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Impromptu picnic aboard the Peacock, so we got together a few packs of wafers, drinks, hot-dogs and chicken cup-noodles… the ruckus the 3 girls created would have put a dozen boys to shame

We decided to go down-river instead of the usual trip up-river, head past Isapura and then get as far as we could get towards the Buriganga. Unfortunately,  just about 20 minutes sailing we found a blockage across the river where the sand-boats unload. They were fixing the pipelines and had these strung across with some sort of floating contraption pushing them around. Turned back and went back up-river the usual way past that lovely cluster of houses.

Warm afternoon, just perfect to laze and doze on the sun deck after a lunch of chicken noodles and a beer……..

More PICS HERE.

The series of photos was shot with 2 wireless Sb800s installed in the upper gallery on the lighting rails of the theatre. For some shots only one SB800 was firing – kept wondering what the problem was but I could not go back up to check. When play practice was done, and I went to retrieve the flash units – the problem was clear. One SB800 was on auto-standby, and it would go to “sleep”. Since I was using remote flash triggers, these will not wake-up a sleeping flash until one shutter release – after the one “misfire” the flash would be alive would work if the next shot was taken before it went into standby again… must remember to run through the check-list fully next time! Though, because there was sufficient stage lighting and the flash was only for fill light – this little issue was really a non-issue eventually.
A set of 36 photos can be viewed : HERE

Blog crashed yesterday. No apparent reason. The fix that finally worked [after hours of tinkering] also caused some letters and punctuation marks in many of the posts to be replaced with strange symbols and characters like “•” and “a” !

At least this blog is up and running now. A pain in the âs€ to go edit all these posts…. so I guess these strange characters are here to stay :-<

…along with this beautiful picture of the lovely view from my window

Another version is HERE

Pahela Falguner Shuvecha Shobaike – Happy First Day of Spring to everyone!
13th February 2010, and the first day of Spring has arrived…

A friend has been involved in a documentary project on the life-story of Bangladesh artist and personality Surayia Rahman - requiring some photographs of Surayia, her art and wonderfully intricate Nakshi Kantha tapestries, photos of the women who embroider the Nakshi Kantha, and other visuals of people associated or who were associated with Surayia. I was given this great opportunity to photograph Surayia at her home in Dhaka yesterday. Surayia does not now design these, nor is involved with the “production work” but is still very much revered by the women who are continuing what she started. Some of the women were at Surayia’s home too. I was then taken by Surayia’s daughter to photograph some of the beautiful tapestries and embroidery pieces which have been collected by people in Dhaka. There are not many around, and these works of art are really precious. Not just because these wont be made anymore, but because there is something so special about Surayi’as work and designs. Some are from traditional folk stories, but many are from her free imagination. She told me of some of these and the many many stories about her life from when she was a little girl to her present life. Of what influenced her work and how she would be shocked at the attitude of people who told her that she charged too little for her work! She knew, way back, that she had a special talent for art. That her visions and ideas, which she then translated into her works of embroidery were special. Of how she was recently unwell and unconscious for a while from dehydration, during her unconsciousness she dreamt and remembers everything what she dreamt. Surayia lives a simple life, in a simple home, with a small but beautiful garden in the midst of now towering condos. While she talked, and I asked 100’s of questions, I clicked constantly. These images are for the project so I cannot display them here. But I do have permission to put up a few, just a few.

Click the photos for a larger view.

6th Feb 2010. Really Rosie work in progress continuing.
Today was practice day for the Band again.
Coordination between band members is stronger and they play tighter.

 

A new member joined in as well.
Click HERE for the series.

READY? SET… GO!!
 

That’s what the t-shirts said for a “fun run” organized by a friend to raise money for a breast cancer fund.

Getting almost 100 people into a group photo was a tough one though. Luckily I had a super-wide lens in the bag, and there was a staircase I could climb for a downward looking shot….

3 February 2010.
WIP photo session # 6. Progress: Stage sets, some costumes, cast dance to live music by the Band, additional scenes rehearsed. Looking good!

And the rest of the series is HERE

I had assumed that any in-camera picture-control settings were not saved when shooting in RAW/NEF format. That these settings were lost unless one was shooting in JPG. Not just assumed, but I have many times tried using various settings and found that when I opened the NEFs in PS, the in-camera picture-control adjustments were lost. Bummer!I never found out that my assumption was untrue, because I rarely used Nikon’s Capture NX proprietary imaging software. There are 100’s [or 1000's] of discussions at the various photo forums on the net about this. None of which conclusively give any information of any value [that's typical of so many discussion-forums, right? where just about everyone is an "expert"].

But then recently, a couple of posts by Moose Peterson [click here for the second post]showed the way. Just great! and just in time. I needed to shoot some images for which I needed the colors to saturate and did not want to do this in PSCS4 during any post-processing – nor did I want to use the Vivid setting in-camera and shoot in [yetch!] JPG .

So, for those who have not come across this valuable info yet, here is how its done [thanks to Moose Peterson]:
• Select a picture-control from the camera menu.
• Adjust / tweak it to your liking if you want.
• Save it as a custom picture-control setting.
• Activate/select the setting.
• Select 14 bit uncompressed RAW/NEF.
• SHOOT!
• Download RAW images to your computer.
• Open the NEFs in Capture NX [you can run a "batch-process" and convert the entire lot of images at one go], and do a “save-as” to TIFF format. NX reads the NEF and the instruction of the picture-control settings and will not discard these when saving to TIFF.
• Open the TIFFs in PSCS4 or whatever version of PS you use.
• Process the TIFFs as you normally do.

DONE!

Here are the processed JPGs after opening the NEF file directly to ACR/PSCS4 and the 2nd version is double-processed and converted using the above method [both images are processed from the same RAW file, shot with picture-control set to VIVID]:

 
Click the images for a full view.

PS [Added this to my "whis list"!]:
When will Adobe wake up and get updated codes for Adobe Camera Raw to read RAW formats without discarding in-camera picture-control settings?

30th Jan 2010
WIP, the Band for Really Rosie.

Great music today, listening to the band at practice..

Some more from today are HERE