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So, when I click my best sunset photograph on my holiday at Goa, how should I compose the frame? Where should I place the sun? Where the horizon line? What while balance I should use while taking a photograph at twilight? So what is a frame within a frame?

When I click Hussain Bolt just crossing the hundred meter line, how should I compose it; should I need to freeze the moment or should I capture the movement within the frame ?

Like those hundred questions – ask them, they have the answer now… little more than 20 associates, who have the enthusiasm towards photography, no matter how much a saturday matinee show calls them, no matter how much distance he has to drive from home to come to office premises on a weekend, no matter what kind of sophisticated camera they have, or even they don’t have …

so we all met at mercury training room on a lazy saturday afternoon at GVC office of CTS at Bangalore … we all had one thing common amongst us … passion ! Passion for photography …

It was scheduled at 2 o clock hoping that all the boring lectures will end up by 4 and then we all go for a joyride … a photo walk … as we started little late, we were overshot by 30-40 min or so …

It was fun throughout the sessions, it was fun discussing various experiences and put it together in a single presentation … it was fun sharing behind the stories while making the compositions …

think and decide – open your heart and mind

All we wanted to open our heart and mind … no prejudice, no presumptions… just thinking and deciding what we want to shoot, be it portrait, be it macro, be it abstract or be it street photography … we have decided not to visually compose the imaginary picture unless we see it, thus we will have a fresh mind to look at the objects differently …

And while we do look at the things differently than others, we also learned some tips and trick which makes composition of the scene through our viewfinder …

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frame within a frame

… is one such thing … let us take a step back, lets us try to frame the scene or object with the surrounding elements falls within the composition … it gives us a different perspective always… this is how we see it differently … let by us not bound ourselves by rules, let’s just listen to what our aesthetical values says…

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wait and watch

Alex Webb said, street photography is like a walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait, and be confident that the unexpected, the right moment awaits just around the corner … we agreed, we need to be patient , we need to watch and wait, watch and wait … and remain confident …

Right moment will surely be around the corner!

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Pattern and abstract and odds

Many odds and many patterns… be it the design made by underwater current on sands; be it the body art of zebra; be it the man made patterns or be it created by nature … all surround us every now and then, everywhere , here and there … the elements form patterns, element makes odd … look differently, before you shoot, see for yourself …

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layers

All you see are layers… sound weird … seriously … all actions, all real life events happen in layers… imaginary horizontal layers always surround us … it is three dimensional always… but how do we show the layers in two dimensions? … Foreground, background and intermediate layers etc are the answers… it creates the feel of the image of being there … it gives us a lots of depth of the photograph… our eyes travel from the foreground and pass through the intermediate layers and reach to the background … it is like conquering each layer and learning about the elements in it … this is little complex though but… what is the joy of composing an image, if I can’t play hide and seek with the elements, if I can’t hide behind the foreground objects…

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by now, we all know, it also gives the visitors a food for thought and food for ideas… what is better? a bare naked face-to-face encounter or a little mischief of playing hide and seek?

Portraits

what’s there in your mind when you make a portrait? is that the face you want to click? is it the emotions of the person you want to click? is it the connection between you and your subject? Which one? … the answer is “all”… we want all the above said things to be captured in a portrait, but one element alone does not make a successful portrait …

it is all in eyes … remember the famous painting of Leonardo Da Vinci; Monalisa ? so focus at eyes, everything will fall in line … make an eye contact … let the eyes talk to each other… make her feel comfortable in front of the lens and there you go… follow your heart and click when it says …
We discussed lot more … we discussed how ISO works, what is 1/3 is rule for photography and many more … a quick handout is available here for your reference …

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the photo walk

… the fun part was this … it WAS a sight just before the evening at GVC premises… just looked here and there, our promising photographers were making all possible angles, focuses, vantage points etc … applying all learning at the field… and what a joy of seeing those images on the screen …

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in my childhood days, every year my village used to be flooded by a nearby river… it was like an yearly event… a small river named Baniyadaha, came out of Torsa was flowing next to our village… people who lives by the river used to leave their house and take shelter in village high school … most of the families lived together in the class rooms or our school… i remember we did not have any brick-cement-concrete house then… it was made by earthen soils… every year after the flood i used see my grand mother and mom making up the house again… and then comes autumn…. durga puja… we used to gear up with something new; leaving behind everything … we used to make banana-tree-boats to ferry from one place to another within the village … all in all it never become so harmful to all of us… it was kind of flushing out all evil through-out the year and start a new beginning… we were kind of OK with this no-so-harmful event every year … we used to enjoy those days …
I also remember the 1993 flood in north bengal … i just passed my matriculation that time and came to Kolkata for higher study… when i went back to my home , it was just water everywhere… roads were immersed, village after village marooned with flood… i had learnt that was a man-made incident…alipurduar and coochbehar district was worst affected, people left their home, cattle etc and came on the road… just to get a place where they can stay at night … really very much disturbing …

… and this time, it was above and beyond my imagination…

benal village, bagalkot district, north karnataka
the geographical location is washed away from the map now… a small tiny village hardly had 40/50 houses and families… but now there is no trace …

it took 16 long hours to reach the place ! … and by the time we reached there, many of the villagers went to field for work…