 2011

These are pictures I took from my recent visit to Singapore. I realised when I uploaded them that they were mostly boring pictures of buildings, and even my people shots weren't as "poppy" as I'd have liked them to be. So I ran them through Picnik and used a couple of special effects, which I think enhance the pictures and bring out better what I wanted to say. I'm actually really pleased with them now, especially the mannequin one and the neon man on the bench right below. It's fun to play with photos every now and then!

Gokarna, February 2011

I travelled alone. And I discovered peace.

Not too many photos, because I was deadly scared of what salt water and sand could do to my lens (I'm paranoid like that) but these are some of the ones I took, that turned out to be my favourites.

Everyone should travel alone once in their lives, I said on Twitter, and on holiday, not on work.

So here's a little beach for your day.

Missing Bombay, memories of Bhuleshwar, October 2010

Since I'm off to Bombay next week, I was looking through my old photos and found a few I took the last week I was there. These are all from the steel market of Bhuleshwar, near the Mumbadevi Temple, and also, some of the earliest shots I took with my new camera.

While I love Delhi, I miss Bombay like a limb, and it's nice to have all these memories I can turn back to.

Gardens and picnics, Delhi, wintertime

You know what's tough? Trying to get those cool pictures of people moving while their backgrounds blur. You see it all the time in sports photography, but I don't think the kit lens my starter SLR came with was made for that. This didn't stop me from trying though. The only thing I will take "can't do" for an answer with, re: my camera, is video. Well, because it doesn't take video. But, besides that, no excuses, camera! You're doing EVERY DAMN THING I WANT YOU TO!

So, a group of very enterprising and energetic people I know go to Lodhi Gardens every Sunday for a late lunch, complete with booze and extreme frisbee. I feel more like the dudes up there, chilling, while the world goes on around me, and also, let's face it, when do I ever have the energy for anything hectic on a Sunday? That week though, I felt fairly inspired, so I grabbed my camera, put on my "grubbies" and went for it.

The pictures are a little blurred, and in later reading of photography websites, I see it would've been easier for me, as a novice, to stick to the preset "Sports" mode in my camera, instead of fiddling with settings, but I kind of liked the way they represented movement and energy.

Jaipur, January 2011

I was at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, which you already know if you read my blog. But since I've started taking pictures, I find myself more drawn to portraits, or just people interacting with each other. I love my random "arty" shots of trees and buildings and things very close up, but a good picture of a person always thrills me. Especially if I manage to get an expression correct, or capture something I didn't even know I could capture.

One of the problems is, though, that I'm always a little shy of taking pictures of people. I feel like I need to ask permission, or like, acknowledge I'm taking the picture instead of just quickly snapping it and walking away as many other photographers do. It's a dilemma that's raged across internet forums as far as I can see--doing some Google research, I found people were mostly divided.

So what's a (sort of) shy person to do? I went online to Digital Photography School (a great website for beginner's tips, I've learnt a lot just from browsing there) and found this article by street photographer James Maher. His tip was to keep your camera as innocuous as possible, even shooting from the hip, which I wasn't entirely sure I agreed with. I don't know if you've done a lot of pictures of people when you're pointing up the lens at them, but it's never very flattering, and it makes their noses look HUGE. Instead, I hung my camera round my neck and each time I passed something I wanted to click, I very slightly changed the angle of the lens and just pressed the button. It gave me some interesting perspectives as you will see in the last four pictures.

Finally, I stumbled across this blog and this wonderful woman's work, and it made me realise what I want to develop the most in my photos, candid, artless street portraits of people doing their own thing. I have a long, long, LONG way to go, but you know, practice, perfect, etc.