Kiran Bhat Photography

I finally finished processing all the film shots from my shoot with MJ. All pictures are shot with Aero Ektar + Speed Graphic combo. First two are shot on Arista EDU 100 and the rest are on Ilford Delta 100. Arista is nice and cheap but the emulsion is not so good. When zoomed in at 100% the scans have spots. Ilford on the other hand is simply amazing.  All the negatives are self developed and scanned using Epson V700. I'm happy with the overall results and love the bokeh. PS:Blogspot is adding some type of tint to all the pictures uploaded for some reason. None of the pictures have the coffee tint.

I am not a big 35mm fan but Kodachrome was something else (I only could my hands on 135 format).It was an excellent film to use Hexanon 57mm f/1.2 + Konica T3 combo. These days I mostly shoot and develop E-6 slides. RIP Kodachrome.

I absolutely love shooting large format cameras. The process of shooting one takes me to the basics of photography. No auto exposure, no metering, no auto focus..nothing. Actually it's just a black box with the lens on one end and film on the other. The view that appears on the ground glass is inverted. As a photographer one is forced to think and make all the decisions involved in the picture making process. So at the end of it you feel like, you are in charge (which is great for control freaks like me!). Because I process all the film that I shoot on my own, I have complete control over the creative process from shooting to development to scan/print stage. This gives a lot of flexibility and room for experimentation. Personally for me one major factor that sets the large format cameras apart from others is the camera movements. The front and rear standards of the camera allow shift, tilt, swing, rise and fall (Hopefully I can blog about camera movements in future). The large neg

Okay so my blog was mostly dead. I was cleaning up my bookmarks in Safari, found the old link to the blog and thought I'd try to revive it. I don't know how frequently can I blog but sure will make an attempt to update it. It was weird reading what had written four years ago and compare it with my current photography philosophy.  Certainly a lot of things have changed, I got back to film and have been mostly shooting medium and large formats. I will add more posts about those. Also in general I have figured what I like shooting and what makes me happy in photography. So watch for it!

I did 2 photo shoots last weekend. 2 entirely different shoots. First one with Strobist Ann Arbor group on Saturday. This was set in Detroit in a decayed mansion (I think it was a mansion!). No power outlets, no restrooms, no air conditioner and sometimes no floor ..no kidding :). It was a blast though! Along with cameras, lights and models photographer also had to be aware of situation of the location itself. Mark and I setup our White Lightning on Vegabond batteries and started shooting. BTW I'm seriously impressed by performance of Vegabond II. Anyone looking forward to buy that, "Do it now!" It's totally worth what it costs. We also did some outdoor photos and the wind wasn't helping to say the least. Some photos from this shoot: The second shoot was in Lexington, Mich. Originally planned as Olympus shoot, just resulted in Cindy and I shooting, because of Father's day. This was one of those times, where nature is too kind towards you and th

Some people have complained that I haven't updated my blog in ages. So... :). I have a photo up on flickr, titled "Happiness". It was supposed to be for an assignment, for a group I shoot with. I'm a big Bokeh fan and my creativity doesn't cross established norms of cliche. So I sprayed water on the table, placed a text chit which reads Happiness. Used 2 strobes and threw water drops out of focus. On the left there is the Orange gelled strobe and Blue gelled strobe is placed on the right. So when the camera's shutter is released, the lights are fired and from the same pattern they are placed, they blend in together. The setup: The result: Olympus FL-50R was at 1/16th of power and Nikon SB-28 was at 1/16 - 0.3EV. Minor adjustments in Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS4.