Friday Photo – Turtle Dove + 500 posts on India Travel Blog
This happens to be the 500th post on India Travel Blog. A turtle dove in Keylong, Himachal Pradesh.
Thursday Travel Photography #2 – Early mornings
The second in the series on Thursday Travel Photography Column, discussing on the importance of early morning light.
Join India Travel and Photography group on flickr.
I have created a group on flickr, called India Travel and photography for discussions on travel and photography, and to share images and travel stories. Please join the group and share your images from recent trips, and possibly your travel stories along with images.
From next week, I intend to critique one or two images every week as a part of Thursday Travel Photography column, explaining how a photograph can be bettered and/or what makes it stand out, highlighting the technicals and aesthetics related to the image. To have your images critiqued, add your images to the group pool and tag them as itpcritique.
Waking up early in the morning is critical for getting good outdoor shots, especially when you are shooting landscape images. The soft light of the morning hours just before and during the sunrise can bring life to a scenery that may look flat in later hours of the day.
On a cloudy day or in clear summer days, the light just before the sun comes out tends to have a blue tint that works well when you are shooting in mountain landscapes, beach side or other open areas. In winters, the early morning sun on clear days tends to have an orange hue that can bathe the landscape in glorious colors. A gentle fog in the morning can diffuse the light and create magical effects in the landscape, highlighting the contours of the mountains and removing excessive details from the scenery. A few examples:
What could have been an ordinary image of wild grass is transformed into a colourful frame in early morning light, on a winter morning. But such brilliant colors may not occur in summers.
The mild fog in the morning hides the finer details of the plains and highlights just the contour of the mountains in this picture. Also notice the blue tint in the entire frame, which will not occur in the later hours of the day. A similar shot, made in the afternoon would be full of details of the plains, and the emphasis on the hills would be completely lost. Also, the image would have a dull color and would look very flat.
Another important character of the morning light is the angle of the incident light. Because the sun is close to horizon and the light is not harsh, sunlight casts mild shadows in depressions in the landscape. Shadows created by such lighting (normally called side-light) help highlight the texture of the subject and show the depth and help visualize the third dimension in the photograph. Contrary to this, afternoon sun has equal intensity in all areas, be it depressions or crests, making the scenery look flat and two dimensional. Where the afternoon light does cast shadows, the shadows tend to be harsh, which form completely dark areas in the image, making the picture look ugly. An example.
In the image above, which was shot in early morning hours, the distinction between each layer of mountains is clearly visible, and there is a depth in the image. However in the picture below, which was shot in the same region but in later hours of the day, distinction between the layers of mountains is not as prominent, and the image is not as appealing as the one above.
If you are shooting wildlife, there is another advantage besides the quality of light. Birds tend to be less active in the morning hours and are easier to shoot. You can find some birds, and animals like monkeys in a close huddle in winter mornings, which makes them look appealing, like in the image below.
To ask me any questions on morning light or other aspects on photography, to start a discussion or share your images related to the topic, join India Travel and Photography flickr pool, add images and start discussion threads.
Recent Read – “Following the Equator” by Mark Twain
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Available for download from Project Gutenberg
Following the equator is a journal of Mark Twain’s travel across the world on a lecture tour. While we call today as the days of the world travel, Twain was a good hundred years ahead, embarking on such a journey in the last years of 19th century. My own reading of the book is limited to the chapters on India, which runs for nearly 200 pages.
Twain arrives in Mumbai, and travels to many places that include Calcutta, Allahabad, Lucknow, Varanasi and Jaipur. They stand as a tourist’s choice of destination even today. While the book is written more like a personal journal, Twain uses every chance to deviate from his explorations to add stories from history of India, related incidences from his own past, and never misses a chance to pass a sarcastic commentary on everything he observes. A paragraph on the numerous crows that he encounters on the Balcony of the hotel window gives a perspective of Twain’s sarcasm.
They were very sociable when there was anything to eat—oppressively so. With a little encouragement they would come in and light on the table and help me eat my breakfast; and once when I was in the other room and they found themselves alone, they carried off everything they could lift; and they were particular to choose things which they could make no use of after they got them. In India their number is beyond estimate, and their noise is in proportion.
But it is not just humour that touches the reader. He digs deeper into government gazettes and documentary evidences on Thugs – the murderous dacoit clan that once stole from travellers from all over India. His visit to Varanasi includes extensive quotes from credible sources on the ways of Indian pilgrims, but quickly backed up with humorous notes on a suggested itinerary for the pilgrim. He frequently shifts between personal and neutral observations, sarcasm, history and events from his life as the pages progress. Interestingly, despite all the sarcasm that is packed in the book, he is never demeaning the local way of life and the native people, and often comes out as a kind person who sympathized with the subjects of the book.
Because it is written like a diary, occasional digressions may disturb the reader from a smooth flow in many occasions. But the humourous take that he always comes up with, makes up for the digressions. For the Indian reader, ‘Following the Equator’ can be more than a travelogue – it comes with some learnings on the history and gives a perspective of everyday life in India a hundres years ago, besides entertaining thoroughly through the pages.