Posts

Some of My Last Kodachrome Pictures

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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.

Large Format Love

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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

Return to Film Photography

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When most people transitioned from film to digital, I returned to shooting film. Like most photographers I started photography with film and was comfortable with 35mm photography. I did get a digital camera when those became affordable and eventually landed in dSLR land. After shooting digital for a few years, I was beginning to get the feeling that I was burning out with my photography. I wanted to do something different, away from pixel world. I got an excellent deal on a medium format camera and bought it. It was a Mamiya RZ67 ProII (pictured below). I loved the big negatives the medium format camera produces. It was a world of a difference from my 35mm days. After looking at some 6x7 slides, I was convinced that film photography is what I need to pursue again mainly in bigger formats. Since then I have acquired several cameras... Hasselblad, Rolleiflex, Sinar F2, Speed Graphic 4x5 and even a Holga.

Reviving a Dead Blog

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!

Striving for Quality

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Gosh! Time flies, it's been more than 2 months since I updated my blog. Ooopss! So anyways, I was going through my flickr pages to do a self review of where I'm headed in terms of photography. Some big changes.... I have done way too many portraits, my post processing skills have improved, my style has changed from shooting a wide angle frames to a tightly cropped frames and most importantly I'm paying way too much attention towards the quality of the images. I no longer want/create dirty photoshopped looking images. I'd rather do minimalistic processing and work the camera, light and the setup of the shoot. I compare some of my portraits with some of the best in the infiniteness of the internet... to my surprise all those images have a real clean look. Major factors that define these images include minimalistic vignetting, eyes sharpened only around iris, skin retouched but not smoothened out, some sharp details around eyebrows, hair strands, finer shadows etc. I had