Exposure and Experience

This might be a slightly different post on my experiments with photography and I would really appreciate any comments or feedback on the methods or the photographs.

When I got my Canon 70D, I was excited to try out the double exposure feature that was available in it. But I haven’t been able to use it so far. So I decided to try out something and here are the results. Prop used: a jute wall hanging (or rather small parts of it)

This one is the photograph that was taken with my camera’s feature for double exposure ‘enabled’ and I used two shots (as per the settings i.e. use two clicks or photographs to create a single doubly exposed image) for this.

I liked how it sort of created a 3D effect on either sides. I applied ‘Watercolor’ effect to it from Pixlr (a free app) and got this photograph. I tried for an artistic and a painterly look and feel but you tell me?

 

Then I wondered, how different is it actually to do it manually (i.e. do the double exposure using apps and tools) when compared to the one that is done by the camera itself. So I again took the photographs of the two sources separately this time (disabling the double exposure feature on the camera)

Used these in Pixlr to create a double exposure image (using the layering and simple copy and paste) to get this image. Does it look like a double exposed image ?

And then added the same ‘watercolor’ effect to this using Pixlr again.
I think the Camera was way smarter than me in terms of merging the images to create a double exposure image in this case, because I felt that the one I took using the Camera’s feature looked much better than the manually created one.

What is your take? Or do you think it is totally not worth the effort?

Attempt @ Scary

I have this Mayan/Aztec Calendar (one of those, I always get confused with it) when I was in Mexico. It is a pretty heavy one and is made of stone. And is my souvenir from the Mayan Places I had been to. As usual, I was playing with the light and tried to make it look a little scary. Among three attempts I made,  I thought this one looked a little more scarier (the rest were a little plain where the light was a little flat on the surface). What do you think ?

 

 

Shadowing the Eiffel Tower

Yesterday night, I was toying with my camera and thought of trying out one of my favorite past times with photography- shadows and images with light/candle. I had this small pocket light with which I was trying out shadows of various objects but the one that I really wanted to capture was that of this Eiffel Tower’s which I had got from Paris. I had first taken the below one, then realized that the word Paris wasn’t shown even though it had the shadow a little more clear with the meshes in it. So changed the focus a little bit and took the above one.
Which one looks better, if at all?

 

 

Processing a Landscape

While going through the pictures, I saw this one and remembered the reason I took this. The varied colors. So I thought I will try to use this single picture and apply the HDR processing using Luminance HDR software I had installed some time ago. Since I am still unaware of lot of parameters associated with it, I gave a go with the various options and got this one close to my liking.

Landscape – Segovia

And then I played around a little more and I got this one 🙂

And then with a new equation, it gave me this one

Now I am like a kid in a candy store 🙂

But my favorite is still the first one, even though the 2nd one looks good for a spooky set with all those branches coming out very well. The third one is just too nice and soft for my liking.

And then again after sometime I tried it with Photomatix Pro for Tone Mapping and this is what I got. And now I sort of like this too. That is why I don’t like too many choices 🙂

 

Do you have a favorite among the three ?  what do you think of the fourth one ?

PS: For Earth Day yesterday, I shared a few photographs of mine in Google+ (a first for me). Just testing the waters.

Filtering the candle light

There might be a few more posts before end of day today 🙂

I love my candles and images that come out of it. I guess I have too many pics of them already and still think of ways to capture the way the light shows or how the shadows change with the candle light and stuff like that. So on an inane urge to mimic something like that, I went ahead and bought myself this LED candle set. Unfortunately out of three, one of the glass holder came broken and so I ended up with two holders and one LED light in different sizes. And as usual I ended up checking out how they look through my camera. So, this is how the original image looked (no editing).

And I wanted to see how they translate to B & W. I used the simple Picasa tools (and today I had some time to play around). So was checking out something.

A simple B & W from the above image looks like this

 

But a filtered one looks like a little different.

This is a red filtered image:

and this is a green filtered image

I was pretty impressed with the changes. How they seem to be on two sides of a spectrum even though the changes are not that drastic with this image. I was wondering about it and read a little to understand it. I am mostly lazy to play around with my pics. But of late I am finding it interesting.