Living by the cold and icy river

Living by the cold and icy river, originally uploaded by vskiran.

Once again I braved myself in the cold weather to try some sunset pictures. This time I headed towards one of the beaches in New Jersey. Actually, I was trying to get to a lighthouse by the atlantic ocean. By the time got to the ocean front, it was fairly dark and quite cold (-10C/14F). I abandoned my search for the light house and decided to keep driving. The strip I was driving on happens to be sandwiched between this river and the atlantic ocean. There were many huge houses that were completely vacant along the way. I wonder if they are only used during summer for recreation purposes.

While driving, I spotted this icy river and a few bright lit houses by its side. I chose a long exposure to convey the feeling of the flowing river. One could see thick ice floating on the other side of the river. Also the little pieces of ice flowing in the river appear as blurred lines along the river. Once again its nice to have a sunset in the background.

Vase in Sunlight

Vase in Sunlight, originally uploaded by vskiran.

I made this shot at one of my friends house warming party. The vase was naturally lit by bright sunlight through the window. The setting was perfect and I didnt have to touch a thing. The photograph was just there to be made.

I metered the exposure for the vase and every thing in the backkground naturally turned dark. Converting the shot into Black and White was a piece of cake in Photoshop.

The light didn't stay like this for very long, probably for just about 5 minutes. I am so glad that I had an opportunity to take this shot.

Color Contrast

Color Contrast, originally uploaded by vskiran.

This shot was made at longwood gardens, my evergreen favourite botanical gardens. It's huge and they have a variety of tropical plants in a beautiful tropical environment.

I was quickly attracted to the color contrast and the symmetry of these leaves. It's like the little fellow is showing off before the big one.

This marks my 50th photograph on flickr.

Let's go Home

Let's go Home, originally uploaded by vskiran.

I always seem to be surprised by the wide gamut of colors during sunset. This day was no different. It was about half hour after sunset and the sky was dramatically changing colors from orange to pink and then to blue. There wan't much time to work with as it turned pretty dark within 5 minutes after taking this shot.

It's sunset and it's time for the birds to go home. I was lucky to find a small flock of birds silhouetted against the beautiful sunset colors.

It was a cold day and I wasn't completely prepared for the wind ( wind chill -10C/14F). It's one thing to spend a few minutes outside in the cold and a completely different affair to spend an hour or two taking pictures. I was well covered with three layers of clothing but it's always the little things that bite you in the end. I chose a thin pair of hand gloves for ease of handling the camera controls. It turned out to be a bad idea. I had to split my time between taking pictures and staying in the car :). It was funny.. but I need to get a good pair of gloves that allow me to handle my camera controls easily. Nevertheless, I am very glad to have obtained this picture. Taking good pictures demands a lot of patience and sometimes you are rewarded too.

Ghost Tree

Ghost Tree, originally uploaded by vskiran.

Who says image noise is bad. I just love it in this picture. It gave an interesting texture to the picture. The original picture was about 1.5 stops underexposed. Correcting that in photoshop added the extra noise to the image. The background of the original color image was a quite blue. I reduced the amount of blue in the gray channel mixer to make the background darker. It definitely helped the picture by increasing its contrast.
This is one of my experiments with long exposure (over 10 minutes ) on a full moon day. You could find my other picture with a long exposure at
eerie house

The tree looks a little surreal agains the house with a white wall. You could also see little bit of star trails in the image.

Another beach view from atop the Montauk Lighthouse

Another beach view from atop the Montauk Lighthouse, originally uploaded by vskiran.

Once again a bit of photoshop magic and I was able to convert a below average Color image to a decent B/W picture. This definitely makes me think that there is always some opportunity to take a picture. Just that they seem to show up in quite unexpected and surprising ways.

As I was saying in my previous blog, in this picture you could see the land slowly falling into the ocean along the coast.

Montauk Point Light House

Montauk Point Light House, originally uploaded by vskiran.

This is the historic light house at Mountauk point built in circa 1796. This shot was made at around 5:30 in the morning. You could see that the lighthouse is still beaming light at this hour. In the good old days around mid 1800 they used to use lamps powered by kerosene. I wonder what they had before that ! They also used to have something called a 5th order frenel lens to focus the light beam over long distances.

Apprently this lighthouse used to be managed by only one person at any given point of time. The stairwell is so small that only one person could climb up or down the steps. I wonder how he used to manage going up and down with kerosene lamps throughout the night.

Once could get a glimpse of the history of the lighthouse for a small fee. It is well preserved in the house next to the lighthouse.

In reality, the weather was quite cloudy and the color and contrast were fairly average in the orginal picture. I had to bring up the contrast/fill light and remove the strong blue color cast to get it to this shape. I am still quite new to photoshopping but I am really happy to be able to successfully bring out what I saw through my eyes in this picture.

Continuing the same gripe from my previous blog entry, the weather was so cloudy and gloomy the whole weekend that I couldn't get any good sunrise/sunset pictures. Thanks to photoshop, I am able to revover this particular one. I spent quite a bit of time sitting on the rocks waiting for the sun to rise. But the clouds seem to have gobbled him on this day. I later came to know that the rocks were laid out to prevent the land from sliding into the ocean. Historic pictures of this site show significantly larger distance between the light house and the ocean. In fact the soil appears quite loose around this area and I did encounter quite a lot of billboards warning about land slides into the ocean.

When I was all set to drive back home, I noticed that this place attracts quite a lot of birds. Then I came to know that this place has lots of nice hiking trails to explore the landscape. Next time I definitely know what to do. If not the sun, i should be able to get some nice bird shots.