Mayank's Viewpoint

The Monsoon was generous in North India in 2010 and twice during the season, I found myself travelling in a bus on the Delhi-Jaipur highway during heavy downpours. As the bus moved, rain splattered on the glass window next to me and created on it what looked like streams! Owing to the almost opaque layer of moving water on the window, the scenery outside turned into background and kept changing as the bus progressed. Fortunately, on both occasions I was carrying compact cameras (Canon PowerShot A720 IS and Canon IXUS 105 IS / SD1300 IS) using which I tried to capture some of the painterly sights.

The dusk mood in a Jaipur (Rajasthan, India) park where I went regularly for winter evening walks fascinated me and I thought of capturing it with the compact camera that I carried in a waist pouch: Canon PowerShot A720 IS. Owing to low available light, some of the initial attempts to capture the mood were unsuccessful as most photographs came out shaky due to slow shutter speed, ISO 400 was the maximum I could go up to to retain reasonably good image quality with a small sensor cam. It then occurred to me that detail was not important in arresting the mood so I took a series of photograph using A720 IS’s manual focus mode, deliberately ‘unfocussing’ all the shots. With blurred photographs, camera shake ceased to be an issue and loss of detail enhanced the mood, imho. Here are some of the results (taken on March 18 and 19, 2010):

A speck of light coming in through the window caught my attention on a very cold morning and I got intrigued by its shape. I spent the next few hours and the next morning discovering interesting shapes that morning sunlight coming in through windows was making at different places around my living room and photographed them. I thought photographing ‘light’ was a very simple idea so to keep the whole exercise simple, I used a pocket digital camera (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ10) for the shoot. Colour wasn’t playing an important part in the images so I converted them to black and white during post-processing. This turned out to be one of the most enjoyable photo shoots I’ve indulged in and one I could do in my pajamas! The name of the series was inspired by lyrics of the song Love Itself by Leonard Cohen.

I am happy to announce the launch of my new photoblog Out of the Ordinary, which earlier existed as ‘Ordinary Photographs’ on Blogger. This, second version, is more formal, uses better technology (WordPress) and displays bigger pictures! It features black and white photographs taken in and around the city of Jaipur (India) over the past four years. Most photographs featured in the blog have been taken with compact cameras. Have a look!

Here are some photographs taken in foggy conditions at Mount Abu, Rajasthan (in July 2007) and at Sultanpur National Park, Haryana (in March 2008). In both situations, I tried to make use of the two gifts that the fog offered: a natural impressionistic feel and natural isolation of elements.