There comes a time in every wannabe-photographer’s life when he has to rest his camera and ask himself, ‘what the fuck do I shoot now?!’

I went through one such existential crisis last weekend. Which is when my good friend Pradeep called. ‘So, what are you doing over the weekend?’, he asked.

‘Uhh, nothing much.’

‘So are you up for a shoot?’

‘Sure,’ I said. I am always happy when I am offered the opportunity to outsource certain parts of the photography process, like say, zeroing in on a subject, and emotionally blackmailing them into posing for me. I’d some very pleasant photo-sessions with Pradeep, and the opportunity was too well-timed to be ignored.

Which is until he turned up over the weekend, and revealed what he exactly had in mind. He wanted to shoot me. Gulp.

‘Ideally, I would do a ROFL right now, but the maid hasn’t swept the floor yet,’ said the Missus, as she passed by the living room. ‘Try not to break too many things.’

For the next couple of hours, I sat in front of all the lighting equipment, following instructions like ‘look to the left, now look at me, don’t slouch, intense expression, how about a smile…’ Surprisingly, these words sound simple enough when you’re behind the camera. But when you feel like scratching your balls and throwing up at the same time, and the photographer tells you to ‘hold that intense expression’, you know you’re having a bad day.

Mid way through the shoot, I realized that I needed some leverage to convince Pradeep not to make these images public. So, I suggested that he too pose for me. He agreed. Alas, he turned out to be a natural.

The above image is one from the shoot. Pradeep seemed to be following my instructions, but now that I think about it, he was probably just recalling my intense expression. He has a mean streak.

The lighting setup is one of my favorites. A beauty dish was used as the main light – this is basically a fancy way of saying that a flash was thrust into a steel bowl so that the entire inner side of the bowl acted as a light source. This makes the the light larger than a bare flash, resulting in soft, even light, since it falls on the subject from more directions. This, however, is not as soft as when you use a softbox (which is even larger, and hence softer). The result is a gritty lighting effect. The lights reflected off the subject’s eyes (called catch-lights) also come out as big circular disks – this adds a bit of punch to the image. A couple of portable flashes were placed on either side of the subject, lighting up the contours of the face. These lights were a little brighter than the main light, which is why you see the white patches on the forehead and cheeks.

In terms of post-processing, I followed the same method as detailed here.

In retrospect, the shoot was enjoyable, except for the times when the missus decided to peep in and say things like, ‘are you sure you don’t want a Digene?. So, we have decided to do this more often, but preferably with a third person as a subject. I only have so many intense expressions.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been getting an unprecedented number of queries regarding the self-portrait I’d uploaded on my Flickr stream some time back. Mom called twice, and Dad rang up an hour back to ask if I was feeling okay. Even my brother called up and asked me to take down the image immediately – apparently, it’s extremely inconvenient having to explain to everyone why his brother has nothing better to do than to click flattering photographs of himself and uploading them all over the web. He’s just jealous. Anyway, here’s the image that has created such a buzz at MIG Block 2, Old University Colony, Guwahati.

Light Setup: Back to Joel Grimes/ Dave Hill territory here. A regular 3 light setup. Two rim-lights to light my sides, while a soft-box acts as the main light from over the camera. I used a studio strobe inside the soft-box. And since I didn’t trade my kidneys for that one, it didn’t come with any way to control the intensity of light. So, that pretty much meant that I had to adjust the rest of the lighting around this big, ugly light. The rim lights are our good old Vivitar strobes, set at 2 stops higher than the main-lights. That’s just a fancy way of saying that I played around with the settings on the Vivitars till the light they threw was brighter than my main light. That’s so that you can see that shiny highlights on the edges of the painfully handsome face. The simplest way to go about this is to first just switch on the main light, and take a decent image. Once you’ve adjusted the shutter speed and aperture as per this, you then add one side light. Then another. I know. Very complicated. I am a genius. Bow.

Step 1 (Preparation): On to the post processing now. Here’s how the image looked straight out of the camera. More or less. I added a duplicate layer and played around with the curves to give the contrast a bit of punch. Then, I went on to clone out some of the bumps and irregularities on the face – this took me around a decade. Once I was satisfied that I was looking human again, I went on to step 2.

Step 2 (Shadows/ Highlights): This is the most important step. Here’s where we start giving the image the final shiny look. A lesser mortal will use Dodge/ Burn. But that would be too simple. (I have to justify a blog post, no?). So instead, here’s what I did. I created two blank layers, and in a flash of genius, renamed them Highlights and Shadows. For the Shadows layer, I took a small, soft brush and ‘black’ as the foreground colour. Opacity was set to somewhere between 5 to 10. Then I went on to darken the already dark portions of the photograph. This would mean the creases on the t-shirt, the vertical shadows framing the cheeks, the laugh lines, etc. Also, you might choose to  darken out some of the distractions on the background. The result might not be readily obvious to you. In case you feel that the opacity is too low, be bold and crank it up to 15 or something – you’ll still be able to modify it later using the layer’s opacity. Anyway, the end result – you should just be able to make out the painted areas when you toggle the visibility of the shadow layer.

For the highlights layer, use the same setting as for the shadows layer, and choose white as the foreground colour. Now, paint over all the areas where the light from the flash was visible. This would include the extreme edges of the face, the hair to the left, the edges of the neck, and the creases of the t-shirt. I also chose to accentuate the sweat drop on the nose for some reason.

Step 3 (High Pass Filter): The next step is to select the original layer, and run a high pass filter on it. I went kind of nuclear on it, choosing a setting of around 200. Since it was a new layer anyway, it could do no harm. Also, I’d just been shouted at for not watering the plants. So, wasn’t in the mood for subtlety. Anyway, once done, I changed the blending mode of this layer to ‘soft light’ to tone down the disco.

Step 4 (HSL): I could leave the image here, but being the perfectionist, I chose to surprise you and add another layer of complexity – literally. I revisited the original layer, and added a Hue-Saturation adjustment layer. All I did here, was to change ’Master’ to ‘Red’, and brought down the saturation till the image started looking like one of those gritty, Christopher Nolan meets Guy Ritchie kind of images.

End Notes: For obvious reasons, I cloned out the logo from the t-shirt. You’ll be aware that my deal with Adidas has finally expired. And in the interest of artistic freedom, I’ve chosen to not renew it. Well that, and I just thought I’d look cooler.

If the above ileads to some horribly discoloured and zombie-style images on your computer, please note that the method is not mine. It’s actually a mix and match from a lot of sources. Chief among them are Joel Grimes, Dave Hill and Scott Kelby. If you love the method, on the other hand, remember that you read it here first and you owe me your kidneys.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

Have you heard of Dave Hill?

If you haven’t, may I please request you to pause for a moment, reflect on your worthless existence, and give yourself a couple of hard slaps. Then, click on the link above and stare at his gallery for a while. Chances are, post that you might want to slap yourself again. Don’t let me hold you back.

The Dave Hill look, as it is referred to in general,  is perhaps one of the most discussed about and attempted methods of photography today. Most people are in awe of the look, but since they cannot even reach near, they just convince themselves they hate it, it’s too cosmetic, it’s all PS, and blah, blah. I am undecided. Regardless of whether I like it or not, I’d still like to learn how to achieve that look. If I’m successful, it will make me feel powerful, and confirm my childhood suspicion that I’m a genius. If not, well, I HATE DAVE HILL too!

Firstly, I don’t claim to have figured it all out. Granted, I’m a genius et al, but I’ve still not grasped this method in its entirety. So, what I present here is strictly WORK IN PROGRESS.’

So, let’s get to it. While all of Dave Hill’s creations are heavily Photoshoped, it helps to keep in mind that this does require a good photograph with a particular kind of lighting to achieve the final effect. (An image of poop with the ‘Dave Hill’ look is…er…an image of Poop nonetheless. There are a whole lot of post-processing wizards out there attempting this with stock images, but ending up with nothing more than severe cases of dodged and burnt fingers. Similarly, there are photographers who’ve tried fitting in lights in every nook and crevice of the frame, but with similar results. Also, it doesn’t help that the creator himself seems to have a lot of fun contradicting himself every once in a while while revealing tiny tidbits about his ‘oh so secret’ method, and watching his followers scampering around in rabid frenzy.

The kind of lighting that Dave Hill uses in his images is called wraparound lighting (not really, but it is now anyway). There will be a soft main-light illuminating the subject from the front. To this will be added some rim-lights. These are comparatively hard light sources positioned behind the subject from either side of the frame, highlighting the subject’s edges as defined by the camera’s perspective. The difference between the two sets of lights would be around 1 or 2 f-stops (that’s Greek for aperture settings). What this does is give the lighting a nice wraparound lighting, as if wrapping itself around the contours of the subject. It also gives you a nice little, mildly intimidating phrase to throw around that comes in handy in various situations.

Cheap Friend & Wannabe Photographer: ‘Hey Rishi, isn’t it your turn to buy beer?’

Rishi (staring at reflection of self in mirror): ‘Yes, will be with you as soon as I figure out the f-stop differential used in this singularly inspiring art nouveau piece employing the highly acclaimed wraparound lighting.’

Cheap Friend & Wannabe Photographer: ‘Er…ok. Catch up with you then…in 2012…’

Other characteristic elements of a Dave Hill creation would be a lot of dynamism. Thankfully, for you, I am not talking about the photographer’s personality here. All of his frames have some kind of a dynamic feel to them – either something is happening or about to happen (That immediately rules out Karthik as a subject, as the only thing that happens in his life happened about 28 years ago). Also, he contrasts this dynamism with a very wide depth of field, keeping almost the entire background in focus. (Since I’m God, I disregarded this last bit in this example).

We will follow 4 simple post processing steps:

Step 1: First, we need to do a bit of healing. Make liberal use of the spot healing brush and the cloning tool to eliminate any blemishes, potholes or craters on your subject’s body. In case you are photographing Om Puri, here’s when you should say ‘D’Oh’ and quit. For others, you are looking for a reasonably flawless looking skin, as otherwise, what we’re going to do next will amplify the imperfections further, making everyone look like Om Puri (I love the actor, but he’s just not Dave Hill-ish material).

Step 2: Next, you create three duplicate layers of your healed layer, and name them (bottom up) Median 30, High Pass 5 and Mask. Please be sure to carefully replicate these names otherwise your computer is liable to go up in smoke in under 30 seconds of your doing this. That, and the fact that it helps you remember the steps. Once that is done, select the layer named ‘Median 30′, and apply FILTER>NOISE> MEDIAN with a value of 30. Then, select the layer titled High Pass 5, and apply OTHER> HIGH PASS, with a setting of 5. Change the blending mode of this layer to ‘Overylay’. Next, log on to your bank account, and transfer all your money to my paypal account. After that, move on to the layer named Mask, and apply a mask over it. Fill it with white. Now, take a nice soft brush (0 will do fine), and having selected the white mask rectangle to the right of the layer thumbnail, start painting your subject’s skin with black. Take care to stay away from edges and sharp areas like eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips, etc. What this will do is make your subject’s skin look awesomely soft, while still preserving enough detail so as to differentiate it from Barbie’s butt. Do this for all of the exposed skin.

Step 3: Next, we apply the LucisArt filter. But before that, remember to flatten your image and make a duplicate layer to minimize the damage you’re most certainly going to do next. Go to FILTER> LUCIS. Set the control on the top-left of the screen to Whyeth, and the mix level to 30. There are 7 buttons on the bottom of the panel, of which the first would be selected by default. This will do just fine. Press okay. Chances are that what will now be presented to you will probably not look pretty. Play around with the ‘transparency of this layer till you’re satisfied.

Step 4: Then comes the fun part. This is where the Dave Hill look really comes out (It better, as it’s the last step). Flatten your image again, and create a duplicate layer. Select the burn tool from the tools palette, set it’s exposure to somewhere between 10 – 20, and setting to ‘shadows’. Now, run the tool over all the shadow areas of your image. Try it first on the clothes of your subject till you get the hang of it. When you think you’ve done enough, do this some more (remember, exposure is at 10 to 20, so you might have to apply this more than once to see any visible difference). Next, select the dodge tool and repeat the process over the highlights on your image, with the setting at ‘highlights’ and the exposure value at anywhere between 5 – 10.

As a finishing touch, add some vignetting effect by applying FILTER> LENS CORRECTION. If you’re not as lazy as I am, you’d have hopefully taken the extra trouble of actually setting your composition against an interesting background – so, you might want to do some colour correction and sharpening there, If you are, then you can just sit back and gloat at your new creation.

This should do it. You should now be the creator of your very own Dave Hill image that you can flash around and blind your wannabe-photographer friends with.

And how have I evolved this elaborate method? I haven’t. There is this noble soul out there called Joel Grimes, who like me, is a very gifted photographer. And unlike Dave Hill, he believes in spreading the knowledge. Do visit his blog for some very nice tutorials on wraparound lighting and post-processing. In fact, I’ve learnt the initial skin softening process from him. For the rest of the method, I’ve relied on another resourceful individual called Google.

Do let me know how your results look. And throw in a few pointers if you figure out something that I’ve overlooked.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

There are some people in this world who have that certain indescribable spark that lightens up the entire room wherever they go. They seem to have this invisible aura around them that compels anyone and everything around to gravitate towards them.

Karthik is NOT one of these people. Unfortunately, he thinks he is. So unless you are familiar with Karthik, time spent with him could be like a series of disturbing pauses, wherein he performs a string of randomly ordered secret-service type squint-eyed glances into the middle-distance. If you were familiar with him, you wouldn’t be spending too much of time with him anyway.

So, there I was the other day romping around, camera in hand, for some inanimate objects to photograph. After an hour of brainstorming, I’d zeroed in on Karthik and a flower vase. The gaudy floral motif around the vase seemed a tad too alive, and tilted the scale in favour of the ever-reliable, ever-vegetating Karthik.

The lighting setup was pretty simple. There was a Vivitar 285HV shot through an Umbrella from camera left (around 8 ‘O clock) triggered via radio trigger. There was another light behind and back of the bearded vegetable from camera right – this was basically to throw some light onto the phone. For those of you who’re wondering how to get your subject to emote like in this image, generally phrases like ‘did I tell you your boss called again to remind you you were fired last month and need not keep coming to office‘ or ‘did I tell you your GF called to say she’s running away with that guy who keeps tweeting about his epic struggle with erectile dysfunction?‘ seem to help. For Karthik, however, just asking him to look happy did the trick (yes, that’s him being deliriously happy).

The second photograph has more or less the same setup, minus the second light on the background; here, the background is lit with light from the window to the left. There was a reflector to the right to fill the shadows on that side and decrease the contrast, but alas  I should have been more specific when asking Karthik to HOLD IT in place).

A steaming hot plate of yucky south-Indian food was placed next to camera to suitably dilate subject’s pupils (yes, still trying to figure out if those catch-lights are actually idlis…) and add the semblance of a smile. I would have liked to have taken more shots, but a salivating, frothing-in-the-mouth Karthik doesn’t a very pleasant portrait subject make. To complete the image, some tweaking was done in post: played around a bit with curves, hue-saturation, colour balance, etc. to soak up the remaining traces of life from the image.

The shoot wasn’t very ambitious. It was just a regular portrait session. But I like the end results because they are very close to how I’d visualized I would want Karthik to be shot. At times, one tends to get carried away with the technical side of things, and forget what’s being photographed altogether. It helps to stay true to the subject and go in with a clear idea in mind. I’m learning to see light as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. That being said, I also hate those boring as-is black and white portraits that one gets to see a lot on Flickr masquerading as portraits. Black and White is grossly over-rated!

View another image from the same shoot here.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

Kuler is the new collaborative color theme generator from Adobe. While it’s meant specifically for designers, it’s equally helpful for photography as well. It’s online, free and community-based. And, it’s free. From Adobe. You got that, right? Adobe? Free?

The interface has a simple color wheel that has 4-5 nodes that can be moved around; the positions of the nodes control the colors of the swatches of color at the the bottom of the screen. While the ‘custom’ mode gives one full control of the nodes, there are other modes set according to predefined rules. For example, the ‘Shades’ rule will help you navigate five shades of the same color. Or the ‘triad’ will help you play around with 3 color schemes. Once you are satisfied with the color scheme that you’ve generated, you have the option of naming it and sharing it with helpful tags. You can also browse through schemes made by other nerds and bask in the warm cozy feeling of nerdy brotherhood.

Once saved, you can also export the swatch values (color info) to other Adobe products. Having a set color scheme in mind while post-processing images leads to interesting results. You could also try and integrate the color choices while taking the actual image with color gels. It’s also possible to work the other way around: to generate a color scheme from an image. You have the option of either uploading an image or linking to your Flickr account for this.

For offline work, if you have Adobe Air installed, there is a tiny little applet that you can use to admire your creations right from your desktop. With connectivity, you can also browse through sorted lists (in order of popularity or recommendation) of others’ creations. Enjoy!

Mental Note: Remember to crop deskbar before posting images.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

Being in a particularly gracious mood, I did this image for my friend Charsi to send across to his fiance. And carrying on the philanthropic drive, here I explain to you how I did it.The source image is from the same session as this and this. It’s a fairly simple image of Charsi, lit from camera right with a Vivitar 285hv through an umbrella. There is another Vivitar 285hv (bare) at camera left (slightly behind the subject) to give some outline to the left side of the image.

Open up the image of Charsi. If you do not know him, or for some reason, refuses to pose for strange photography enthusiasts who keep mailing him with the subject line: Proposal for Sad photo session with FlickrAddict123′, any other particularly melancholic individual, gazing into the middle-distance in the general direction of the camera should be okay (at this moment, anyone from Wall Street in any pose would do – recent developments ensure that they look nowhere but the middle-distance. Oh, and you might also want to steer clear of places where you’re likely to find happy people, like in a bingo hall or a park). Duplicate this layer – I’m awesomely confident about my PS skills, everyday I find new ways of messing up a perfectly decent photograph. If you are as adventurous as I am, you can continue working on the original layer. Name the duplicate layer ‘I’m a sissy’.

On the sissy layer, do all the cool stuff with the curves, saturation and color balance, till your ego is massaged enough to consider yourself a PS pro. Make sure that you have some dark portion in your image (more on this later).

Now for the background. Add some texture to your background. Add a layer mask, and paint out the melancholic stock-broker so that you can see his face through all the mess (how true). Play around with the opacity of the texture layer so that it doesn’t look like a close-up of a Van Gogh painting (you might be a Van Gogh fan, but you are almost certainly not talented enough to pass off thick layers of paint as work of art). You might also play around with the different blending mode. Here, you can let go off the edge of your desk, as these changes are perfectly reversible. Once done, lean back and wait for someone to walk into the room and say something like I’ll be damned, you’re a genius.’ Do not, I repeat, DO NOT proceed further till this happens.

Detour: We need a nifty calendar hanging on the wall behind the broker. For this, you can use any image of a calendar. But being the perfectionist that you are, you might want to use an image you yourself have taken, and make a calendar out of it using FD Flickr Toys. The website is self-explanatory. Once done, you would want to add a bit of texture to the calendar to give it a more realistic look. A quick and dirty way of doing it is to open a new blank layer (ensure your foreground – background colours are default black and white; for this, just click D). Now, go to filter> Render> Clounds. Repeat this a couple of more times. Now, pull down the opacity of this layer; play around with the different blending options (for me, Hard Light seems to work fine), and you are done.  Also, add a page curl to one of the bottom edges.

Now, open up the calendar file, and copy it as a layer onto the main file. Resize it, and place it such that some part of it is behind the stock broker. Rotate it a bit so that it does not appear geometrically perfect. Erase or mask out this bit such that it appears as if the calendar is on the Van Gogh wall and the sad broker’s body is obstructing your view of it. Now, in order to relieve your viewers of the anguish of trying to figure out as to why would anyone have a calendar painted off the wall, right click on the calendar layer, and go to blending options. Add an awesome drop shadow. Get some coffee.

Now, add a wet pane texture onto the top of the pile, and play around with the opacity and blending mode. After this, get your eraser out and delete out some text from the new later to make it appear as if the text has been written on the pane. If you’re using a stock-broker image, here is a suggestion:

“My Choices
1. Shoot
2. Hang
3. Drown”

There we go. You now are the proud creator of your very own Sad Stock Broker! Congratulations!

Note: Wet Pane Texture courtesy Grégory Millasseau

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

“From Clee to heaven a beacon burns,

The Shires have seen it plain,

from North and South the sign returns

And beacons burn again.”

Starting a piece of writing with a quotation is akin to downloading all your pictures on to your computer, and turning them into high-contrast ‘black and white’ images. Magically, regardless of the subject matter, the output instantly takes on an air of respectability. ‘Oh, black and white…must be a professional!’, mutters the unsuspecting viewer to himself, while the scheming photographer drags the saturation button all the way left on his next post. It’s a fail-safe way of garnering attention on any photography site – try it! The next best way is to have a profile name like ‘FemaleNudeYoga, but then again, it all depends on how desperate you are for attention.

Photography, I feel, is one of the trickier forms of art (but then again, I can imagine someone write now sitting on his laptop, writing ‘XXX, I feel, is one of the trickier forms of art). Since its representation of the world is so visually realistic and unambiguous, it is very hard to ‘allow’ within it the space for the viewer to read in his or her own interpretations. So, it’s somewhat of a fine balance between nudging the viewer in the general direction you want her to go, and yet allowing her to ramble around and find her own spot. Most of the black and white photographs that we see today are like a huge billboard saying ‘PROCEED TO POINT X.’ So, the challenge seems to be more in COLOR!

Which brings me to today’s post (actually it doesn’t, for the preceding paragraphs have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but what the hell, they still sounded good, right? I am a sucker for the occasional black and white too!). If you’re amongst the millions of loyal readers of this blog (well, it’s more like 117 readers, but we’re getting there…), you’ll be aware of the minor misunderstanding that had cropped up between the missus and me. I’m happy to inform you today that the matter has finally been resolved, and there is relative peace and quiet at home. And not unlike resilient Indians dropping in on to a bombing site hoping to catch a glimpse of some devastation at someone else’s expense , the camera and other photography equipment are beginning to crawl on to the scene once more. The following images form part of the elaborate confidence-building-measures (CBM) that were drawn up following the truce:

This is one of the first shots from yesterday’s session with the missus. It was shot in the bedroom at around 6 PM. The room was fairly well-lit, but since I was using external lights, that doesn’t really come into the equation. The shutter speed is at a maximum of 1/200s (sync speed – any faster than this, and it wouldn’t be open long enough for it to capture the flashes), and the aperture was at F/20. The aperture was kept low as the softbox on the right of camera was too close to her, and would have blown out the highlights otherwise. The post-processing is fairly straight-forward: after the regular spot-healing, curves, etc., a solid color layer was added, the opacity brought down to about 40% and the blending mode changed to ‘Hue’. That’s what lends the image the warm, glowy look. The background was lit with a Vivitar from camera left, through a brown water bottle. On top of this is a simple texture courtesy Jerry Jones, aka GhostBones. It was inserted as a new layer, and a layer mask was applied to let the original image come through. After a minimal level of color balance, a vignette effect was applied via Filters>Distort>Lens Correction. All this might seem kind of complicated to you if you are as proficient in PS as I am. But believe me, I was almost as clueless about the various steps while doing them. I just knew how I wanted my missus to look like – with a lot of trial and error, I tried filling up the missing steps in between to get that image (including the regular groveling on the knees, and pleading her to pose for me, sigh!). Also, if I were to re-do this, I would crop out the empty space on top of the missus’ head – the image would look much better with a tighter composition, methinks.

This one was taken at f/10, and quite frankly, it was fairly blown out (for the reasons specified above). But since I click in RAW (Google that if you don’t know about it, and liberally sprinkle it in your next conversation with friends and family), I retrieved a lot of the detail PS. Thereafter, the PS work was more or less similar to the last image. The only difference in the look that I wanted a bit more directionality in the lighting of the scene. If you look closely, the lighting on the background in the previous picture is fairly even from left to right, although it falls off pretty sharply on the missus. Also, the light appears very soft. I wanted the light to be a little harder, and fall off equally on background. For this, what I did was use the crop tool to select the entire image, and then drag the right border such that the image doubled in width (the image itself would of course remain the same width, but there would be some blank space to the right that PS would think is part of the image. Post that, I applied a sharp vignette. The vignette on the right-side hence was applied to the blank space that was created in the last step, which I then cropped out. I am sure there are much better ways of doing this kind of thing, but this works too . If I were to re-do this, I would have not reduced the exposure of the image in PS by as much. That would have helped retain some of the glow that you see in the previous image. I did try getting it back via curves, but was losing a lot of detail in the shadows (and I was too lazy to start all over again).

And if you’re still wondering what the heck does the poem at the beginning of the post have to do with all of this, well it’s absolutely nothing. It just looks good, like a perfect black and white image.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

Charas, aka Charsi, is my friend, colleague and neighbour. Lot’s of responsibilities for a single person, eh? Yes, and he does them all with elan!

Our friendship goes back about 2000 beers, 1 bar brawl, 3 jobs, 3 cities and 6 years. And despite this rich experience, he still doesn’t kick me out of his home; in fact, he occasionally drops by mine too!

Charsi is a person who is literally ‘game’ for pretty much anything. He lives, breathes, eats and sleeps sports; and when he’s not doing any of the above, well, he’s perhaps reading up on sports. To the people who know him, he’s best personified by this cursor that I am seeing blinking as I type this…forever in motion. His enthusiasm and energy in everything he does is so contagious that there ought to be an antidote for it. And speaking of antidotes, as with anything that suggests motion, my body seems to have naturally developed immunity against Charsi’s influence. For people familiar with my athleticism would recognize now how shamelessly M. Night Shyamalan stole the entire plot of his 6th movie from this friendship of ours; well, almost – I’ve given up playing with explosives, and don’t have much time for comic books either.

Okay, now that the sponsored intro is out of the way, let’s get down to business. After the perfume bottle incident, the Governing Body in the house has put our 1-2-3 agreement on hold: so, no more clicking pictures of the Missus or her belongings (alas, I had a great light set-up for her dressing mirror). Suffice to say that for a brief period of time, my bottled up artistic exuberance was suffocating me from within.

And finally, I said no more. It was time for me to be a man, for me to stand up for my sovereign rights, to show the world who’s the boss, to finally put everyone else in their rightful places. No more of the snide remarks, out with the long soliloquies of being ‘productive around the house for once’. Even the meek had to revolt some time. It was time…time to fight back. The camera stayed safely out of sight, over the book-shelf for 2 weeks.

For some time, I played around with the idea of hiring some pretty models and getting them to pose for me. I mentally played out the scene: I was adjusting the tuft of hair on my nude model’s forehead, when the missus walks in. Chin high, I resolutely nod my head, as if to say ‘ha-hah! take that!’ As comforting as this seemed, I knew the scene would have certain deviations in real life: ‘Honey, please…please darling….I swear I don’t know who these people are. I just woke up and found them in our living room. As I asked them to leave, they started stripping, and threatened to castrate me unless I took pictures of them with a three light setup (one for the background, one on camera right through a huge softbox, and the third just out of the frame on camera left, bare, as fill-light).’

Alas, I get carried away at times.

I can’t quite explain it, but as I sat there thinking about my imaginary nude models, I started thinking of Charsi (huh? told you I can’t explain it). As in, no, I do not think he’s an ideal stand-in for a pretty female model. But he had something that  trumped everything else – proximity! And of course if the Missus does happen to walk in, there wouldn’t be a scene. That being the case, I convinced my mind to squint its eyes, and overlook some minor details.

The first picture is a standard portrait that I’d been meaning to try out since quite sometime. Umbrella on the right, shining a Vivitar 285hv at 1/2 power. Another Vivitar at the back as background light. Simple. Well, not quite. My living room has dull, off-white walls. Shining background light on them would not amount to much in terms of colour effects. So, what do I do? Gels, you say? Yes, you are absolutely right. But, er….don’t have none (thanks, Montu!). What I do instead, is snoot the flash and shoot it through a green-coloured water bottle. It more or less has the same effect. It’s not something that hasn’t been done before (in fact, there might even be a flickr group for this: SNOOT FLASH THROUGH GREEN BOTTLE – SUBMIT 1, COMMENT ALL!). But it was definitely something I hadn’t done. And I am pretty thrilled with the result. Awesome expression by Charsi just adds to the appeal (of the photograph, I mean ).

This one was more or less the same setup as far as the main-light goes. No background light, though. Instead, we have a gobo’d Vivitar shining in from the back and on to the left side of his face as separation light. I really like the catch-lights on this one. Nothing like big round catch-lights to infuse life in to your portraits. Just imagine this image without them. Wouldn’t be the same, right?

By now, I wasn on a roll. I had clicked atleast 2 photographs that I knew I would be proud of. So, had to try something different. Enough of those standard, dull expressions. Let’s do something conceptual. And just as I was thinking aloud these thoughts, Charsi surprises me with this.

For once, I really like the post-processing I did on this. It’s nowhere near perfect (look at his wound – looks like paint), but it conveys the idea behind the image quite well, methinks. But his expression, of course, is the core of the image. It’s just awesome! I’ve been meaning to blog about the PS work as well, but taking those screen shots requires way too much effort. I mean, who asked those morons to put the print-screen button way up there…!

By now, I was just way too excited about the pictures I was getting. I had taken at least 5 good images (had clicked about 50!). I walked up to Charsi – a tuft of hair on the right-side of his forehead was disturbing me. I tried combing it down with my right hand.

Door opens, Missus walks in, shopping bag falls, jaw drops.

‘No honey, I have nothing to tell you…no, I like rock. Yes, Katrina Kaif is pretty…no, Salman is not. Fights, of course I’ve been in fist-fights. Yes, I hate flowers…!’ Sigh!

More Charsi pics here

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DISCLAIMER: No one involved in the making of this blog-post is homosexual. I mean, i’ve nothing against being gay, but Charsi isn’t. Nor am I. No, no flowers. Yes, Katrina Kaif is pretty. Yes, I get into drunken brawls regularly. Who Stephen Fry? Yes, Iron Man was awesome…pink is the ugliest colour…

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