Shot @ Nandi Hills

This is a technique that I had come across long before I bought a camera, but was looking at others’ photographs. I tried this a few days back… but because of harsh light and certain setting miscalculations, it dint quite come out the way I wanted it.

Today, I was just sitting at home when I thought I should give it another try. This was the result..

I know many people know how to do this… but this is the technique in case anyone is interested.

Set the ISO to 400 and the camera to shutter priority mode.
Reduce the shutter time to anything more than a second.. i used 2 seconds. The aperture will be taken care of by the camera.
A suggestion is to use a tripod or in case you dont have one (like me), place the camera on a solid surface to the end, such that the focus ring can be easily rotated.
Then, with the settings in place, zoom out and focus on a object. Best subjects are flowers or household objects.
Now, once u release the shutter, it will be open for 2 seconds. During this time, turn the ring to zoom into the image. If done neatly (and a few times) you will have an effect like this… or maybe even better.

Me and another friend Chetan have decided to check out all the birding spots around bangalore. We will visit a location every saturday morning and try to spot and photograph as many birds as we can. Since we are both new to birding compared to anush, amogh and deponti… we felt it will be good for us to venture out, spot birds and identify as much as we can.
So for the weekend, we had been to TG Halli. Thanks to anush for directions.  We reached there close to 7:00 AM and we spotted a couple of kingfishers and a lot of weaver birds. After a short walk through some fields we came pretty close to the dam and spotted some Red Wattled Lapwing.
From their behaviour we thought we might be close to a nest and so we decided to stop and try to photograph them the best we could.
Here is a pic..

After a while we decided to make the relatively short journey to savandurga. We had heard that there are good birding spots there as well and once we reached savandurga we found a very small (approx 60 acre) area that had been designated as a forest zone. The official there was more than happy to let us in and we went for a stroll and reached a lake.
We were able to spot 2 coucals, 2 bee eaters and a king fisher. My friend got my attention to the sound of a bird, which he said belonged to a Horn bill, but I wasn’t sure and neither was I confident enough to argue with him otherwise.
It was a good trip.  Hope to do more of these over the next few weeks.

Also, here i a little abstract type of a image that I more or less created using Photoshop… i call it Spooky Serenity..