Nature Photography | Creative & Artistic | Fine Prints and Stock

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.

Recently I came across works of a 15 years old school kid named Nirvair Singh. Some of his work really made me think. Here are a few of his images -

Fields of Punjab

Compliments

Sunny Pearls

Shadow

Against the Sun

Can this Survive in this World

Just Before I Leave

These images and the way he titled those images made me think he has God’s gift to beautifully see the nature and more importantly translate them to images. I got in touch with him to know some more details – it appears he just got access to his father’s camera and he is learning and experimenting with it!! I am sure if he continues one day he will become a great fine art nature photographer – I sincerely wish him great success.

This triggered a thought in my mind – are several of us are born with such a skill to freely and beautifully express our visions and some where we got derailed while trying to learn nature photography ?

My little friend Nirvair has been seeing bird portraits on various internet forums for some time now. He told me he took lots of time using a blind and an 80-200mm lens to approach a cattle egret from a very close distance and made this image. This really concerned me a bit – I am not worried about the quality of the image here but I am really concerned about the photographic lesson he has quickly learnt from the net – approach as close as possible to get a frame filling image !

Questions that are currently running in my mind are -

Did our visions distort during our learning journey of nature photography ? Did we learn those attributes which went beyond techniques of using a camera and started imitating others, throwing our own God given natural visions ? Or we are not as gifted as my little friend Nirvair is ?

I hope it is the last one otherwise it really hurts

After a few unsatisfactory macro experiments today morning I decided to sit down below some garden flowers at Lalbagh, Bangalore hoping to make some different perspectives of butterflies and bees. While I could not get butterflies the way I wanted I did get some interesting perspectives with bees, flowers and a trace of a bird too in one image

You may visit this link for rest of the perspectives.

I made this above image yesterday after struggling for hours using a 50mm f1.8 lens reversed on a 105mm f2.8 Micro lens. Those who have used such reversing techniques understand very well what a nightmare it is to use such a combination in field. The main issue is the front element of the reversed 50mm lens is almost touching the subject (couple of centimeters of minimum focus distance) and extreamly shallow depth of field. The above image shows (blurred) stamens of some tiny wild flower. My first reaction was this image will find its home in my image trash since the stamens are not sharp. But the second look at it changed my views drastically. More I look at it more I like – it some how appears to my eyes as an unexplainable abstract art. May be it looks like a footprint of an animal and the color scheme seem to beautifully complement. My current feeling is sharper rendering of the stamen would have spoiled the image itself !! I hate to have a very satisfying image without consciously attempting at it (take vs make). But I must admit this is one such.

Some thoughts about abstract images – what are abstract images ? To me, an abstract image is one which evokes visual meanings or interpretations which are often unrelated to the physical world which the image itself literally represents. In art we have seen two related movements – Abstractism and Abstract Realism. In Abstractism artists use forms, colors and lines to create art work which are purely imaginary (non-representational in real world). On the other hand artists who practice Abstract Realism use forms, colors and lines found in physical world to convey something beyond or totally unrelated to the subject itself. So both form of art is suggestive (not representational) if I can call so – while one uses imaginary subjects the other uses real ones.

Can we draw a parallel to Abstractism in the world of photography since photography by definition is casting an image of some real life subject ? I do think so. The above image I think is an example of this. If I have not told you about the subject and how I made it then I think it is very difficult to relate it to a subject in the real world. On the other hand we often see abstract images of nature – most of it are examples for abstract realism. The below image of a dead tree in water is one such. Here every thing is realistic (representational) and viewer can easily relate them too but our mind (at least mine:) does not seem to be interested in spending time analyzing water and tree but mind seem to be more interested in correlating ripples, shapes, light and colors. The fact that it is an image of submerged dead tree becomes insignificant.

Isn’t it interesting how our visual systems and mind work ? Human visual process has been a mystery. Scientists have been working for hundreds of years now to understand human visual process. The results of those research are not proportional to efforts that have gone in so far. Will we ever understand how human vision/mind works ? My gut feeling says we will not because to me it appears there is an inherent recursion here – the mind which is trying to understand itself – but then it may be dismissed as ignorant casual random thought – which I am ok with!!

In a related note I do believe mathematical computing model (if one exists or can be formulated) of human brain (and of an insect for that matter) is much more powerful than Turing machine (todays computer).

Are we talking about God then ?

Ok, I may be digressing here (we are on the topic of abstraction nevertheless!), let me end this here…

(You can click on above images to see them in larger size)

During this week end I spent some time doing cosmetic changes to my web site Nature Lyrics. Tried to retain my old design principle of keeping everything simple. Not over use technology for the sake of using it. I have also separated macro gallery and landscape gallery. Added couple of more galleries dedicated to Ramanagar and TG Halli respectively which I frequent almost during every weekend.

Our sensory organs are amazingly designed. Very minute change in what is being sensed can have large difference in its impact – be it taste, visual response or hearing related. Last week I had some time experimenting with different light sources to make an image of this above butterfly. The first image above is made using 3 light sources – 2 flash lights (Maglites, one warm and one cold and another built-in camera flash). The butterfly is lit using a warm light, the flower lit using one with cooler white balance and the bottom portion of the flower is lit by built in flash with compensation so that flash light (Maglite) lit parts does not get affected by built-in camera flash.

The second image below is made the same way, only difference is I have used only two light sources – warm flash light and built-in camera flash.

The below image is made similarly but this time I did not use built-in camera flash so the bottom portion of the flower is little bit darker.

This last image below is made using only camera flash.

See the difference in visual impact!! especially between first three. In the first image cooler white balance on the flower subtly emphasizes the butterfly which is missing in the second one. The last image is very uninteresting for my taste buds.

It is amazing how minute difference in lighting can have large visual impact on the images we make.

In an unrelated note nature photography is lots of hard work. Making a satisfying image may take hours if we are lucky !!

Last week end and today I spent some time photographing frogs near a pond at Ramnagar. There were many at a pond. After thinking about what to do last week I decided to make an image of frog in water emphasizing its eyes and it hanging like posture in water. Today I went there again – not sure how I wanted to photograph it again. A thought occurred to me about emphasizing its eyes again – but differently this time. I made a ring using my fingers of the left hand controlled sunlight light falling on the frog to create a kind of natural burning effect. The result is the image below – quite satisfied with what I got. No photoshop tricks here in particular burning. Post processing is limited to levels and sharpening.

I am increasingly being convinced that I have all I need to make some unique images – but often the previous baggage of formulas of making images of nature pulls us down.

You may click on above images to see them better in larger size.