Rough Cut

Last Saturday, I took out my new camera for a work out. I had bought the Canon A550 for quite a bargain, and the reviews on the Net looked good- most of the sites had lots of good things to say. Now, I am an absolute rookie when it came to photography, and I don’t know what ISO and white noise is. Theory is OK, but until you know the effect of these parameters in real life situations, you would never appreciate the difference.

I left my room at 1.30 in the afternoon. The plan was to go to place named Artist colony (maybe because the land was allocated for artists), about 30 min walking distance. I heard that the scenery was good, with lots of trees and a water body. The dry weather, though put paid to my hopes and there was only a puddle at the bottom of a crater. Anyway I wanted to test my camera, and any scene is fair game.

The specs on the camera said 7.1megapixel and 4x optical zoom. It also had quite a few modes and settings which took getting used to in the beginning. For instance, I was poking about in the menu hunting for the zoom function when the zoom was supposed to be activated from a lever. A couple of long range shots went by like that, though I soon figured out things out, and it was smooth sailing after that. The mode I was shooting was initially Auto, and the shots seemed pretty good, to my untrained eye. Then I started getting cocky, going to manual mode and flipping around menu controls like I was a pro. And the results were expected: in bright sunlight those photos looked like they were shot at fading light. Oh well, I will learn.

Next stop was Mango gardens. This is a park whose level is above the road, almost like a part of a hill has been walled off. You won’t see anything from outside, but once you enter the place it seems like you have been transported to a different world. Grass lined pathways, clumps of trees, a pond in the middle with ducks doing their thing- pretty impressive. The maintenance was top notch too, and this is where the municipal corporation deserves the credit. Prefect for a photo shoot.The time of the day was afternoon, and there was an interesting play of light and shadows. The waters in the pool were miraculously still and I grabbed some mirror images before things got too splashy. The zoom feature came in handy here, as I was able to take shots of the ducks from about 10 metres away, without having to squint. My only complain is that it takes quite some time for consecutive shots, which feels icky when you are doing multiple shoots of, say, a child in a swing. The time lag makes you feel cramped. These are some of the photographs of my first session.

http://picasaweb.google.com/bhaskar04