Editing Gimmicks

How to convert this:

to this?

It's all explained in my other blog here: Click here

Put your comments there, let me know what you think !

The Book I am reading - III

I read two books lately.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Apparently the classic books.

Let me just say I completely failed to see the point / message of the books if at all there is one.

1984 by George Orwell is next in line.

On second thoughts, I should just stick to comic books.

It's about the birds ...

Yep, It's about the birds.

Been a long time since I wrote anything here... Oh, well.

Recently went to Bandipur, though didn't see a tiger, I saw couple of magnificent birds.

Crested Hawk Eagle

Another shot of the same

And, then there was Crested Serpent Eagle

I had never seen these birds in the wild before !

Anybody ready to gift me this ?

(Clicking on the above pics will take you to my flickr pages.)

Quote for the day ...

"If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?"

So true, so true ...

Stolen from here...

My own website !!

Woohooo !!!

Everybody, go to http://mylittlefinger.in ! [UPDATE: Don't bother. It's not mine anymore :) ]

That's my site !! Although nothing much there right now, I promise I'll show off all my CSS/html skills there soon :-)

Woo hoo !!!

Did you know

this word?

"Ominous"

My client at the office used this on a conversation and I had to quickly google it to understand ...

:(

How to shoot lightning!

or to be precise, how I managed to capture lighting on my camera :-)

Okay, this might be a lengthy post, you've been warned ...

So, another weekend, and as usual I am wondering what to do. But today, Bangalore weather has been nice... It started to drizzle in the evening. And lighting ...

So I took my camera out, put my 18-55 mm lens on that, and set it up on my rarely used tripod.

Alright, lightning was predominant on east side and sky was full of clouds :( Once in a while I could see lightning clearly, but had no idea how to shoot it.

So, I set my shutter speed to max, ie 30 seconds and to compensate that I kept the aperture to low. f22 me thinks.

But, no luck. All I could capture was some light pollution from Bangalore night sky and some residual light from the lightnings. Even after 5-6 attempts.

Clearly, higher exposure was not going work.

And I started to lower the exposure gradually, still no luck. And now clouds were moving towards south. And it started to drizzle heavily.

Armed with an umbrella, I continued on my quest to capture the elusive lighting.

By now, I changed my tactics from longer exposure to very short exposure. Like 0.8 sec at f5.6

Then there was a silver line over the clouds. Literally !!

So, the trick I used is to click continuously, with highest exposure that is less than a second. Because, for exposure longer than a second, the de-noise mechanism on my camera starts. Ie, once a shot with 1 sec exposure is taken, it would not allow me to take another shot immediately. Though I can disable it, I didn't want to.


Finally after around 200 clicks I got my first shot with a lightning.

And after some more clicking, here is the best I could capture !!

All these pics are in my flickr page, which you can find here ...

If you know a better way to capture lightnings, please do let me know...

I am happy :-)

Tiny ant

There is was a tiny ant on my desk, and it looked like it was lost. It just went in cirlces :(

I tried to help, but I think I just killed it.

The Book I Am Reading - II

Well, I read 8-9 chapters of 'The Selfish Gene', and I am giving up.

I get the gist of the book, and it is too intensive for me to read :( Especially when the Richard Dawkins (Author) starts to argue about other experts' view.

Now I am picking up another book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson. And its got big fonts!! Yay!! I just love the books with big fonts :)

The Book I Am Reading

Okay, time for some serious reading.

So, day before yesterday, I ordered few books from flipkart.com. This is my first ever online purchase ! Phew !

So, one of the books has already arrived today and I am gonna start reading today.

It's 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins, I've already read some chapters long back, and by no means it's an easy read.

Well, anyway, once I finished reading this, I hope to put a post on what I think about the book.