Nature Photography | Creative & Artistic | Fine Prints & Stock

When photographing “almost” flat surfaces quality and direction of light plays a major role in getting textures within our subjects right - more so in macro photography. See the above image and the same one below. The only different is direction of light used. For the above I used light falling on the subject in a oblique angle and for the one below it is front light.

See the difference !!

Why oblique angle of light made so much of difference ? It is because “texture” is characterized by fine play of light and shadows as shown in below two small crops (100%) of the above images.

Next time when you are photographing almost a flat surface give it a consideration for angle of light falling on your subject !!

Some time back I had a request for a few high resolution images of critically endangered vultures found in India by a non profit organization. It may be noted that the population of vultures have drastically declined in India thanks to use of diclofenac by cattle farmers to treat cattle diseases which is highly toxic for vultures which feed on the carcasses of dead cattle. This particular organization was planning to use images of vultures to make posters for creating awareness amoung people to protect them.

After giving some of those images to them it occurred to me why not make all my images of subjects in nature which are labeled by as either Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for use by non-commercial organizations working towards conservation of nature ?

This lead to quick scanning of all my images and tagging them with these key words for faster search of endangered subjects that I have photographed.

If you are a non-profit organization working on nature conservation  and if you are looking for any of these high quality images I will be glad to donate them for free for this cause of conservation.

For more information visit this link below -

Conservation Photography

After my Expressions blog below I thought of sharing impressions series, again made at Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in India. Visit my Avian Gallery to see some of these impressions of light made using back lighting conditions early in the morning.

In an unrelated note, I have added image search function to my site. Earlier I had my site search based on both Google custom search engine as well as a public domain php based Sphider. But both can’t  display images. So decided to write a bit of code to implement image search function for my site using an inverted index. This is the link for image search function.

Life has become very hectic these days. It is long since I have been thinking of processing this expression series from my trip to Bharatpur during last November. At last I got some time today to look at them and process them. I enjoyed each of those expressions seeing them through my view finder then and now during processing these images. Hope these images will bring smile on your face too. As of now I have uploaded about 16 images. You may look at them at -

Expressions of Owlets

At a later date (new images gallery gets updated frequently) you may see them by going up the gallery here.

Once you load all those images using your browser you may want to quickly browse them again by clicking or to enjoy the changing expressions better !

Nature Lyrics Site Update

I have also made some cosmetic changes to my web site

Nature Lyrics

and also enabled my

Fine Art Prints gallery. I plan to write a blog on my experiences with fine art printing so far in the near future when I find time.

Balancing the needs of aesthetics for human visitors and needs of non-human visitors of the site is an interesting challenge. That governed some of the design changes this time with an increased focus on professional nature photography (if this passionate hobby can pay for itself). Of course changes to the site will be an ongoing process.

Good light to all,

- Ganesh H. Shankar.

Of late I have been fascinated by black and white (or near black and white) conversions from color images. Such conversions takes lots of time. It appears that often used technique for B&W conversion is channel mixing. How do we want to mix the RGB channels to get the required feel ? Thats what makes this B&W conversion very interesting.

Not all images look better than color versions - however hard we try to find that magic combination but some images do. Which ones are those ? I tried to find some patterns - prominent colors, intensity levels, patterns etc. Looks like it is not easy to guess. Some images are straight forward but not all. May be that comes with experience.

Unlike processing of color images b&w appears like a more involved art. We quickly become conscious about aesthetics and art unlike in color images processing where we have a tendency to follow some scientific rules. Reality seem to take back seat and also it is not very clear what is fair representation. I would think B&W is for portraying artistic visions, may not be for sharing natural history.

I have created a new gallery dedicated for black and white nature photography. I am yet to create a link from my galleries page. Hope to do that in the near future. Click the link below to see some of my color conversions to B&W. Looks like I will be updating this gallery often ! Here is the link -

Nature Photography in Black and White

- Ganesh H Shankar.

Park gate opened at 3:15pm. My safari vehicle driver and the guide might have decided on the strategy to show me a tiger. My vehicle driver started zooming very fast inside the park and I had tough time to balance my 600mmf4 lens mounted on a tripod. He was taking particular path inside the park and not even looking left and right - this is not the kind of ride I got used to in our jungles. Typically we move slowly and see what nature has to offer to make some images. But here it appeared as if the driver had an appointment with the tiger at a particular spot!

We reached that mystery spot around 3:35pm. The place appeared completely dry - a rocky region without trees. I could not believe presence of any prey population in that region. I asked my driver as to why we stopped there. He showed me a cave about 50 feet below and said there may be a tiger resting there which may come out in the evening - and it was not the first ride where I had such promises. I don’t blame him however - it is a wild jungle, not a zoo. We can’t predict where these gentlemen (tigers) are in the wild. He said the strategy for the evening was to wait there till end of that evening. I reluctantly agreed (and was ready to write-off one more day and related expenses).

Soon after another safari vehicle came by and my driver promptly told them there could a tiger hiding there. They started waiting too. In next one hour about fifteen more safari vehicles circled that spot hoping to see a tiger there. Having wasted an hour there I could not control my self and asked my driver what is the guarantee that the tiger is hiding there. The reply was as expected - “there is no guarantee”. I appreciated his honest reply however. Only consolation was I was not the only stupid waiting there - there were 15 more vehicles and about 50+ tourists waiting there!

Sun was fast going down the hills. I was mostly sure of the (another) wasted evening. Light turned golden yellow and I was dreaming of casting some golden stripes on my camera’s sensor. I don’t wanted a ride inside the jungle without a single image. So I tried making some image of an egyptian vulture flying far off in the beautiful golden light.

Sun was going further down the hill on the west. A few minutes of light was left and I zoomed out and in my wide angle lenses to see any interesting perspective that would show up through the view finder. Thanks to the big party there and noise around my brain refused to work. I decided to make some productive use of the time by counting safari vehicles gathered there! Counted 27 vehicles and a few more were still arriving.

Last rays of sun were getting diffracted off mountain edges. Suddenly a few safari vehicles moved and a few shouted tiger tiger ! I was on the other side of the semi circle of vehicles. My driver suddenly moved the vehicle too. Thank God my 600mmf4 did not topple. Next few seconds of frantic movement - my driver was negotiating a complex path between scores of vehicles assembled there. While moving down I saw a huge beautiful striped gentle man moving. The very last golden rays were still getting reflected off those stripes. Sad, I was not in a position to make an image since the vehicle was moving. There was a total chaos, vehicles moving and obstructing views, several people shouting, drivers yelling at other drivers. By then tiger decided to sit down amidst a grass region since its path was blocked. My driver got back to our original spot where we were standing hoping to have a better view. All I could see was the beautiful head of the tiger. By then sun went below the distant mountain. My camera started showing shutter speeds less than 1/60sec. Good I was armed with my D700 and did not hesitate to push to ISO to 3200.

The clock ticked away and was getting closer to 6pm. It takes about 20 minutes drive to reach the gate. Park authorities levy heavy fine if any safari vehicles gets delayed beyond 6:15pm. I was not sure whether the tiger will get up. Sure it did !!

It got up, went below the small valley and climbed up only to see about 30 vehicles blocking its path. It spared a second looking at all the vehicles, decided its narrow path amidst vehicles which are only a few feet way.

The way it gently went in between vehicles as if there were none is still in my memory. All of a sudden we became so silly and mean amidst this gentleman of Bandavgarh. We had no business to interfere in its life the way we did - still it tolerated a behaved like a true gentleman. I felt the title of the Mr Vivek Sinha’s book “The Tiger is a Gentleman” is so well justified. It exhibited far more civilized behaviour than we humans assembled there to have a glimpse of it.

The gentleman negotiated its way into the woods. All the vehicles started zooming towards the main gate. I sat down thinking about last few minutes and the lesson gentleman has taught us on that shameful evening. When I reached the gate I had a nice mud bath - thanks to speeding vehicles and rising dust from the roads of the jungles.

—————————————————————

To the gentleman of the Bandhavgarh,

Wish I could some how convey this to you. My sincere apologies for being part of the crowd that evening.

I am very sorry,

- Ganesh H Shankar.

Some of the images made at Bandhavgarh National Park are here.

Madras Photographic Society has requested me to deliver a lecture on creative nature photography. This program is schedule during 22nd and 23rd Feb’09. More details about the program is here in case you want to attend.

See you there on Saturday !

I have been very busy redesigning my website during weekends for last couple of months. As you might have guessed I have designed this site myself. From the design perspective earlier version had some inefficiencies in terms of work needed to get images uploaded to different galleries etc. So the thought of redesigning the website occurred couple of months back.

Having spent lots of time working on CNP website I revisited my earlier decision on not using any of the public domain softwares for content and gallery management - like Joomla, Gallery2 etc for my site. Finally, after some thinking I again I decided not to use them :)  because I felt my needs are very simple, I don’t need  heavy weight softwares which I find often very slow, takes lots of time to load pages, a layer below most of the websites using them look very similar ! (BTW, I write software for living). I started the redesign of my gallery software and rest of the site couple of months back with following clear guiding design goals -

1. Artistic Appeal/Uniqueness

I hope I did some justice for now, I will keep revisiting this aspect often - artistic appeal and uniqueness is very close to my heart.

2. Simplicity

Fewer content/links per page - less clutter

3. Speed of content loading

This adds a lot to the browsing experience.

4. Search engine friendly and search engine optimized.

Whether we like it or not website design needs careful consideration from search engine optimization perspective. After all bots that visit our sites for content indexing are dumb. Some of them do have an intelligent coating above their dumb brains. It is very important for us to design the website in such way we have better control over informing search bots over what to visit, what is important, what are new contents,   if I have two similar pages which one is more important for me, and control over lots of other aspects related to search engines.

5. Should work on smaller display resolutions too. As on January 2008, according to statistics 48% of the display resolution stands at 1024×768.

I think my current design of the gallery and website meets most of it for my taste with ample scope for tweaking and modification. In a nutshell minimalistic design with an emphasis on art and simplicity. I will continue to tweak my site to further add to some of those goals above.

Here goes the New Nature Lyrics Website

If you don’t have a background in computer science you may stop reading further since what follows may be difficult to follow!

I felt whole of my web site can be described using a regular language ! I chose xml to describe content of my web site. First I wrote a program in C (btw, I love programming) which took content of my current site as the input and generated an intermediate xml file. An image entry in my xml file for example looks like -

<image>
<image_title>Terns in Love | River Tern | Sterna Aurantia </image_title>
<alt_text>Terns in Love - courtship feeding</alt_text>
<description>River terns in courtship feeding display. Every movement of these terns appear very artistic - be it simple flight with large wings, to fishing to this courtship feeding</description>
<pri>0.99</pri>
<file_path>terns_love_in_space_gd1.jpg</file_path>
<thumbnail_path>terns_love_in_space_gd1.jpg</thumbnail_path>
<primary_category>avian</primary_category>
<secondary_category>favourites creative tg_halli</secondary_category>
<exif_data>Nikon D700, Nikon 600mmf4 af-s</exif_data>
<key_words>River Terns Courtship Feeding Artistic Display</key_words>
<location>TG Halli</location>
<is_print_available>ADD_LATER</is_print_available>
<non_interpolated_resolution>ADD_LATER</non_interpolated_resolution>
<ethics>UA</ethics>
<have_raw_link>NO</have_raw_link>
</image>

Several of these fields are newly added which were not relevant to my earlier design. Now I have designed it in such a way that the new attributes can be easily added by adding new entries to the image definition shown above. For example if I want to show print sizes available for an image I may add a field <print_sizes>8×12,12×18</print_sizes>.

I then wrote an xml parser which read this specification of content of my site and automatically generated following-

- Gallery structures - Different galleries automatically get created based on the image attributes. One image may show up in multiple galleries depending upon its secondary category.

- XML file as sitemap (sitemap.xml) for the entire web site conforming to sitemap protocol defined here. I do think search bots need some help in discovering right content of our websites. While bots are smart from perspective (well they are not!)  nothing like providing a good sitemap to these search engine bots.

- RSS feed (feed.xml) for the new content in my site and my blog conforming to RSS specfication defined here.

The beauty of this control is I can easily add new features. For example enabling the site for Cooliris should be breeze( but I don’t plan to do that for now). This also helps me in bulk modification of the content. For example I can easily add “Indian Vultures are critically endangered” to the description of all images of Indian Vultures at once.

This flexibility also helps me in better describing the site for search engine bots !! I hate that but we need to live it. Unfortunately limitations around indexing technologies are making web masters behave like kids. Other day some SEO consultant working on optimizing someone else’s photographic site sent me a mail saying he has added a link to my site and asked me to list the site he is optimizing by listing it with in my links !! I must say this is a search engine induced behavior ! Ok I am going off track..

That is the high level description of my new website. I did one mistake earlier by not adding enough information for each of the images. Because of this you may still see lots of images without any description. I hope to complete this boring job slowly whenever I find time.

You will also see a new link “Fine Art Prints” ! That will be the topic for one of my future blogs.

I have just updated the site. There may be some initial errors. If you find any issue in my site please let me know - thanks so much in advance..

Came back from a week long trip to Bharatpur and Chambal couple of weeks back. Bharatpur is bubbling with birds this year. Bharatpur did not see any rain during last three years. Hope it rains next year too. Lot to write about this trip. No time now - will write about this trip in near future.

Some of my Bharatpur images (old and new) can seen in my new Bharatpur Gallery. I have tried to explore some creative perspectives in some of these new images. Hope to add more images soon. It is a holiday season for us - I am heading towards a remote village in Western Ghats side for couple of weeks.

See you back in 2009. Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year 2009 !

I was pondering over the question of why some images look artistic while some others don’t. This led to some thoughts around what I call visual contours. Visual contour is an imaginary line on the image over which eyes and mind move as a visual response to that image.

Here is an attempt at describing my own visual process for the above image (click on it to see it larger). Eyes traced upper contour of the bird, went up till it’s eye and the eye led further movement down along to perch. If I trace this as an imaginary line on the image it looks like -

Let me share another image -

When I look at this image (click on it to see it larger), first I stop at eye of the bird since it is directly looking at me. Visual movement there after is not very controlled. However there appears a weak uncontrolled movement as indicated in the image below.

And its visual contour as I experience -

What is this concept good for ? I tend to think more complex these contours are less impact these images will have on our mind - after all our mind don’t want to process a lot more information ( limit of 7 +/- 2 according to George Miller).

In a related note do colors bring another dimension for which we can’t draw these visual contours ? What if colors in this below image is predominantly red ? How will visual contour if one exist change ?

I tend to think color indeed brings another dimension which goes beyond visual contour described above affecting the mood of the image. How do we understand that dimension of the visual process ? I don’t know. There are more questions than answers.

Are contours and shapes of these abstract visual lines and interactions between these abstract lines describe effectiveness of an image ? artistic merit of an image ? Can we use this as a tool for better critique an image ?

May be the answer is yes ?

Recently I was in a remote village near jungles where my in-laws live. Having visited this place a few times now I found a small hillock where a few bats (looks like Indian Fox bat) fly over it every day after sunset. It appears these bats leave their roosting place about 20-30 minutes after sunset and take the same flying path everyday. During this visit I climbed this small hillock for a few days after sunset hoping to make some images of them bats at night.

Photographing them after sunset is a nice challenge. The visualization I had in mind was gently lit bat using a flash while rest of sky rendered a deep blue conveying mood of the night. Unfortunately I was not very successful in making a technically perfect image due to several challenges.

The biggest challenge was time window I had. For auto focus to work we need contrast difference between flying bat and the background sky (there are other techniques possible like remote triggered devices etc which was not possible in this case). I just had about 10 minutes each day when lens can auto focus and sky is sufficiently dark. Sun was setting around 6:15pm. These bats use to start flying around 6:35pm and would all cross the small hillock where I used to stand by 7pm. I was keen on making images as late as possible so that I could record mood of night with deep blue sky. I was less interested interested in images like this below - main focus was to capture the mood of the night with bats in the frame.

The other related challenge was not enough light. My 50mm f1.8 was not good enough ! Flash light would not reach. I used my SB-800 to light them with exposure compensated by +3 stops. I also tried Better Beamer flash extender - not much of help either. The first image above image is made using a 50mm f1.8 lens wide open. At f1.8 and 400iso shutter speed typically use to drop below 1/60s at around 6:45pm and decay of light seemed exponential with time later. After around 7pm no contrast, no auto focus and it was time to pack up and return home. Accurate panning at forced slower shutter speeds was another issue.

Though I was not successful in making a technically perfect image I had enormous learning in terms of realizing the challenges involved in making images at night. Hopefully I will be able to use some of it at in the near future..

Last week I spent a few days at a remote village near Karnataka-Kerala border which happens to be in foot hills of Western Ghats. Weather was just perfect. Just after monsoon rains the place was ideal for macro photography. I have seen variety of butterflies, damselflies among other beauties of our natural world. I have visited this beautiful place for a few times now (happens to be my in-laws house) and noticed a group of bats everyday crossing a small hillock about half an hour after sunset. This time I tried to make a few images of bats flying at night. It was a very challenging task and I am not very satisfied with images I made. However it was a great learning for me. May be I will have opportunities in future to use those valuable learnings.

I really enjoyed doing some macro work however. This time I consciously tried to explore different creative possibilities in macro photography. Just completed processing and uploading (about 28 images so far, a few more to go). All those images can be found in my New Images Gallery.

Not sure how many of you have seen a very interesting recent ad by Canon - “Art and Artist”. If I remember it right it showed an image of a dancer performing with “Art” written near it and beside it was an image of a Canon 1D Mk3 with “Artist” written near it !! I had a nice laugh thinking about an extension of such an image shown below. How could Canon forget about the poor porter (also known as photographer ) who carries this artist on a tripod everywhere ? ! I think without their knowledge (hopefully!) Canon ridiculed every photographer with that ad

On a philosophic note can a camera ever become an artist ? Modern day digital cameras have powerful computing infrastructure within their hood. Considering computers can play and out smart humans in games like chess can’t they out smart we photographers some day and Canon’s vision really coming true ?

Here are some of my formal looking informal thoughts on possibility of camera really becoming an artist.

According to Church-Turing Thesis if there is an algorithm or a program then there is a Turing Machine that can be constructed to run that algorithm. In other words today’s Random Access Stored Program computers are bound by Turing Machine in its computing capability. So as described in the above Wiki link today’s computers can be abstractly described as a 7-tuple - . What is interesting note here is the the transition function is a finite table which essentially is heart of the program or the algorithm. Summary being capability of computers are clearly understood today in terms of capability of the Turing Machine - a mathematical model for today’s computers.

If we can describe computers using this model, is it possible to arrive at such a model to describe a human computing machine - the brain ? Is there such a 7-tuple or n-tuple that can be formulated to describe human brains ?

Today how human brain works is a big mystery. For now let us assume science in a few light years from now will find one such n-tuple representation to express human mind and its computing power. Let us also assume such an n-tuple has a transition function similar to δ shown above. One quick observation that can be made is such a transition function δ will not be static since we humans have a remarkable inherent ability to learn on the fly.

Why humans, I think even small insects’ brain is more powerful than today’s computers in terms of its learning abilities. One day I noticed a mosquito repeatedly hitting a mirror - probably seeing its own reflection in the mirror. It was interesting to know however that after hitting the mirror a few times it quickly learnt the other one is not real and went away. Assuming we had implemented a mosquito using a program and it was programmed to get attracted towards another mosquito we would have seen a bug report seeking implementation of mirror detection logic be included in the firmware of the mosquito because our electronic mosquito did not learn about the mirror at all and went into an infinite loop

The point is there is no way to code all those lessons and experiences of life into programs we write. Having studied computer science I think writing program to create art is beyond my imagination. God has designed a beautiful computing model where transition function δ (if one exists) gets changed on the fly or in other words there is a true learning on the fly. Expression of emotions and feelings are part of this beautiful yet unknown computing model.

How then computers can play chess ? If they can can’t they compose an image ?

Games like chess is a solving a search problem. It is possible to arrive at an algorithm to compare different positions and best move to make. A machine with enough computing power can outsmart human beings even though it indeed takes lots of CPU power to match the mysterious analysis a human mind makes. Problem of composition on the other hand is related to emotions felt in human minds - working of which still remains a mystery. Below is an image I made yesterday. It is an image of the cloud pattern in the sky rotated 90 degrees clockwise. I felt presenting it that way makes it visually stronger abstract image. Here we are dealing with emotions and mystery of learning which is not at all understood by science so far.

Limited imitation of art using computers may be possible but then it is only an imitation not a true creation. I think prerequisite for a camera becoming an artist is we understanding how our own brain works. Hope that happens some day - but my gut feel is it is impossible since there is a complex recursion here - mind trying to understand the mind itself.

Till then following will remain true -

I am sorry Canon

I often hear views that a nature photograph should faithfully portray what is seen by human eyes. I would agree to this if purpose of nature photography is only documentation. First of all the medium of capture (sensor/slide/negative) has inherent limitation compared to human eyes and it is theoretically impossible to portray what we see. For example there is no way I could have made an image of the above butterfly which truly appears like what I saw - either we over expose butterfly or under expose background. Obviously I decided to do latter. Isn’t this a nature photograph ? Is this a manipulation ? Should I selectively open up only background by about 2+ stops to show traces of some branches if any? Isn’t it a selective manipulation then - since people think a modification applied to an image as a whole is only considered OK ? Are we waiting for some supreme authorities to tell us what is accepted and what is not ? We have come all the way from digital is unacceptable to cropping is ok to modifications applied to whole image is ok but not to part of the images to crops, curves a little bit of dodging/burning is ok to … What is that next rule that we are waiting for ? I am not talking about placing a tiger’s head on elephant’s using an image processing software but some of us seem to create boundaries for ourselves in terms of what is accepted. Recently I was talking to a very senior wild life photographer and was telling him I am tired of seeing stereotypic images of xyz bird with feed kind of images and we need to think of something more original and creative. He asked me - “God has created everything, what is there for us to create?” - needless to say I strongly disagreed with him. We are not talking about physically creating something here - but some new perspectives that our inner vision sees and we giving it an expression in the form of an image.

I think following strict rules on what should nature photography be is killing our own creativity. I do think human mind wants to see perspectives which are beyond faithful representation of physical world.

I visited Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary yesterday morning. Light was just perfect and sky was painted with beautiful cloud patterns. Lots of White Ibises flying in all directions. Seeing them I decided to make some images with different patterns of clouds as background. Wide angle lens (24mm) gave interesting perspectives of them in flight - rendered small in the frame with interesting cloud patterns providing a feel of these Ibises flying in their own universe. I used a circular polarizer to increase the impact of white clouds.

I have a few more images in my avian gallery. Larger images with black background seem to provide much better visual impact for these images. You may see them here in my avian gallery.