Photographes Amateurs et Pros Mauriciens (PAPM) Chez Pepe

Yashvin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:20:12 +0000

The group members organized quite a few events in the past (Catamaran, 24/7 night out, Shooting in Port Louis among others)Â and today, we met Chez Pepe, Flic en Flac for lunch. 25 members turned up at the restaurant at around 1230… There was loads of things we talked about, for example photography, photography and photography. We tried to discuss about other things like photography and photography. Do I need to say that people around us most probably talked about photography too, lol!

I felt a bit “shy” with my 18-55mm lens when I was among those holding huge lens. One of the most amazing lens is the first one in the picture below : a 70-300mm lens which all of us had the opportunity to hold and shoot a few pics. Wow, it weighted so much but the weight does not really matter once you start playing with it

This part of the beach was crowded with girls and boys holding their big DSLRs and shooting everything which moved around…Â Even the static objects were not spared!

Sorry to people out there in case you felt that we were a group of paparazzi!

Leave all of you here, I will upload my shots later tomorrow (hopefully).

Discover the world of photography

Yashvin — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:13:49 +0000

After introducing the world of blogging to many of you (?), today I invite you to discover the art known as photography.

In this post, I would like to share my little experience gained since the last weeks and hopefully, some of you may found it useful. Tips from professionals and other amateurs are also welcomed

Learning the basics

Since the last weeks, I have been surfing on loads of photography sites/blogs to learn the basics of photography. The only way to grasp them is to practice, practice and practice. It’s always useful to have some volunteers around and sometimes a pet which can also be a nice subject.

Tutorials and tips are widely available on the net and two sites which I found very useful are digital-photography-school.com and photoxels.com.

There has always been wrong perception about digital cameras :

The number of mega pixels on a camera will not make your shots nicer! Nor will they make you a good photographer.

A good photographer will be able to get a nice picture with a small 2 or 3MP while you will still be struggling to get a nice shot with a big DLSR of 15Megapixels!

A camera with a large mega pixel is useful mainly when you need to

crop some parts of a photograph or

view/print the picture at a very large size like billboards etc.

Basically, there are 2 category of cameras :

Point and Shoot cameras which most of us have,
SLR (Single Lens Reflex) and DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras.

Digital, Optical?

When looking at a camera, you have surely came across the words Optical and Digital zoom.

What’s the difference between these 2 type of zooms?

To be simple :

While using the optical zoom of a camera, the image’s quality remains the same at a zooming of 1x and lets say 10x.

But with the digital zoom, a camera will actually enlarge the same picture the number of times you want. At some instant, you will start seeing pixels and the image quality gets low.

Getting used to Aperture and shutter speed

Once you decide moving further into photography, you will need to know these 2 most important terms:

Aperture
Shutter Speed.

The aperture determines how much wide should the lens be opened so that the correct amount of light will fall on the film/image sensor while the shutter speed determines the amount of time the lens should be opened. At first, these 2 words may be quite confusing, but with some practice, you will quickly learn the difference. Write them on a piece of paper and carry them with you, that’s what I did!

	A large aperture (small number value e.g 2.8) will allow you to focus on a main object/person while the other elements remain blurred. Here the background is in focus, while the foreground (mirror) is blurred.
	And a fast shutter speed (largest fraction value, e.g 1/500 or 1/1000) will give you a still image, for example you may see the drops of water splashing when some object falls on water. (Sorry, but I don’t have a nice picture to illustrate this)

Now, if your camera has different modes for shooting pictures, you should stop using AUTO mode and move on to A (Aperture), S (Shutter) or even M (Manual)!
Remember, practice makes perfect!

Photos taken today…

Since my team was not required to be in office today, I went back to Champs de Mars and also Marie Reine de La Paix.

The starting block (Click for original high resolution image)

Taking pictures at Champs de Mars can be so amazing and challenging, specially for an amateur who does not always want to have a nice photograph of the horses… There are so many people moving around or leaning against the track fencing, parents holding their children to have a better view. These are only a few, there are so many!

Colourful roadside

Pizon Land

The 2 pictures above were taken today at Marie Reine de La Paix and they are all available on my flickr.

Flickr-ing

My Flickr Page

Some time ago, I was not much interested to view pictures taken by others, but since I started to take them myself, flickr is one of the sites I visit the most, even more than facebook!

Once you start to learn about photography, you will automatically stop losing your time poking or doing quiz (sometimes stupid) on facebook!

Flickr makes you learn a lot about photography techniques. There isn’t any other simpler way to learn how, where and what to shoot!

There are loads of tools which can make your flickr experience nicer, one of them being flickriver.com, which dynamicallyÂ loads picture while you scroll down…

Credits

Special thanks to Doorgesh and Bernard for contaminating me with this virus! lol

Also, thanks to my models Dhaneesha, Dakshinee, Deepa, Pif (yeah lol) and also mum whom I keep carrying with me when I go out to shoot

Later, I will share more about what I learnt in photography. Photography is so huge!

I am simply loving it and what about you?

I hope that I have not written any nonsense above, and please note that these are only basic things about photography for a novice…

Yashvin, pages of my life » Photography in Mauritius