Fireworks in the sky!

I guess this is my first work on fireworks. This photo was taken during the Paryaya, a festival of my native town, Udupi. To shoot some pictures on this auspicious day, I had gone to the Sri Krishna Temple with my camera. The temple's premises was crowded, and I had no experience shooting in the middle of such a huge gathering.

As I finished shooting the pictures of the nearby temples, I saw fireworks on the sky. The patterns they made on the sky seemed soothing. And the best way to capture the moment was by setting my camera to continuous mode. Then, I just held my shutter button at the sky and my camera went into burst mode, clicking images one after other. Soon, I was left with 100s of frames on my memory card! Later that day, I came back home and selected some of the best ones, and deleted the rest. And that's how I got this one. Hope you liked it. Btw, stay tuned for more of my photos. Bye!

The new SLR in town - the Canon EOS 1200D

Image Source: Canon India

Canon has put itself into a challenge by bringing out this baby DSLR into the market. With its rivals, Nikon bringing out fully loaded entry level SLRs like D3200, D5200, will Canon live upto their customers' expectations? And this one is considered to be an update to the Canon EOS 1100D. But the question is, is the new Canon EOS 1200D a worth buy SLR for beginners? Let's take a look. 

This entry level DSLR comes in 2 different kit combinations - Kit I (with Canon 18-55) and Kit II (with Canon 18-55 and 55-250). Most of the customers remarked this Canon product as highly priced, with the body itself costing you Rs 30k! Moreover, beginners are into investing less on their first camera and that's one draw-back of this entry level DSLR.

The most striking feature I found is that this camera is app-enabled. The app gives you the complete guide on using your first SLR and also has pretty good challenges for you. The app is available to iOS and Android users.

Image Source: Flickr

You can capture sharp images with the 18 megapixel APS-C size CMOS sensor. The Canon 1200D comes with a 3-inch screen which is not touch-responsive and is stationary, no swirling. Shooting in low-light has been brilliant with this one as you have an ISO range from 100-6400 (expandable to 12,800). It comes with an in-built flash, which can come in handy for beginners. The focusing has been decent but is a bit slow. 

Unlike, the Nikon entry level SLRs, this one lacks has only 5 creative filters, has got 9 AF points, and there's no mic feature for shooting videos. That puts the 1200D aka Rebel T5 one step below the Nikon SLRs. Though with Canon's wide lens-range, you can make most out of this one. 

I think the 1200D is ideal for shooting nature, landscape, macro, portraits and not fit for sports and action photography. Infact, the ratings for this product has been pretty low. If you have your budget fitted to buy this SLR with expensive lenses, then go for it! And one more thing. Instead of buying this one, with the same budget you can get better processor, faster burst-rate, larger screen, by buying the Canon EOS 100D. You can even look out for the Nikon SLRs. Also, take a look at the below video!

Going HDR!

I'm a kind of person who cannot sit idle even for a minute and the worst part is that I have got nothing to do during my vacations. I had to do something to strike off my boredom. But how? That was one thought I had in my mind for the last few days. The best one out of the thousands of ideas I had in mind was to learn Photoshop CS6. I know a bit of basics,  that I learnt during my last vacations but wanted to try professional editing. 

So, I gave it a shot!

I have heard a lot on HDR (High-dynamic-range imaging), maybe on the web, maybe on some of the photography magazines or other sources. Moreover, the HDR Images on 500px fantasized me, they were remarkable.  I had to learn this one! And the best part of HDR, is the way it transforms the sky in the frame.

According to me, HDR best suits on photos of the categories - nature, landscape, architecture. So, I picked this photo. You can check out the original version of it, here. So, I went to YouTube, and searched for videos containing Photoshop HDR Effect Tutorial, and I ended up watching the below video. 




That's how I learnt the HDR effect! It was fun learning HDR. This tutorial was a bit simple one. There's some more professional and complicated ones. Need to go through those as well to master HDR and I have lots of time trying it out. That's all in this post folks, but I will be up with some more of my Adobe Photoshop CS6 edits! Till then, bye!