My recent efforts at photography have revolved around shooting small, natural objects over long exposures with torch lights. For much of the time it is fairly frustrating; inadequate light, too much light, imbalance in light, or slight shift in focus which you’d notice only after packing up and loading images onto the computer. The biggest frustration though is in finding objects to photograph. The first time I did this was when I noticed a small twig which had an incredible texture to it. And I’d instinctively taken to this “miniature light painting” exercise. Much of the inspiration though had come much earlier from watching a documentary on the German photographer Andreas Feininger who, among many other things, photographed small, interesting objects in his studio. About this photograph and its title, the object is part of a tree’s root. We’d dug up a bit of earth from our garden which had now gotten these roots spread by a tree about 3 meters away. The “twig” itself looked a lot like a cross.

A shop on Commercial Street, Bangalore, selling antiques. Shot with a SMC Takumar 50mm 1.4 on a Dynax 3 with Fuji Superia Xtra-400

A beautifully detailed twig lit by a torch and shot with a Kiron FD mount 70-200mm lens on a Canon 60D. Lens was at 200mm and f11. Long exposure. Ignore what it says about the focal length being 50mm on the left.

A long-exposure of a garden. Lit only by stray street-lights and an open shutter of more than a minute. Canon 60D, Canon 50mm f1.8 II

I bought a new Yashica Electro 35 and the first roll from GK Vale was horrendous. They developed it alright (which cost about 40) but in copying jpgs to a CD, they seem to have gone nuts. All the pictures had black bands on them. Some thin, some wider. And for this process, they'd charged 160. The next roll I made sure I went to a small studio. This is one of the results, for half the price.

A small playground under rain. Absolutely no post processing, as a test of my Yashica Electro 35 GTN. It passed. That's the truth. F4 and 1/500 are the facts.

A rose against a black background. Macro again.

A close-up of an orange flower. That's as much as my knowledge of flora allows me to explain. Used a Canon 60d with SMC Takumar 50mm f1.4 on extension tubes. F-stop at F11 and shutter around 1/25 (on tripod)

After shooting the first roll I am quite confident that the basic 1/500 shutter it works on when without a battery is fairly useful for outdoorsy requirements. I hadn’t known this limitation until taking 4-5 shots. Which meant a lot of images turned out quite dark. The ones I thought would look good, looked good, more or less. However, the conversion into Jpegs done by GK Vale in BTM left a lot to be desired.

The negatives look fine, but the Jpegs have black bands as margin. In some cases this is fairly poor. Wonder if they’ve given up the ghost on film processing.

Small droplets of water hanging from a leaf. Shot with Canon 60d + Extension tubes.