Few days back, I got a chance to visit a small mountain stream near my place. A group of friends made a plan for a picnic there. Mountain streams, with their rocks and cascades, always attract me. This one was also a great idea. Picnic by the stream, a couple of dips in the cold water, and some motion blurs. A great day awaited me.
Monsoons are an interesting time for the hills. Everything turns fresh and green. The water sources get replenished. Clouds float around, and sometimes for days, we are stuck indoors, admiring these clouds through the windows.
During the rainy season, when the skies are always grey and when the clouds float around in the valley, there are times when the cloud cover opens up for a while and provides a glimpse of the snow covered Himalayan peaks. For a photographer, these are windows of opportunity. I enjoy capturing the peaks whenever such a scene emerges.
Coates Kinney wrote these lines more than a century ago, and yet, even today they make sense :
When the humid shadows hover
Over all the starry spheres,
And the melancholy darkness
Gently weeps in rainy tears,
What a joy to press the pillow
Of a cottage-chamber bed,
And to listen to the patter
Of the soft rain overhead!
Today afternoon, sitting alone inside the house, while the dark clouds beautifully cover the valley in front, and the rain drums its music on the roof, I ponder on the present and the future. My camera rests on the table on one side, and the calendar shows the empty days on the other. Rainy days always bring with them a mix of feelings. Somehow, the sadness today is stronger than the joy.
Want to change the intensity of colors in your photograph? Most photo-editing applications provide two tools for doing this – Vibrance and Saturation. Though quite simple, these are still misunderstood and misused quite a lot. Here is a short and simple explanation.
