Portrait is my first passion. My strength area as well. Then came the turn of landscapes. I shot a lot and made tons of mistakes. Someone said, I should shoot birds and hence got into them. I shot a lot, made mistakes but got hold of tens of good images. Lot to do there. I often thought of buying Nikon AFS 16-35 f/4 IFD lens, thinking that will give me good landscapes ! How naive of me ! I never bought that and though the thought keeps coming back to me! I might buy that one day, but on second thought, I think of Tamrons new announcement SP 15-30mm f/2.8 Di VC USD lens. Usually Tamron SP lenses are pro-grade. And if this is any good as I think it should be, I will prefer that over Nikon and buy it. To shoot this, however, I used Sigmas Ultra wide angle, i.e. EX DG AF f/1.8 20mm Asperical IF D lens. This is ultra fast and ultra sharp even wide open at f/1.8. (Nikon has now announced almost siimilar specd f/1.8 20mm lens). The one mistake I used to make was not get into the fields or at the river-bed. I will shoot from the high-way from over the top of the bridge. How stupidly lazy of me ! But I always correct myself and real fast. I now park my vehicle on the highway, and walk deep into the fields. For example, for this image, I got under the bridge, and spent two hours there to get only handful images. I realized, what a world and what a super vantage point I had been missing all along ! I always tell myself that there is always a second chance. But I also know that second chance does not mean anything if I have not learnt from the previous one. It takes courage to make a mistake, acknowledge and correct it. I got this image in that process of learning. There are quite a few. I post-processed it this afternoon, and I learnt a lot doing that. I was not able to extract my own details from the RAW image I had shot. Today, I am sort of enlightened on that front. This is my image. This is what I saw out there early morning under that bridge, by the bank of the river. They say, if you do not learn, you repeat the same lesson and that does not end until either you learn or you die. I did not want myself to be doing the same until grave and that is the reason, I stumbled upon the treasure in post-processing technique. Boy o boy, am I thrilled ! You bet, I am !! Today, I broke the jinx and I am on top of it now. This image, therefore, is very close to my heart as the first image I post-processed through that processing wisdom I acquired today! I am thrilled. I am super-excited in fact ! While I still buy that Tamron lens which should hit the market in 60 days or so, I have an ultra-wide angle, one of the fastest (f/1.8) as it is, and now I know what to do with it..! I will be on the rampage of shooting landscapes now onwards! I wonder why and how I managed to stay away from that fascinating world so far ! Looks like anything is possible. It is only the matter of hard-work, conviction, persistence and being passionate about pursuits. Raajan Patil
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 11:51:19 +0000
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