The second in a series of two. This somehow reminds me of an olympic torch being carried around a stadium and hence the title! A bit fanciful I agree.

First one in a series of two. Don’t know if this looks nice or not to you but I liked the defocussed backgrnd and the light breaking out as circles and therefore decided to put it up.

I took quite a few shots of ducks and gulls on that recent visit to the park. I’ll start off with this one. These ducks are quite used to humans as visitors to the park keep offering food to them. So they don’t run away as long as you do not get too close. This coupled with a medium tele lens lets you get decent close-up shots.

From Wikipedia, ‘the Gordian Knot is a metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke (“cutting the Gordian knot”). The myth it refers to is associated in legend with Alexander the Great.’

I really like this inspite of the blurred stem in the foregound spoiling things a bit. The thorns against the defocussed background are what makes this shot I feel.

The weather finally cleared here today. So went for a walk in a nearby park, with my trusted camera of course! Managed to get some decent shots. But before posting them here is a shot from a couple of days back when all of a sudden we had a glorious evening. The sky was dripping molten gold.

This is from last week and it was a late evening shot so it came out nicely blue. But I was curious to see how it would look in black and white so I played a little with the channel mixer in PS and I kinda liked the result. So here it is. All I did was increase the red and green and keep the blue low so the sky in the backgrnd is blown and the branches stand out starkly against the white backgrnd. Let me know what you think of the result.

After a gap of two days here I’m again! Since the weather here continues to be downright shitty I tried a few macro studies the other day. Here is one I liked.

Another photo where I tried the lens baby effect PS action. I thought that, in the original image, the background was distracting and there was an irritating light source (which you can still see) right next to the leaf. With the background rendered out of focus the reason for taking this shot becomes clearer in my opinion. (A portion of the image on the left and on the bottom has been cropped out to remove some distracting elements.)

There is a lot that is wrong with this photo, starting with the focus. But then I like the delicate flame like twirl of the defocussed leaf in the background and the two elements in the picture seemingly touching at one point. Also, this is proof that Minolta’s body integral anti-shake works. There is no way I could have got this passably decent photo, shot in low light at 1/8 shutter speed, hand-held with a 100mm macro lens, if not for the anti-shake!