Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PHOTOGRAPHY
Subroto Mukerji
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
to my inimitable guru
S. Paul
the Great Master who befriended me.
2
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
CONTENTS
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………...…….2
Copyright…………………………………………………………………………………...……..5
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..……...6
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..……...8
Prologue……………………………………………………………………………………..…...20
Beyond Photography – Part One
- Coming to Grips with the SLR……………….…………………….………….29
- The Starting Point – The Shutter Speed…………………………………….….31
- – The Aperture…………………………………………… .34
- – Depth of Field……………………………………………36
- – Lenses……………………………………………………37
- – Exposure by ‘Experience Meter’……………………… .. 41
- – Filters for Daily Use……………………………………... 44
- – Flash Synchronization……………………………………45
3
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
- – Composition……………………………………………….97
- – Portraits………………………………………………… 104
- – Bespectacled sitters………………….…………………. 106
- – Low-Key and High-Key Portraits……………………….. 110
- – Landscapes………………………………………………. 112
- – Capturing Love……..……………………………….…… 114
- – The Fountainhead.……………………………………… 120
Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………….…..……132
TIPS FOR BETTER PICTURES…………………………………………………..…….134
“We have two lives - the one we learn with and the life we live after that.”
~Bernard Malamud, The Natural
4
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Copyright
The author asserts his moral right over the ownership of the contents this book,
they being his personal intellectual property. No part of the book may be copied,
Xeroxed, quoted, or otherwise reproduced without the express written
permission of the author.
5
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Acknowledgements
This book also gives me an opportunity to thank Thomas Abraham (Señor El Tomāso)
of LM Ericsson, Austria, and all those other friends who encouraged me to take up the
camera—many of whom I never got around to thanking in so many words.
There is nothing I can ever do or say that will enable me to make amends to my wife,
Sumita, for the insanely fanatical and self-centered way in which I pursued (but never
quite caught up with) photography—a hobby she never really approved of. Yet she not
only put up with my lunacy, she once even sold a diamond ring to buy me an enlarger.
Her elation, on the rare occasions when I managed to do something a tad out of the
ordinary, always left me red-faced and fidgety. I seriously doubt that I merit such
devotion and deep commitment. She is a divinely ordained cosmic gift to keep me
afloat in a world where lifelong companionship is becoming such a rarity.
And to my timeless muse, who always tried to get me to activate some smidgeon of
potential that she imagined lurking within my submerged self, I say, “Merci! But for
you, mamselle, this book would never have happened.” Life after life, her inspiration is
a karmic debt I fail to square, which is why it tracks me relentlessly across the eons.
6
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
“In eve
“In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.
It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another
human being. We should all be thankful for those people
who rekindle the inner spirit.”
"In the future I believe all those who want to leave a record will be photographers of
some kind. Our concept of a photographer will broaden. It will include everything from
those in the area of scientific recording to those who use it to record everything in the
household. And there will be many who would hold exhibitions and publish
photographic collections as a means of personal expression. In that world of the future
there will also be people who use photographs, rather than words, in an attempt to
change society."
"Photography has many different roles and education is one of its most important. The
photograph is valuable in conveying what only you can see and therefore, understand.
The photograph’s value is in its ability to act as an extension of the human eye. There
will always be a need for photographs as long as people use their eyes."
"Every form of human communication starts as a pure thought in the brain but passes
through the hand or mouth which act as a filter. Even if a person is extremely sensitive,
if they are not skilled in the use of speech or body language, their meaning may not be
conveyed effectively. Since the photographic medium affords faithful recordability,
images are made without those filters. There is a spontaneous, pure expression that is
unique to photography."
"Its apparent ease frequently causes people to overshoot, to take pictures of things they
really don’t want to photograph. That’s when you’d like to have that filter. That’s a fact
to always keep in mind when picking up a camera."
"A camera is just a tool for taking pictures. As a designer, I want to design a camera that
becomes an inseparable part of the photographer, a camera that does not get in the way.
But I take pictures too and I have come to realize that because the contemporary camera
is at its state-of-the-art limits, surpassing those limits is a problem that the photographer
will have to solve by himself."
~ Yoshihisa Maitani of Olympus Camera Company
7
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
INTRODUCTION
No matter how accomplished one may think himself, when he sets out to
learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm
as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world.
~Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle
This book was originally intended for the amateur who was keen to
improve his photographic skills. I’ve lost count of the people who’ve asked me
questions like, “How is it that all my pictures come out dark…and usually blurred?”
or “I’ll bring my camera and lenses over some time; I wonder if you’d care to
explain the correlation between the various functions?” So I decided to write a
primer that would cover the basics of taking good pictures without obsessively
dwelling on the technicalities ad nauseaum, for such books – numerous as they are
– can be monotonous, and I’ve always felt that a lecture is the most boring thing on
earth.
It was never my intention to put the reader out of his or her misery;
euthanasia is not my style. All I wanted to do was to try my hand at a little book that
shoots from the hip (lip?) and, while enthusing the beginner, expands her mind by
exposing her to some of the endless vistas that one can explore with the camera…
besides breaking him of his habit of reflexively reaching for his automatic compact
camera only on birthdays, class reunions or picnics. But before the book had
progressed halfway, it got away from me—just like everything else I’ve written.
As this particular book began to write itself out of me, a by-now
familiar feeling of déjà vu engulfed me…a signal that this book, too, was taking me
where it wanted to go. After I’d gotten the transcribing out of the way, then, I took a
short breather before going over what had come through me. I found it was, again, a
sort of rehash of my life learnings (that’s a grammatically verboten word I’ve picked
up from all the HRM books I’ve edited), this time clad in photographic garb. At the
same time, I dimly glimpsed my subconscious motivations: what I’d really wanted
8
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
to explore was not just the substance but also the essence of photography. My
timeless muse was at it again…
In lapsing now and then into introspective mode, I was unwittingly
going beyond – far beyond – photography, to venture into another universe I’d never
dreamt had anything at all to do with making pictures with a camera…the realm of
unfathomable everythingness. This is a zone where there is no space, no time—just
an everlasting encounter with Truth, Light and Beauty of which we are all part, from
quark to cosmos, across all eternity. Ahead of me, a glittering trail of stardust
illuminated the path taken by my muse as she – after having yanked me out of my
comatose state – led the way across the vast chasm that separates our mundane from
our eternal selves.
Not surprisingly (with her in the picture), it had turned out to be a
different sort of photography book, one that – while often adopting a philosophical
tone – shared practical information (and, more importantly, probably had the ability
to trigger ideas that had the potential to provoke people to action). I think that is
why, perhaps, I’ve adopted a conversational style, with minimal use of jargon.
Never did I feel the urge to copy anyone else’s book. Good, mediocre or just plain
lousy, the book would be all my own…well, almost all my own. I just have to
acknowledge once again the role my muse has played in making it whatever it has
turned out to be – that’s your privilege to decide.
So as to obviate the perils of exemplification, I’ve purposely avoided
too many of the pictures that are de rigueur in ‘how-to’ books on photography.
Beginners tend to use visual examples as templates, and that’s something that can
seriously inhibit experimentation as well as hobble development. Moreover, the high
degree of subjectivity involved in the selection process signals that it’s likely to be
another’s version of a pretty pictorial book on photography. We have enough of
those already. All I wanted to write was a short, punchy, inspirational book that
pointed in the right direction – to borrow a phrase from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
once quoted by my timeless muse – without getting in the way of the action.
Now that I’ve finished writing it, two people, thirty years apart, can
heave their respective sighs of relief. One is my father, who – way back in 1977 –
encouraged me to write a book on photography. The other is a dazzling friend who
9
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
was born a mere three years before that, in 1974. She is crazy about vintage cars and
photography, and she had once sent me a few well-put-together emails to clue me up
on certain points. I owe her a backlog of debts that I can probably never adjust.
Some people are human catalysts; they go through life changing people but remain
unchanged themselves. Thank God for that!
Both she and Dad probably expected much more from my pen than
this pocket-sized effort. But given the circumstances, it’s the best I could manage. I
hope they’ll understand.
What is it that definitively sets Man apart from the animal world? It
is not communication, for animals have been proved to communicate. It’s not
intelligence or manual dexterity—the primates demonstrate them in ample measure.
It’s got to be the elusive thing called ‘creativity’, always more apparent in its results,
whether conceptual (e.g., the General Theory of Relativity) or tangible (such as the
ancient cave paintings, found in the Lascaux caves in France, or the far older images
of humanoids and animals scrawled on rocks in the Tassili region of the Sahara).
Ever since Man has looked at his world with awe and wonder, he has
tried to capture his memories in (startlingly real and evocative) images that seek to
mirror his perceived reality. Whatever the medium, however, we can be sure that
men were (and are) essentially dissatisfied with their creative efforts…whether it be
bushman rock paintings, caveman art, photographic images, computer generated 3-
D imagery, verisimilitudinarian or virtual reality—with ‘reality’ sometimes
overlapping these, as in motion picture representations such as the Arnold
Schwarzeneggar (to spell his name the way he did earlier, way back in 1969 before
he won his first Mr. Universe title) blockbuster Total Recall.
Optics have been around for centuries, but till the nineteenth century
no one had been able to make images by means other than manual efforts – that is,
by pencil, charcoal or paint on paper or canvas – before the invention of
photography. It owed its genesis to the laboratory discovery that silver halide crystals
10
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
react to light by undergoing a chemical change…and nothing was ever the same
again. Photography forever changed the way we relate to the world around us.
All credit must go to the early pioneers, men like Joseph Nicéphore
Niépce and Louis Daguerre, who saw the potential in the new developments in
science and initiated the art and the science of mechanized image making. Over the
years, the process was further refined, with cameras more or less keeping pace with
the latest scientific developments, till finally, the age of the 35 mm camera dawned.
I’ve skipped a lot of history here, because I don’t think very many of
my readers want to know about all that old stuff. But I cannot resist squeezing in a
rambling (if far from comprehensive – that would take another
book) discussion about 35 mm cameras, because this is the
point where, for the first time, the portals of photography
opened to the common man. It didn’t happen overnight, of
course, but the writing was on the wall. Any camera/film
system that was easily portable, relatively cheap and simple to
use was destined to be democratized in an age of mass production.
35 mm photography really got going when the renowned optical firm
of Ernst Leitz GmbH, Wetzlar (now literally a Mecca for photo enthusiasts who
come on pilgrimage from all over the globe, and who approach it with as much awe
as a Hindu approaches the Temple of Jaggannath at Puri) was given a charter to
develop an instrument to test the new 35 mm film developed for making motion
pictures. They, in turn, hired an optical engineer called Oskar Barnack and told him
to work on it. The rest, as they say, is history.
Long used to working on microscopes and other precision optical
instruments, Barnack did the only thing he could: he came up with a high-precision
optical instrument that happened to take pictures. It was tiny, easily handheld and
simple to use—once the film had been loaded in the body. This was easier said than
done, because in order to ensure that the film lay inexorably along the film plane (the
focal plane, i.e., the flat surface at which the image cast by the lens falls), the back of
the camera had to be so designed as to be completely removable. Leitz weren’t
taking any chances with a foldable, hinged back with a steel, spring-loaded pressure
plate, as in modern cameras.
11
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
It was a simple but elegant solution: that of doubling the cinema film format created
the miniature film format of 24 x 34 mm (it became 24 x 36 mm a bit later). The first
photos - of outstanding quality for the time - were made in 1914. The First World
War interrupted progress, and it was only in 1924 that the first Leica (Leitz Camera)
went into serial production, and was presented to the public in 1925. Today, of
course, we have cameras with auto-loading, an innovation that is – in my opinion – a
mixed blessing. In my manual loading cameras, I always managed to get 38 frames
out of the film, unlike the strictly 36 frames these programmed cameras deliver. They
go into auto-rewind mode after the 36th frame, and that’s it.
Moreover, people like Mitchell Funk rewound film on their Nikon Fs
to certain (already exposed) frames, in order to make perfectly registered double
exposures. The Nikon F had a film counter that actually counted backwards as one
rewound the film (by hand, of course) so it was easy to return to a previously
exposed frame if one had recorded the frame number—which Mitchell Funk
routinely does. Sometimes, the old ways are the still the best.
Although the famed Leica Model 1A – now worth its weight in gold
to collectors – was cumbersome to load and not exactly easy to use, the picture
quality – incredible by contemporary standards – can easily match those taken by all
but the best cameras available today.
Featuring revolutionary Leitz optics, the new Leica cameras were an
instant hit with field, sports, and news photographers of the stature of Henri Cartier-
Bresson (one of the co-founders of Magnum Photos, the famous newsphoto service),
12
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
but they also had many detractors. Some lamented the arrival of a format (35 mm)
that sounded the death knell of photography as a leisurely, contemplative medium:
the end of the lovingly composed, excruciatingly tedious one-shot an-hour process.
Bertrand Russell compared the 35 mm camera with the cod “that lays
a million eggs in order that one may hatch”. Elitists hate their exclusive tramping
grounds being thrown open to the public. It says much for the prescience of this
famous philosopher that his words presaged the coming of a new age of
photography.
Model after improved model followed in a steady stream from the
hallowed works of E. Leitz GmbH, Wetzlar, West Germany, more notable among
them the Leica IIIF, the Leica IIIG, the legendary Leica M3, with its exquisite
Elmarit, Summitar and Summicron lenses…to be finally topped by Leica’s first
Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera: the fabled Leicaflex, a reply to the growing might
of the (long defunct) Swiss Alpa and the Japanese kamikaze cost-busters.
I have used both the M3 as well as the Leicaflex, and am hard pressed
to describe the rapture of using these awesome instruments. Leica stood for the
pinnacle of the camera maker’s art, to be finally challenged by two ‘upstarts’ from
distant Japan…Nikon and Canon.
The Korean War in the early
1950s coincided with the
development of a Japanese
rangefinder camera (it focused
by turning the lens till two discrete images of the
scene coincided in the viewfinder – much like the
rangefinder device used by riflemen), by Japan’s oldest optical firm: Nippon Kogaku
K.K., of Tokyo.
Combining the best features of the Contax (another justifiably famous
German camera, that harnessed the power of Carl Zeiss optics) and the Leica, the
Nikon S was given away free to war correspondents covering the Korean War. It was
a smash hit with them. The little camera was incredibly rugged, even under battle
conditions, and the Nikkor lenses it used were second to none…so they reported.
13
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
None other than the legendary S. Paul owned the first F2 that I ever
used, and I still remember my amazement that a mechanical (as opposed to an
electronically-controlled) shutter could be this smooth, and have so light yet so
positive a release. It was heavy (but not unduly so), divinely balanced and utterly
heavenly to use; its lever-operated film-wind was deliciously smooth, as if the gears
were coated with butter.
Moreover, its unique 100% viewfinder integrity – what you saw was
what you got on film, not 95% or 93% as in most other makes/models – allowed one
to shoot 35 transparencies keeping
the outer mounts in mind and
composing the picture accordingly
in the viewfinder.
Variants of the F2
followed, such as the F2AS and the
Hi-Eyepoint (which featured a
unique high-vision eyepiece in place of the Photomic finder) mostly concerned with
the removable / interchangeable pentaprism atop the camera that contained the
14
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
metering system. Add an MD-2 battery-operated motor drive that allowed picture
taking at a then-phenomenal 5 frames a second (you saw an F2 powered by an MD-2
being used to photograph the ill-fated Padre in The Omen), and you were deep in
professional territory.
I preferred the economical but essentially robust Nikon FE (which
still lives on in the Nikon FM 3A) with its electronic shutter and MD-12 motor-drive
that allowed sequential shots at 3.5 frames per second…and since it used the same
razor sharp Nikkor optics as did the F2, it was theoretically its equal. S. Paul always
eyed my compact FE / MD-12 motor-driven combination warily, knowing I had the
armament to (hypothetically) match him in the field 99% of the time.
The fact is that I never came even remotely close to emulating my
guru; he is beyond the reach of any lensman…the Maharajah of Photographers (as
Pramod Kapoor, the suave publisher of Roli Books calls him), all of six years older
than his brother Raghu Rai, today a legend in his own right.
A cousin of mine, who was the General Manager of the New India
Assurance Company way back in the early 1980s, once went all the way to Japan to
hunt for an F2 in pristine condition; he had a severe heart condition and his health
was fast deteriorating. But his desire to add the king of cameras to his collection of
fine cameras prevailed; on reaching Tokyo, he asked his Japanese friends to hunt
high and low for the fabled beast. Even in those days, a basic F2 Photomic was a
highly prized item, and a second-hand specimen in mint condition was almost
impossible to locate, because no one wanted to sell.
Despite the fact that his Japanese underwriters, part of a mighty
zaibatsu, joined in the merry chase, it took him three weeks to find one! ‘Bindu’
Mukerji died a year later; the Nikon had not been used even once. He went to the
Happy Hunting Grounds with a smile on his face. Such is the irresistible fascination
of these superlative optical instruments.
Lest I manage to give you the impression that Nikon is the only good
Japanese camera manufacturer, allow me to remind you of the erstwhile Kwanon
Camera Company named after Kwanon, the Japanese Goddess of Mercy. This once-
small camera maker made excellent rangefinder cameras, but in unleashing the
versatile Canon F1, with its exhaustive repertoire of accessories that vastly extended
15
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
its capabilities, mercy flew out of the back door, which is perhaps why they renamed
the company as the Canon Camera Company. The Canon bombardment had begun.
Well known for its outstanding compacts, it now became a big name in SLRs as well.
The Canon F1 was a worthy opponent of the Nikon F2. Its more
plebian stablemates were global best sellers, and one model – the aperture-priority,
semi-automatic Canon AE-1 – even held the record for the maximum number of SLR
cameras sold for a particular model. Though prestigious and exquisitely engineered,
Nikons were very expensive; Canons perhaps cost a tad less but performed just as
well, and the Canon optics were second to none. Their high-speed super-telephoto
lenses such as the 600 mm f.4 were very popular with sports and wildlife
photographers.
Asahi Pentax (the Pentax Spotmatic F had spot metering, a very
handy way to read exposure) and its Takumar lenses, in their traditional screw-mount
avatar, was a superb instrument. Asahi occupy a special place in the history of
cameras; they introduced the instant return mirror. In an SLR (Single Lens Reflex)
camera, the viewfinder shows the actual image that will appear on film; it is not an
approximation, as in rangefinder cameras, because the picture-taking optics and the
viewing optics are one and the same.
Light enters an SLR’s lens, bounces off a mirror positioned at a 45°
degree angle, and ricochets around twice inside a pentaprism (5-sided prism) – once
to correct its upside-down orientation and once again to flip the image the correct
way around, i.e., left-to-right – before entering the eye!
At the instant of exposure (i.e., at that moment in time when the
shutter opens to admit light), the mirror flips up out of the way (the viewfinder image
is blanked for a fraction of a second; this action is quite apparent at slow shutter
speeds like ½ or ¼th of a second, when the
viewfinder blacks out disconcertingly for
an instant), allowing light to strike the
film that lies stretched out beyond the
now open shutter.
16
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Before Asahi Optical Company invented the instant return mirror, the mirror had to
be manually flipped out of the way, and manually returned in order to restore vision
through the viewfinder (even lenses had to be manually stopped down to the taking
aperture, just before exposure, and manually reopened thereafter).
17
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
1
See Part Five of this book for more on the creative aspects of photography.
18
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
process of ideation. One of the main reasons for writing this little book is to help
greenhorns over this hurdle, drawing upon my own experience with automatics.
Those who have outgrown their tiny auto-everything compacts and
want to take control of their picture making, would probably find this book helpful.
But photography – like all the really important things in life – is a product of passion,
precision, practice and perseverance. There is no easy short cut to becoming a good
photographer…and photography palls when results are consistently below
expectations. Many a potential photo-artist has abandoned the medium because of
this; I’d like to do my little bit in preventing this attrition. All its takes is some hard
work, dedication (stick-at-it-tiveness’), and some guidance. I hope the latter can be
found between the covers of this book. The good news is that – like gambling at Las
Vegas – no one ever had such a good time working up a sweat, as they can have in
working at creating great images.
Many of life’s failures are people who didn’t realize how close they were to
success when they gave up.
Prologue
~ Thomas Alva Edison
19
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Prologue
20
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
I gave him the duplicate key to my little apartment, with its geyser-
equipped bathroom, so that he could use it any time he liked. Tomās never forgot this
small token of my regard for him. He was growing out of his job with Ericsson India,
and wanted to go abroad—there was an uncle in the BKME (Bank of Kuwait and the
Middle East) who had promised to sponsor him provided he managed an
appointment letter from LM Ericsson, Kuwait.
So one fine day, Tomās resigned his job and joined my parents and me
in Solan (Himachal Pradesh), my first posting as a Probationary Officer with the
State Bank. We were delighted to have him! About three months passed happily, with
Tomās well adjusted to his life with us. But one day, he bared his heart to my father
(this came out much later), revealing his distress at the prolonged stay and
wondering why the long-promised NOC (‘No-objection Certificate’) had still not
come from Kuwait. Dad, who was quite a palmist, told him not to worry and that his
NOC was due any day; he would be an NRI soon…and stay that way.
A couple of days later, Tomās came loping into the house, found that
Dad had gone to the fruit market, located him there and showed him the NOC that
had come that very day poste restante. That same afternoon, he left for Delhi and for
a new life with LM Ericsson Telefonatibolaget, P.O. Box 5979, Safat, Kuwait.
I bade him a gloomy farewell, knowing that the chances of seeing him
again were bleak. The late Lars Magnus Ericsson had set up a small radio repair shop
about a century ago in Sweden that had grown into a global communications
behemoth and taken my best friend away from me.
As we returned from the Durga Puja mela at the cantonment area in
Patiala, we saw a long, low, dusty shape with thick radial tires parked in front of the
house. Arabic lettering peeped out from behind the splashes of mud on the
registration plate. I rang the doorbell, and Mother opened it. There was joy on her
face. “Guess who’s here!” she chortled gleefully. It was Tomās!
I hugged my dear friend whom I’d never thought to see again. He was
my fellow Bulletman, my partner in many a hair-raising, high-speed Bullet trip over
remote mountain roads. His driving skills are simply phenomenal. I am barely good,
but Tomās is outstanding, a born rally driver. Anything with a motor and wheels
becomes a controlled subsonic missile in his hands. Yes, that’s the 6-cylinder Datsun
21
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
260 Z Sports 2+2 he’d sent me photographs of, the ones with the new TV tower in
Kuwait and the huge oil tankers navigating the Gulf, in the background.
With him were a young, recently married English couple, André and
Doreen Winter, very keen on computers, cars, rallying, and photography. M/S Andor
Microsystems were computerizing the Bank of Kuwait. André had a bag full of
equipment and fine lenses, from a 300mm Takumar telephoto to a 16 mm full-frame
fish-eye lens, to go with the Asahi-Pentax ‘Spotmatic F’ body.
I wondered whether Tomās had remembered to bring me the small
camera I needed: the cameras available in India were crude and unsophisticated. I
needn’t have worried; he had remembered to bring my camera.
But what a camera! It was the new Minolta single-lens reflex, the
XE-1, produced after Minolta Camera Company signed their collaboration agreement
with Ernst Leitz GmbH, Wetzlar, West Germany, manufacturers of the legendary
Leica cameras. Details of its sophisticated features would fill this page: Copal- Leitz
Leitz
electronic shutter, twin metal shutter curtains with vertical travel, infinitely variable
shutter speeds on ‘Auto’ from 30 seconds to 1,000 th of a second, aperture-priority
automatic exposure, through-the-lens (TTL) metering with Minolta’s
Minolta patented
averaging exposure system reading a weighted average of the entire scene, multiple
exposure capability, self timer, low-battery LED, comprehensive viewfinder readout,
depth-of-field preview, ±2 stops exposure compensation on Auto, auto-exposure
memory lock, optional full manual override, M90 (Manual, 1/90 th second) setting for
manual/flash shooting even without batteries, Minolta’s
Minolta patented bayonet mount
accepting a mind-boggling array of Rokkor lenses…it goes on and on and on: and all
in the expensive, black ‘professional’ finish.
Bulging in a distinctly masculine manner at the front end was a huge
chunk of glass weighing 14 ounces: the fabulous 58 mm, f1: 1.2 MC Noct-Rokkor
lens, excellent for flash-less, ‘available light’ picture taking. Incredibly, there was
even an accessory 200 mm f4.5 Tele-Rokkor telephoto lens, along with a 2X tele-
extender, all in individual, original Minolta cases!
I was speechless. I’d lost my tongue. Besides, there was a large
obstruction in my throat. No sound issued forth, no matter how hard I tried. I’d asked
22
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
for a pebble: the man had brought me the whole goddam mountain. In one fell
swoop, he had handed me the equipment I needed to become a serious photographer.
Ever since I had a tonsillectomy in 1955, I’d been using the Model T
of cameras, a Kodak ‘Baby Brownie’ box camera giving eight exposures per 127 roll
of film, which my cousin Otima (‘Iron Lady’ Otima Bordia, IAS, elder daughter of
my uncle, Justice Basu Deva Mukerji) had then presented me. It had cost her all of
19/- rupees of desperately saved pocket money, which represented a considerable
sacrifice in those days.
Through all my boyhood and young manhood, it had coped with me,
while faithfully recording fishing, hunting and camping trips, and sundry other
outings. I hardly found any incentive to buy the crude, 120-size roll film cameras
from Agfa-Gevaert then available in India. After twenty years of hard use, however,
the Brownie’s bakelite body had started chipping, and ingress of light into the
chamber meant that its useful life was over. Amazingly, the lens and leaf shutter were
still in perfect condition—a tribute to Eastman Kodak’s commitment to quality.
Seeing my interest in photography, an indigent but indulgent maternal
uncle had sent me many books on the subject. These I had pored over, absorbing
technical know-how as well as tips on better photography. I drooled over the pictures
of cameras, especially the single-lens reflexes with their instant-return mirrors, TTL
metering, and lens interchangeability that made this type of 35 mm beast the most
versatile of all picture-taking instruments. I read and re-read many other books I
bought, but alas! I was a cameraman sans camera.
Now, thanks to El Tomāso, the long wait was over. Fitted with the 200
mm telelens, the camera felt familiar in my hands, but this time, a gun that did not
kill or maim, freezing images on film forever. 36 rounds, single shot or rapid-fire, up
close in macro or as distant as the stars, I could now ‘shoot’ anything visible to the
eye…or beyond. The mustachioed rally driver from the Gulf had made my dream
come true.
The trio had driven overland all the way from Kuwait in the Persian
Gulf, through Afghanistan and into India. Tomās over-flew Pakistan, as he did not
manage a visa from the Pakis, rejoining the party at Amritsar. I remembered that only
six years earlier, the Indian Armed Forces had given the Pakistan army a drubbing in
23
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
the 1971 war, and the memories still rankled across the border. As we tucked into a
hearty dinner, we made plans.
It was decided that we would drive down to Delhi, then on to Agra to
see the Taj Mahal before returning to Delhi. We would then fly to Srinagar, Kashmir.
I baulked at this: I could not impose any further, although Tomās insisted that he
would take care of the tickets. The Kuwaiti Dinar was then valued at an exchange
rate of Rs.13/- to a Dinar, and Tomās was apparently flush with Indian Rupees.
But I could take advantage of his generosity no further. I came up
with Rs.5,000 – all I could then spare – which sum I pressed into Tomās’s reluctant
hands. That’s all I paid for the camera and probably the best holiday I ever had. In
return, I got priceless memories that would last a lifetime. The next day, I took ten
days leave and we were off in the 260 Z Sports 2+2.
High-speed cruising, at least of this variety, was something new to
me. 150 kilometers an hour on the speedometer and climbing steadily, yet I had total
control, thanks to the low center of gravity, wide Bridgestone radials and Girling
disc brakes on all four wheels. The Grand Trunk road never felt like this before.
Could Sher Shah Suri, who made this road, ever have imagined that one day, people
would travel on it at such fantastic speeds?
The NISSAN Datsun glides, floats; whatever the condition of the road
surface might be, it’s no concern of ours. Tinted glasses, power steering, genuine
leather bucket seats, 6-track quadraphonic music from the cartridge player, silent air-
conditioning; the works! The trusty Ambassador was revealed as a bullock-cart!
The shock-absorbing, soundproofing qualities of this famous rally car
were legendary. At 175 kilometers an hour (that’s well over 100 miles an hour—the
ton! At last!), one cannot hear any exterior noise inside the Datsun’s luxurious
passenger compartment. The high-frequency triple horns can only be felt (through
the co-pilot’s footrest, or the driver’s foot-pedals), not heard. You know they are
working from the way traffic veers sharply to the left, giving me room to overtake.
A quick declutch, a mere tap on the tubby gear lever to shift down to
fourth, a slight jab of the right foot, and the engine responds gallantly; the car surges
forward eagerly, pressing us violently back, deep into the aromatic leather. Things
recede dizzyingly in the rear-view mirror as I slip back into top, and the muted,
24
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
superbly responsive engine hurls the streamlined projectile at nearly 180 kilometers
an hour (112.5 mph) ventre à terre towards Delhi. The capital now seems
disappointingly close as the odometer reels in the distance rapidly.
Agra! I cannot find the words to express the wonder that life was for
me then. My heart overflowed with love, happiness, and bonhomie, and my body
seemed to be bursting with physical power. Every breath I took seemed to invigorate
me even further, as I reveled in the magic of youth. My wife of seven months (!) and
I had never seen the Taj Mahal. We were now gazing at it for the first time, and that
too in the company of dear friends. After seeing the mausoleum, we wandered about
the grounds the whole afternoon. I was not prepared for the sheer grandeur, the
breathtaking immensity, of this poem in marble. No photograph of this monument to
eternal love can ever hope to do it justice.
It was a fantasy world; the very air seemed to whisper of an ancient
love that lives on beyond the grave. The best description of the Taj Mahal that I’ve
come across is couched in poetic, not architectural language: “A teardrop on the
cheek of time.” I empathized with Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and his lost love,
Mumtaz. Her death must have made him realize that he, too, was mortal, and that
nothing lasts forever…except love. The monument was, perhaps, his way of telling us
that love endures even after the body, evanescent and ephemeral, is gone. That
moonlit night at the Taj, I pinched myself often, to see if I was dreaming.
There were hardly any people around, and André put the Pentax on a
tripod and took many long exposures with the fish-eye lens. We felt very close to our
wives. Poor Señor Tomās. Then unmarried, he was very fidgety, trapped between
two young couples on their second honeymoon. The restlessness would increase
further in Kashmir!
The Chief Secretary of Jammu and Kashmir was distinguished IAS
officer Sushital Banerjee, my paternal cousin. When we alighted from the plane and I
phoned my sister-in-law Ranu, that beautiful and capable lady at once sent a car to
fetch us. It was a Sunday, and I found dada was home. He was very happy to see me
and my friends: my Dad (his maternal uncle) was his boyhood hero and he would
spend hours giving him the massage disciples traditionally give to their gurus,
pressing his biceps, muscular back and brawny legs after his workout or game.
25
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Sushital was meeting my wife for the first time (he sent me a gold
Sheaffer’s pen set as a wedding present, but pressing duties came in the way of his
attending the reception at our ancestral home, Madhu Mandir, Allahabad); he
remarked that if such a lovely lady could not tame and domesticate me, nobody ever
would. (Did she? I often wonder.) The lady in question blushed at the neat
compliment from this extraordinarily handsome and charismatic man who exuded
power and authority.
Sushital regrets that, on account of government regulations, he cannot
have André and Doreen as guests in his official residence, but he’d arrange
something even better. That evening, the couple was settled in ‘Armstrong’, a
Category ‘A’ houseboat moored on the Dal Lake, with its own dedicated shikara
(similar to a Venetian gondola, except that it is paddled, not poled).
I have rarely seen such luxury as I saw on that house-boat; a lavishly
equipped kitchen, two plush bedrooms, a magnificent drawing room littered with
genuine antiques, engaging bric-a-brac, and Persian carpets. There are flowers
everywhere, even on the balconies. It is a floating palace! There is no air-
conditioning—all you need to do is to open the window!
It is verily a paradise on earth, this idyllic vale of Kashmir, tailor-
made for romance. I envied the young English couple, so obviously in love, and
guiltily wished that we, too, had a houseboat! But that’s being ungrateful—Bowdi
looked after us very well, and gave us a lovely suite in the West Wing of the huge
bungalow on the Bundh. André was most impressed by the armed guards at the gate,
and the magnificent Chinar trees in the beautiful garden.
Trips were arranged for us to see Sonamarg, Pahalgam, Gulmarg,
Chashmeshahi, etc. From Gulmarg, we took horses to Khillanmarg and on to
Alpatthar, beyond the tree line and even beyond the snowline. André had difficulty
breathing, and asked me what height we were at—he paled under his tan when he
learnt he was at over 12,000 feet! That’s almost two thousand feet higher than Ben
Nevis, I pointed out, the highest peak in the British Isles! No wonder the Englishman
had trouble finding enough oxygen to breathe. Doreen, my wife and I were not
affected by the height: we must have highlander blood in us.
26
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
27
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
~ Wayne Dyer
28
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Beyond
Photography
PART ONE
29
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
There were three concentric focusing aids right in the center of the
bright, contrasty viewfinder: the ‘split image’ focusing aid, one that split an image
(like a jawline, a pair of spectacles or a hemline), that you then ‘joined up’ into a
coherent item by turning the soft, rubberized lens focusing ring. There was also a
shimmering outer ring that turned clear when the image was in focus. Either of these
usually suited the subject; if not, the rest of the ground glass of the viewfinder was
the fallback position.
Since – despite all the theoretical knowledge I’d picked up from
books (and which seemed to promptly desert me in actual picture-taking situations) –
I didn’t bother too much about which aperture was set on the lens, I usually got a
shutter speed totally inappropriate for the subject I was shooting.
For example, to freeze (if that’s what the creative requirement was) a
fast-moving subject like a car crossing horizontally in front of me, I needed a shutter
speed of at least 1/500th of a second. If the aperture setting on the lens, however,
happened to be f.11, there was no way, with 125 ASA negative film, I was going to
get more than 1/125th, except in very brightly lit conditions. To achieve 1/500th of a
second, I needed an aperture setting of f.5.6!
To confound matters further, if the averaging system used by Minolta
found some dark areas in the frame/ background, it tried to expose those shaded
areas correctly by further lowering the shutter speed, thereby overexposing the
subject. On account of all these factors, I usually found that, although the frame was
correctly focused – focusing was something I had to do (and still prefer doing)
myself – my subject was either over- or under-exposed, the background was
distracting from the point of view of contrast (too dark or too light to make the
subject stand out against it), or the composition was just plain rotten (there were
telephone poles ‘growing’ out of people’s heads, the classic bloomer!).
Worse still, the subject itself was usually blurred when I wanted it to
be pin-sharp, thanks to camera shake. The natural tremor of a person’s hands can be
horrendously magnified in pictures shot at slow shutter speeds, which is a problem
we’ll examine a bit later in the book. Certain situations can call for a blurred subject,
but that’s also something that we’ll go into later on.
30
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
I found that shutter speed determines the duration for which light falls on the film.
That is why it is expressed in terms of seconds or fractions of a second. The larger
the fraction sounds, the shorter is the duration of the exposure; e.g., 1/60th of a
second is a slower shutter-speed, giving more time to the light to fall on the film,
than, say, 1/250th, 1/1000th or even 1/2,000th of a second, the last two being very short
exposures (fast shutter-speeds). Fast shutter-speeds can ‘freeze’ rapid movement; a
car flashing past appears stationary in the picture.
31
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
If a speed of say, 1/30 th second is used, however, that same car would
register on film as a blur…not bad, if you are looking to capture an image about the
velocity and impatience of road users around you, juxtaposed against a slower strata
of travelers – say, a cyclist – to add the contrast that highlights what life in a
metropolis is all about. It’s not a good solution if your intention was to show the
car’s details…but it’s a good one if you want to illustrate the hazards of cycling on
busy roads with fast, undisciplined traffic, a common feature on Indian roads.
High shutter speeds can freeze action. High-speed flash can produce
the same effect, provided the available light is too weak to create an image on film,
except at very large apertures (such as f.1.4). This is why strobe lights in discos work
so well: flashing on for a very brief intervals of time before shutting off again, the
infinitesimally-brief (but very intense, as a compensation for the brevity) winks of
light mean that your retina only registers ‘freeze frames’ of the scene, a very pleasing
effect when some of the better-looking dancers are ‘frozen’ in attractive ‘poses’ on
the retina of your eyes.
I seem to remember a disco called ‘Ghungroo’ in the Delhi of my wild
youth, which had this sort of arrangement. Pulses of light from electronic flashguns
(significantly called ‘strobes’ in America, or ‘Speed Lights’ by Nikon),
Nikon are normally
as short as 1/1,000th of a second or of even briefer duration, and have the same effect
as that of high shutter-speed in daylight. This is the reason why exposures made with
electronic flash as a light source can freeze motion so effectively.
The shutter of your camera, instead of controlling the intensity of light
from its natural source, usually daylight, (something quite beyond it’s control!),
restricts the duration of light going through it to the film lying behind it, for certain
fixed intervals of time, i.e., as per the shutter-speed setting.
32
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
journey from one side of the film to the other, while the second curtain follows suit
fractions of a second later.
Let us suppose you are seated in a room, in total darkness. You are facing the door,
and there is a piece of unexposed film in your hand. The room has only one (sliding)
light-tight door, and that being presently tightly shut, no light has managed to sneak
in from the sunlit balcony beyond it to hit the film and expose it.
But now, if someone opens and shuts the door for a thousandth of a
second, a small quantity of light will manage, in that brief interval, to get through to
the film and register on it…i.e., ‘expose’ it. The light hitting the film will cause a
chemical reaction in it, which is what ‘exposure’ means.
When that light is a focused image, such as through the focused lens
of a camera (read ‘shutter’ for ‘sliding door’), unlike simple ingress of unfocused
light coming though a doorway as in our example, it will form a (latent) focused
image on the film, an image that will emerge, as if by magic, after the film is
chemically processed.
However, depending on how sensitive the film is (yes, films come in
various types and sensitivities, but for the sake of simplicity we will continue to talk,
for the time being, of standard negative film, the type you use to shoot your picnic
snapshots), some effect to the exposure to light would have resulted.
But if the person at the door now decides to slide it open and shut it
again after an interval of a full second, the film will, in all probability, be totally
33
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
fogged by the heavy exposure (thanks to the long duration of the exposure). In other
words, the duration of the exposure has been far too long, and the film is ‘over-
exposed’, like any movie star can be if s/he gets too much coverage, ‘fogging’ the
minds of cine-goers! Too much of a good thing can be bad!
However, if it were dusk, the evening light coming from outside
would be very weak (weak intensity of light), and the one-second duration of the
exposure ought to be right on the button! In other words, we have the option of
adjusting shutter-speed according to the intensity of light, by keeping aperture (the
doorway) constant so as to balance the equation and achieve correct exposure.
The Aperture
But there is another way of achieving this most desirable correct exposure: changing
the other half of the equation, i.e., by keeping the shutter-speed constant and varying
the aperture!
The aperture you have set on the lens is, of course, the other half of
the equation that you can fiddle around with. The aperture mechanism of the lens of
a single-lens reflex camera closely resembles the iris of the human eye.
By virtue of an arrangement
of overlapping metal plates,
each the approximate shape of
a butterfly’s wing secured in
an annular configuration that
allows each plate a certain
degree of free lateral movement, the aperture through which light must pass (like the
iris of your eye) can be increased or decreased. What this means is that by
controlling this ‘aperture’ or iris, you can control the amount of light getting through
the lens and onto the film.
If you look through a window on a bright day, the outside glare can
hurt your eyes for a few moments. But then the iris of your eye reacts by closing
down, narrowing the pupil (letting in a smaller amount of light) till the harsh glare no
longer causes discomfort. While the human eye can take a few seconds to thus adjust
34
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
itself, in a camera the actual iris shuts down to the aperture set by you on the
aperture-setting ring on the lens, in microseconds, at the instant of your pressing the
shutter-release button (on an SLR camera).
If you had looked out of the window through a card with a single
pinhole punched in it, the scene would not have dazzled your eyes at all; the tiny
aperture of the pinhole would have restricted light to the extent that the harshly-lit
scene outside would have looked pretty dim! (When you were back at school, you
might have made your very own pinhole camera; they need exposures of quite long
durations, because the pinhole allows so little light to squeeze through to the film).
The small aperture controls the amount of light reaching your eye to the point where
it does not ‘over-expose’ the scene on the retina of your eye and cause pain (at which
point, you shut your eyes tightly). It’s like a tap whose knurled knob can be used to
control the flow of water; the wider you open the aperture inside the nozzle of the
tap, by twisting the knob anti-clockwise, the more the amount of water (read ‘light’,
in the case of your camera) that gets through in a given span of time (the other half of
the equation: remember shutter-speed alias ‘duration’?).
Let us suppose we are filling a large bucket of water from the tap. We
are given only one minute to fill the bucket. We therefore open the tap the correct
amount, so as to fill the bucket within this pre-set time duration. Transposing this
analogy to an actual picture-taking situation, let us suppose we are told to shoot the
picture at a shutter-speed of 1/250th of a second. So we set ‘1/250’ on the shutter-
speed dial on the top of the camera, then adjust the aperture ring on the lens
manually to the aperture recommended by the camera’s in-built exposure meter.
35
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
As you become familiar with your picture taking and with the way
your camera works, you will learn that, in a variety of situations, it is better to
override the ‘auto’ setting and go the manual route. Exposure meters can be fooled
(though, in this age of computer-like cameras, this is getting somewhat rare), but
once your ‘experience’ meter gets going, you can instantly come up with the correct
combination of shutter-speed and aperture and compensate manually. Later, we will
explore this point in greater detail.
Depth of Field is another factor affected by the aperture (apart from the amount of
light it controls). The ‘depth of field’ is the distance behind, as well as the distance in
front of, your subject, that is acceptably sharp at a given aperture. In other words, it
is the zone of sharpness. The basic rule is: the smaller the aperture (e.g., f.11, not
f.4), the deeper the zone of sharpness, i.e., the area that is acceptably sharp to the
eye, both in front of and behind the subject. I will expand on this point a bit, later on.
Professional photographers, who shoot scenic pictures or college
graduation group photographs, know this well. You may have noticed that in most of
your pictures taken with a simple box camera, your friends clustered in the close
foreground, the cars in the parking lot behind, and the distant skyscrapers…all were
in good focus: a very ‘deep’ depth of field indeed! This is because such cameras have
very small lenses (which are very inexpensive when mass-produced), with very
small, fixed apertures.
But in serious photography, such a universal depth of field (dof) is not
always desirable. So many things in focus—it can confuse the eye and steal the
thunder from the main subject—your friends! You don’t want a picture-postcard
frame of Dal Lake, do you? All you want is a well-composed picture of your friends
in sharp detail, with the rest of the scene out of focus so as not to distract the eye.
36
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
There are two other factors that affect depth of field: the focal length
of the lens in use, and the distance of the subject from the film plane:
38
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Other noticeable (and often very handy) features are the exceptional depth of field
and stretched out perspective. The wide-angle lens has the effect of ‘stretching’ a
scene: a room can look very long; a small car’s bonnet can look as long as that of a
Ferrari. This is an intrinsic property that comes with the lens, and can be used to
good advantage in certain situations, which you’ll appreciate as you go along.
Narrow-angle lenses
At the other extreme, the longer the focal length of the lens, the narrower the zone of
sharpness, other things being equal, i.e., given the same aperture setting. Portrait,
sports, and news photographers often use this to their advantage; it allows them to
concentrate on the most important area of the picture: the actual subject.
open the aperture as wide as that permissible under exposure considerations, focus
slightly ahead of this particular runner as he crouches there (all seen side view, not
front on). He will be sharply etched, while his competitors will fall progressively out
of focus on either side of him.
40
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
rig to compensate for the Earth’s rotation. From macrocosm to microcosm, it’s all
yours, baby! Phew!
A rough guide, a rule of thumb, that I always use, is that I take the
correct bright daylight exposure to be a product of the reciprocal of the film speed,
and an aperture of f.11. Impressed? Now I’ll stow the jargon and simply say that if
you are using 125 ASA film, your bright daylight shutter-speed will be 1/125 th of a
second at an aperture of f.11. Now you can consign your old hand-held light
(exposure) meter3 to the dustbin…even if it’s a Gossen Luna Pro!
1/2,000 2.8
1/4,000 2
1/8,000 1.4
42
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
On the other hand, I’ve often seen S. Paul using his shoulder ‘firing’
NOVOFLEX’ 400 mm f.1: 4.5 ‘follow-focus’ telelens, that focuses by squeezing
and/or releasing the spring-loaded trigger built into the pistol grip. It is an excellent
‘weapon’ for someone like him, with his incredible reflexes, sharp eyesight, and
knack for capturing breathtaking images of birds in flight.
I do not believe that the keen amateur needs much more than a UV (also called
‘skylight’) filter on his lens, which not only protects the front element of the lens but
also neutralizes UV (ultra violet) rays from the sun that give color photographs a
bluish cast. I personally prefer using a 1A filter, which does all this and a bit more,
imparting a faint pinkish (or ‘warming’) effect to my color pictures that I find very
pleasing. I use ‘HOYA’ filters, but you can choose any brand that appeals to you.
The only other filter that I will recommend for colour film is a
polarizing filter. As light coming off reflections can degrade images, the polarizing
filter, by virtue of its internal construction, acts like a Venetian blind and
‘rationalizes’ the rays of light, eliminating scattered rays that spoil the picture
(degrade image quality) by hitting the lens at odd angles.
A polariser tames glare or reflections off many types of surfaces, like
water. Details appear again in brightly-lit portions, whereas burnt-out highlights is all
you’d get without it. One more effect of a polarizing filter is to enhance colors, so
that blue skies look bluer, making white clouds stand out contrastily against them
(see calendar shots), greatly enhancing the visual appeal of a scene. With slight
under-exposure of a transparency film, and the use of a polarizing filter, breathtaking
effects can be achieved.
Another widget that photographers love to use for taming excessive
levels of light intensity is a neutral density filter. This filter, like your sunglasses,
curtails light by as much as 10%. Neutral density filters come in different strengths
expressed as 2X, 4X etc. a 2 X ND filter cuts light by one stop, so that, for example,
you can use 1/1,000th of a second at the beach at f.4 instead of 5.6, as recommended.
This larger aperture also allows you to narrow the depth of field.
44
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
A 4X ND filter can help if you are caught with 800 ASA film in your
camera on a bright day, by bringing exposure combinations within control. With the
4X ND filter fitted, the 800 ASA film becomes as a film two stops slower, i.e., the
equivalent of a 200 ASA film. Although it is the rare amateur who is likely to face
such a crisis, I mention it simply to add another angle to the possibilities offered by
ND filters. Who knows to what use you may have to put one to, if you always load
400 ASA or faster film? But buy the other two filters first!
Flash Synchronization
Unlike leaf shutters, where flash synchronizes with each and every shutter-speed,
focal plane shutters in most5 SLR cameras cannot synchronize with flash beyond,
usually, 1/125th of a second or 1/250th of a second shutter-speed. Without going into
the technicalities of why this is so, let us confront the problems that arise from this
property.
Suppose we have to use 1/500th of a second in a daylight shot and also need to use
some fill-in flash (to brighten up – throw some light into – shadow areas) as well, we
will have to compromise by reducing the shutter-speed to 1/250 th which is the
maximum speed at which flash-sync occurs (with, say, the Nikon FM2).
But this will defeat the purpose of the main exposure, which may be
to get a shot that freezes action, yet has flash lightening up shadows and revealing
detail lurking there. The ideal balance we are in search of will be lost. You may even
end up with two overlapping images, one in response to the available light, the other
in response to the flash. Not a bad effect, something to file away for future reference!
Although electronic flash in general cannot sync at shutter speeds
higher than 1//250th of a second, there is another (but a little more cumbersome and
expensive way) to take flash pictures at any shutter-speed—focal plane flashbulbs.
For all those who have never seen a flashgun that uses flashbulbs, something not
entirely surprising since these conventional flashguns have more or less gone the
way of the Dodo, let me explain that these guns used flashbulbs that had to be
discarded after use. Since these bulbs became very hot after the exposure had been
5
There are exceptions, like the Olympus 4T — a major advantage despite its hefty retail price.
45
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
made, they usually gave the negligent or absent-minded a memory or two to last a
lifetime if he touched them with ungloved hands. I really have no idea if at all focal
plane flashbulbs (or such flashguns) are available today. Perhaps not; their
inconvenience apart, in this age of instant karma, they wouldn’t find any takers.
Every camera system or flashgun has something going for it, and
most SLRs are in trouble here. Some Nikons have managed to circumvent the
problem by means of a special, very expensive flashgun dedicated to some of their
top-of-the-line models. But most pros who are into fashion or other forms of
commercial photography prefer to use leaf-shutter cameras/ lens combinations (not
only because they sync with flash at any shutter speed, but because the larger
negative gives the greater detail necessary for their magazine/poster shoots!).
Hasselblad, Zenza Bronica, Rolleiflex, Mamiya, Kowa and Yashica are some of the
major systems.
Since these are all 120 roll-film cameras, and hardly as versatile or
compact as SLRs, this use of lens-shutter cameras with flash has remained firmly
within the domain of photographers who specialize in high-speed nature and
scientific photography, fashion, table top food photography, and other sundry studio
image-making. These large format cameras, however, pack enormous detail into the
negative due to the larger surface area, which is why they are popular professionally.
I would always advise the keen photo-enthusiast to save up money
and buy the outfit that will help fulfil his/her aspirations, no matter if it takes a
year…or two. Good, solidly made cameras, like, say, the Nikon FM3A will last a
lifetime, as will the lenses. Even pros use their gear for years before discarding it.
46
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Beyond
Photography
PART TWO
capable of delivering image quality comparable with those obtainable from fixed
focal length lenses. That doesn’t include Nikon’s
Nikon fabulous but stiffly priced push-
pull f4.0 80~200 mm Zoom-Nikkor …my dream lens that, one day in the future, I
was to actually acquire.
The great advantage the Hanimex zoom had over the 200 mm
Rokkor telelens I owned was, of course, that I could ‘crop’ the image in the
viewfinder itself, eliminating much of the composition that I normally had to do in
the darkroom. That is, I could enlarge or shrink (zoom in or zoom out of) a scene
while viewing it in the viewfinder, compose, and press the shutter button when it felt
just right.
This reduced cropping at the enlargement stage, and obviously made
better use of the potential of the tiny 35 mm negative, whose 24 mm x 36 mm size
was not as tolerant of ‘wastage’ as a larger format like, for example, the 120 roll-film
negative, which is 70 mm x 70 mm square.
The 90 ~ 150 mm portion of the zooming range of the Hanimex lens
was ideal for portraiture, and at 230 mm – with four times the magnification of my
58 mm standard lens – I could pull in quite distant subjects. Images shot with the
aperture wide open at f4.5 were sharp from corner to corner, and with the
background thrown well out of focus at about 150 mm in tightly composed shots,
subjects stood out even more sharply because I made it a point to select contrasting
backgrounds that isolated them still further and made them ‘pop out’ of the picture.
Shooting with fine-grain 125 ASA B&W film, I was able to use fairly
high shutter-speeds in sunlight because I shot with the lens ‘wide open’ (i.e., at the
maximum aperture of f.4.5), and I could get razor-sharp handheld pictures with
reassuring repeatability, having established my own working formula. My pictures
started to show signs of a ‘signature’.
Since we are on the subject of film, I might as well add a few remarks
that may help you in choosing the right film for your picture-taking needs.
35 mm FILM (ammo)
As its name implies, B&W negative film, on being developed after exposure, yields a
strip of film, about 1.5 meters long, called the ‘negative’. This strip of film, with the
characteristic sprocket-holes running down the sides, is then snipped into six strips of
six frames each (six sixes are thirty-six…the official number of frames, or shots,
available on the film) and stored in cellophane negative envelopes.
To ‘print’ these negatives, they need to be slipped into the negative
tray of a photo-enlarger, a device that focuses light from a powerful electric bulb,
and through a ‘condenser’ onto the negative, and thereby projecting the ensuing
negative image onto an easel (where the light-sensitive photo paper is fixed).
49
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Working in the dim glow of a red lamp (B&W print paper is not
affected by this colored ‘safe’ light), the darkroom technician focuses the image on to
the paper and makes an exposure. The exposed paper is now successively passed
through developer, stop-bath and fixer, at which stage normal room lighting can be
switched on and the results viewed.
As you will notice, this highly simplified version of the process of
developing a print from a negative is analogous to the chain of events that go into
making the negative itself inside the camera.
The subject of darkroom techniques is a fascinating world where a lot
of creativity can be unleashed, and it would benefit those keen on specializing in
B&W work to read some of the excellent books available on the subject before
setting up their own darkroom. All chemicals necessary to the processes are readily
available, either off-the-shelf or in raw form, for self-preparation as per various
popular formulae. Professional processing of B&W materials has become rare, and
inordinately expensive after the advent of automatic color processing booths and
studios.
But B&W is a medium that, ipso facto, is conducive to a lot of highly
artistic control at every stage of the process, and presents certain subjects in a unique
way that color materials can never hope to emulate. It is no accident that many great
photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Brett Weston, Yousuf Karsh,
Philippe Halsman, Wynn Bullock, Bill Binzen, Duane Michals, Jay Maisel and
Dorothea Lange favored the use of B&W.
It is a world within a world that may take a lifetime to really master. I
can assure you that the results are well worth the effort. B & W, by its very nature,
forces one to achieve modeling and depth by the use of light and shadow, by
Guru Dutt, the famed filmmaker, director and actor, made full use of it in
classics like Pyaasa. B&W is a deeply evocative medium that color just
cannot compete with, in certain respects. Just take a look at some of the
photographs taken by S. Paul and you’ll know what I mean. Yet, this maestro
can produce winning shots in color as well, such is his immense versatility.
50
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
51
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
clicking away like maniacs, expecting the little pop-up flashguns in their cameras to
emit light intense enough to cross half a stadium and capture an image!
Flash has limited range, depending on the model, the film speed in
use, and the aperture set on the lens, and it consumes prodigious amounts of
electricity / battery power. Had it not been so, someone would have, by now made an
electronic flashgun large enough to photograph the moon during its dark phase! But
who knows what the future holds…
52
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
faster the film, the grainier the image! This is because the chemicals tend to clump
together, giving the effect of graininess when processed.
Blow-ups, i.e., really big enlargements of the sizes possible with
slower, and far more commonly used 100 ASA film, are often disappointing if one
isn’t careful. Color tones (also called ‘color saturation’) are somewhat subdued, and
overall lack of good color contrast may be evident. I am talking about the vast
majority of photographers. The key to getting the best out of fast film is perfect
exposure, which is where most of us stumble.
However, it must be admitted that, over the years, the quality of
images made with fast films has shown a marked improvement with the application
of new, improved film manufacturing technologies. I think the advantages of using
fast film, for the amateur, would out-weigh the disadvantages, apart from the slightly
higher cost of the film. But even that may be offset by the fact that the faster film
will enable those images to be captured that would otherwise have remained elusive.
Occasionally, photographers ‘push’ a film one or two ‘stops’. This
means, for example, that they will expose a 100 ASA film at a rating of 400 ASA,
and tell the lab to ‘push’ it two stops (a rating of 200 ASA is a push of one stop, i.e.,
twice the sensitivity) during processing. Incidentally, when a film’s rated speed,
usually expressed in ASA (American Standards Association) is double that of another
film, it is said to be twice as fast, or twice as sensitive to light.
I once exposed 1,600 ASA color negative film at a meter rating of 400
ASA (i.e. I ‘pulled’ it two stops; 1,600 to 800, then halving it to 400 ASA), using an
on-camera flash and another for side lighting, activated by a slave unit that triggered
off the remote flash when light from the on-camera flash hit it. Equipment used was
53
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
With negative film, always expose for the shadows, i.e., aim to get an
exposure that will yield good detail in the shadows (it is always better to over-expose
color negative film slightly). You can do this by taking a careful meter reading for
the shadows. If you don’t have an exposure meter in your camera or a hand-held
exposure meter/ spot meter, then take the instructions that come with the film as a
starting point, and give a slightly heavier exposure.
Alternatively, you can try to give double the exposure (one stop down
in shutter-speed, e.g., 1/125 to 1/60, or one stop wider aperture, e.g., f11 down to f8)
than what you think a normal shot by the prevailing light would entail. Color film is
very tolerant to over-exposure, i.e., it has good ‘exposure latitude’, as we guys say.
The highlights (the brighter parts of the picture) will take care of themselves. In fact,
this way you’ll see detail in highlights you would never get to see otherwise!
Highlights don’t get burnt out very easily, as they would be if you
were using transparency film, where the exact opposite holds good: expose for the
highlights, and let the shadows take care of themselves. Transparency film has many
properties that are the exact opposite of negative film. Let’s just say it has a more
positive outlook on life! Reasonable under-exposure yields good color saturation and
rich color contrast. Considerable under-exposure can yield startling effects, including
color shift…definitely worth a try.
54
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
One factor common to all color films is that long, really l-o-n-g
exposures (and by that I mean exposures of about twenty seconds or more) will
produce an effect called ‘color shift’. The colors of the image undergo distortion:
they no longer echo the true colors of the subject.
One moonlit night at Bharatpur (the world-famous Ghana-Keoladeo
Bird Sanctuary that I visited for a week in 1977, when it was in its heyday), I put the
Minolta XE-1 on a tripod and, with a 28 mm wide-angle lens, made a long night
exposure of the misty, moody marshes with the moon hovering overhead. The auto
exposure lasted about 40 seconds.
I was using ORWO (produced by the same plant in Wolfen, East
Germany, that was so badly damaged by Allied bombing during World War II) color
transparency film rated at 50 ASA, and when the film came back from Bombay, duly
processed, I was delighted to find that the night shot was of quite acceptable quality,
aesthetically speaking. But the dominant tone was a deep purple, which would no
doubt have tickled pink the rock band that sports this name!
lens is called a ‘normal’ lens not because other lenses are abnormal, but because the
size of the images given by it corresponds to the size of the subject as perceived by
the naked eye. Many photographers choose to call it the ‘Standard’ lens.
A ‘telephoto’ lens, to be exact, is an optically corrected, but physically
shorter (i.e., no longer a true long-focus) lens that ensures that the light comes to a
focus at the film plane.
Here’s the secret of the hieroglyphics: the ‘f’ numbers (engraved on
the scale opposite the aperture dial are merely sizes of the aperture, i.e., the opening
for the light to squeeze through to get to the film. The maximum aperture possible
(inscribed on the lens front ring) is always the maximum aperture of the lens. It is
merely a mathematical expression derived from dividing the focal length by the
actual diameter of the front element of the lens.
Try it. Take up your compact camera, which may be fitted with what
the manufacturer claims to be a 35 mm f.4.0 lens. The diameter of the front element
has to be 35 / 4.0. Measure it carefully with a scale: the result will be 8.75 mm …
Voilà! The mystery of the fabled ‘f’ number demystified!
Or measure the diameter of the front element of the 50 mm f.1.4
normal lens on your fine SLR camera, and divide the focal length (50) by it; the
answer will always come to 1.4, which confirms that the diameter of the front
element is 50 divided by 1.4 = 35.71 mm. Simple!
Actually, the ‘f’ number is always expressed (quite correctly) as a
ratio, so you may find 1: 1.4 inscribed on your SLR’s normal lens, or 1: 1.8, or
maybe even f.1: 2, which is still plenty fast for many low-light situations, though not,
obviously, as fast as a 1.8, 1.4, or 1.2 lens—remember my 58 mm f.1: 1.2 Rokkor,
with its huge front element? That’s why 600 mm f.4 superfast telelenses look like
bazookas.
The logic of the ‘f’ number – front lens element relationship is simple,
if you’ll recall the analogy of the tap filling the bucket of water, or the iris of the eye
widening in bad light. The wider the aperture (here, the front end of the glass where
the light enters the camera), the greater is the amount of light accessing the film.
It’s no wonder that professionals, who often have to get sharp pictures
in poor light, need fast lenses like the f.1: 1.4 to give them access to as much light as
56
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
possible (and, incidentally, enable the fastest shutter-speeds possible under the said
dimly-lit conditions). They usually don’t need depth of field for a carefully focused
news picture in poor light.
If they do, they are in trouble. There is no way they can use an
aperture of, say, f.8, (giving reasonable dof, especially with a 50 mm lens and a
subject at medium distance): the low shutter-speeds that will then become obligatory
for obtaining a properly exposed negative will mean the subject, if moving, is going
to be badly (probably unrecognizably) blurred.
This is where they will have to introduce an artificial light source
(flash, or sometimes even a ‘sun-gun’, as used by videographers) … or load faster
film! This is why many professionals carry two or three camera bodies: they are
loaded with different types of film and fitted with lenses that will best utilize the
properties of each rig in a given situation. There’s always a way out!
By virtue of the design compulsions in producing fast lenses, a lot of
optical ‘corrections’ are necessary; optical aberrations are unavoidably inherent in
the such designs, and this necessitates many elements inside the lens, busily
canceling out each other’s errors. The faster the lens, the bulkier, heavier, and costlier
it inevitably is.
In years to come, better, more efficient glasses will certainly be made.
Moreover, computer programs for designing better lenses are always improving, so
cost and size are gradually coming down. Yet, an f.1: 1.2 lens will always be twice as
expensive as an F.1: 1.8 lens, so if the 1.8 is more than adequate for your needs, it
may not be wise to spend more for a 1.2 which will tire you (I mean it: every extra
ounce costs, in the field), burn a hole in your pocket, and may not give equal image
quality to boot, aperture for aperture!
In fact, such super-fast lenses are designed in such a way that their
best performance – in terms of image quality – comes in at the wider apertures.
That’s the whole purpose of buying a fast lens: to use it in poor light or wide open, to
get faster shutter speeds, isn’t it? Obviously, the f.1.2, f.2, and f.2.8 aperture settings
are going to be used a lot of the time, so the performance at these apertures had
better be very good.
57
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
good zoom from a reputed ‘independent ‘such as Tokina, Vivitar, Tamron, Kalimar,
or Hanimex (manufacturer’s ‘original’ lenses are just too expensive to be sensible
58
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
FOCUSING
Focusing is an important subject that we haven’t covered too exhaustively till now. It
is of supreme importance in photography, because there is no point in shooting a
well-exposed but out-of-focus picture (unless that is what the Art Director wants!).
a shimmering ring concentric to the split image, that clears up when correct focus is
achieved.
Each has its use in the field, and experience will show which is best
in a given situation. I find myself using the split-image about 90% of the time.
This ‘law’ states (correctly, I may add) that no matter how shallow or deep the depth
of field, the actual zone of focus is ⅓ rd in front of the subject and ⅔ rd behind it. So if
the zone of focus is all of 3 meters, there is acceptable sharpness available one meter
in front of, and two meters behind, the subject.
This becomes important when we want to either eliminate as much of
a distracting background as possible (even after using the other tricks up our sleeves
such as using a telelens – that has a shallow depth of field to begin with – and using
the widest aperture possible, consistent with exposure requirements).
In order to maximize a background blur, therefore, I focus slightly
closer! Bingo! There is very little sharpness left in the now severely attenuated ‘zone
of focus’ (remember, dof decreases as you focus closer). The background, i.e.,
practically everything behind the subject gets progressively hazier, and the subject
seems to leap out of the picture! It looks so much sharper, so very relevant, standing
out against the inconsequential, blurred background.
This is one way to eliminate from the frame those unwelcome ‘sight-
seers’ when you are photographing your friend at the beach. Of course, you could
blow the crowd away with a .44 magnum from Smith & Wesson, but you may just
as well kneel and frame her against the sky from a low angle, using a 35 mm lens.
This will not only eliminate any problems with the background but
will also accentuate her long legs, ‘stretching’ them by harnessing the optical
phenomenon known as ‘perspective distortion’ to add even more impact to the
picture. It’s an old trick of ‘cheesecake’ and catwalk photographers.
61
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
62
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
falls against the aperture number on the other side of the arrow or diamond. If it
does, you’re through. Now everything you shoot within the pre-set range will be in
focus. If it doesn’t, either shift to smaller aperture setting, or adjust within the zone
of focus that you’ve got.
This works very well on manual exposure and non-auto focus
cameras. Remember, not all auto-focus cameras give 100% accurate results all the
time, especially when you’re in a hurry and the camera’s autofocus sensor is relating
to some other object in the background! It is reassuring to recall that many great
photographers use the hyperfocal technique with stunning effect, and many street and
action photographers use it most of the time.
This is only a technique. If you feel you have the hand-eye
coordination to focus manually in step with the action, do so by all means. Many
photographers have such superb reflexes that they can focus in a trice. Years of
practice have honed their responses to the point that they are easily able to keep pace
with the action.
POSTSCRIPT
63
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
greatest challenge almost always comes from the mind, and it’s better to invest in
upgrading that, and not equipment. Strange, how cameras and lenses keep getting
‘better’ every year, but the pictures generally don’t.
I wouldn’t mind sharing a thought or two with you here: the mind is
far more powerful than we can imagine. Listen to your intuition. Use it well; it is a
good guide to the unexpected. In photography, anticipation is very important. Try to
anticipate your next moment of truth, ready with the right equipment, film and even
raingear.
Whether you capture images on film or digital disk is immaterial: the
basic techniques will always remain the same as long as the laws of physics, as we
know them today, continue to apply. I may not be there to see the results of your
efforts, but you will.
Study art. The Great Masters of painting and photography have left
behind peerless examples of their inner vision as captured on canvas and film. While
appreciating their skill, do try to have something to say with your camera, and go
about saying it. You don’t want to take snapshots with a $1,000 camera, do you? In
other words, develop an area or two of specialization: it makes things a lot simpler.
Some of the masters of painting I’m particularly fond of are Vermeer
(for his muted colors and his subtle out-of-focus effects that draw the eye to the main
subject; Turner (for his wild colors, vivid imagery, adventurous themes, and his use
of out-of-focus images to appeal to the imagination and invoke emotion; Salvador
Dali (for his zany sense of humor, boundless creativity and masterful technique); and
definitely Vincent Van Gogh (whose paintings amaze me, as much by his technique
as his imaginative use of everyday scenes, and his unerring sense of composition and
balance). And Degas of course, for his action-packed pictures of dancers on stage
(Avinash Pasricha has obviously been greatly influenced by him), or Paul Gauguin,
with his blunt, crazily juxtaposed colors and exotic compositions.
This could go on and on, but the point is that we have nothing to lose
and much to gain by studying the masterpieces of art and trying to learn what we can
from our priceless heritage, albeit conveyed through the use of another, older
medium.
64
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Beyond
Photography
PART THREE
In 1980, El Tomāso again came to India from Kuwait, this time by air.
In the cargo bay of a Boeing parked in a hangar at Delhi’s Palam airport was a
brand-new, rally-modified Subaru 4-wheel drive car that he planned to use in that
year’s Great Himalayan Rally.
There was just one hitch: although the car’s documents were valid (it
was supported by a carnet, a document that admits vehicles imported for specific
short-term use, such as a Car Rally, without paying customs duty), the customs
65
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
authorities were mysteriously dragging their feet in releasing the car. In desperation,
Tomās finally asked me to see if I could come up with an answer to Indian babudom.
66
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
I had packed only four rolls of 35 mm B&W ORWO film that I’d
bulk-loaded into film cassettes, and which I rated at 125 ASA. I had the Hanimex
90~230 mm, f4.5~5.6 zoom lens and the 58 mm f.1.2 normal lens. If I wanted to
walk a lot, which I fully intended to do, I didn’t want to be carrying too much gear.
Besides, I expected I’d have to do quick, available-light shooting at
some distance from the subject. I knew how self-conscious Indians become
whenever a camera is pointed at them (everywhere except in Kashmir, where they
ask you for money the moment you point your camera at them, no doubt having
imbibed this habit after being voluntarily paid for the privilege of being
photographed by foreigners, who are used to such fine courtesies).
For many days, I wandered all over Kulu town and its neighboring
hamlets, but I could not get a single ‘decisive moment’ shot of the sort that the great
Henri Cartier-Bresson used to take. I did not want a posed picture; I needed a
spontaneous shot that would capture the joy of being a child, without revealing any
hint of the camera’s intrusion.
A day before my departure, I found myself wandering aimlessly over
rolling grassland about half-a mile above the town. Tired and thirsty, I sat down
under a pine tree to rest my legs. Some distance away, a little boy was enjoying
himself, pushing a full-sized bicycle up a smooth slope and then running downhill
with it. He wasn’t big enough to ride it, but this was the next-best thing.
He ran down the slope with it again and again, the wind tossing his
hair, back-lit with the golden rays of a late-afternoon sun, into disarray. The joy on
his face, the exhilaration that suffused his tiny, perfect features, was a perfect
representation of his private world in this Valley of the Gods. The pedals of the
bicycle spun with an abandon that matched his own, the spokes of the gleaming
wheels were blurred discs of light…and suddenly I came alive to the possibility that
here was my picture.
I grabbed the XE-1 and focused at a point diagonally opposite me, on
his usual downhill path. I had just a few seconds to take the shot. I set the shutter-
speed to1/30th of a second (the aperture came to f.5.6 in that evening light), and, at
full 230 mm zoom, the Hanimex 90~230 mm, f4.5~5.6 zoom lens threw the
background well out of focus.
67
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
As the boy came running down the slope again, I ‘panned’ the camera
with him as he sped down the slope, squeezing off three frames as fast as my thumb
could wind the film and my index finger squeeze the shutter button.
Because I had to use a slow shutter-speed like 1/30th of a second,
which invited the risk of camera-shake spoiling the photograph, I kept sitting on the
grass, resting the lens on my bent knee for support. I treated it as I would a rifle,
following (panning) the ‘target’ in my ‘gun-sights’ (the viewfinder).
Fortunately, this also improved the angle of composition. I left
enough space in the frame ahead of the subject for it to ‘run into’, without a static
centered placement that might have ‘choked’ the action.
The slow shutter-speed must have blurred the whirling pedals and
wheels, but the panning movement meant that ‘I was moving’ at a pace relatively
equal to that of the subject, thereby ensuring that, essentially, it would remain sharp.
Incidentally, panning at slow speed blurs an unwanted background ever further.
I knew I had captured the mood I wanted: the fantastic, ecstatic world
of childhood. I put the camera down, a warm glow within me, and as I did so, the
boy took one last, lingering look up the slope and disappeared over the ridge,
unaware that he had been captured forever on film. I am ever grateful to that
unknown boy, and to the spirit of the hills that rewards the earnest and the ingenuous.
Before I mention that this image I captured at Kulu won a prize at the
All India exhibition that followed, (where I found, to my amazement and delight, my
little contribution rubbing shoulders with photographs taken by legends of the
pictorial world like S. Paul, Raghu Rai, O.P. Sharma, FRPS, Shiv Kumar and N.
Thiagarajan), I wish to beg your pardon for the detailed description of how the
picture was taken.
It is an attempt, not to glorify my fluke, but to pass on to you
whatever lessons may lie buried in the episode, in case they are someday of some
small help to you in your own photographic efforts. Nothing teaches better than
experience, even if it’s someone else’s.
It was the great S. Paul himself, my guru in absentia – he can see an
ordinary, everyday scene that you and I might walk past and extract a prize-winning
image from it – who gave me the names and addresses of some foreign publications
68
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
that invited transparencies for their forthcoming annual issues and for competitions.
Here, too, I met with occasional and modest success, encouragement enough to keep
the hobby going.
Then one day, Satish Tomar suggested we go to Dudhwa National
Park, beyond the district of Sitapur in northern Uttar Pradesh, and adjacent to the
Nepal border. That sounded very interesting; so far, I was only familiar with the
Kumaon hills and a few portions of Garhwal; I had never been to the jungles of
Dudhwa, near the Indo-Nepal border, which were said to be very impressive.
We drove down to Dudhwa in a Matador van, the five of us: O.P.
Sharma and his charming and gifted wife Chitrangada, who was an accomplished
artist and photographer in her own right; Satish; O.P.’s brother, S.K.Sharma (all
OLYMPUS users); and I. Satish hadn’t brought any equipment, so I lent him the
Minolta XD-11 fitted with the 100~500 mm f1: 8 Zoom-Rokkor I had recently
69
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
70
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
The morning is bright and sunny, dispelling the fears of the night
before, when we were Bushmen gathered around a dying hurricane lantern. It has
71
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
drizzled in the night, and the forest has come alive with color as myriad wildflowers
bloom, and the air is full of hundreds of butterflies of every color and description.
S.K. Sharma is busy with his OLYMPUS OM-2 and macro lens with
extension tubes. He is in his element—this is his area of specialization. With the
superb OM-2 that has so many photographic firsts to its credit (including TTL off-the-
72
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
As I raise the Nikon FE and 500 mm mirror rig, with the motor drive
set at 3.5 frames-per-second continuous fire, I’m half hoping to see a rampaging tiger
wading into them. But no such thing happens. I never learnt what spooked them, but
the chattering motor drive gets me some excellent frames as the herd—antlered
males, does, and fawns—splashes through the swamp in a spray of water and
disappears into the cover of the forest beyond.
Though I got some memorable pictures, the frames could have done
with at least one stop less exposure. They were over-exposed by one stop! A pity. I
was puzzled at first: I had been exposing at 1/500 th of a second, which was, to my
mind, just right for the light conditions. The mirror lens has a fixed aperture of f.8, so
there was little I could do there. Then I remembered something I’d once read (I have
an annoying habit of remembering a piece of vital information when it’s too late).
I had once come across an article in POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY about
a pro called Caroll Seghers III who was given the assignment to shoot pictures of a
white horse, for the ‘White Horse’ whisky advertising campaign (over the famous
caption ‘No whisky in the world can run with the White Horse’). He chose to shoot a
powerfully muscled, handsome white horse running up a hill towards him, with
bluish-purple mountains smoking mistily in the background.
Topping the rise, its milky whiteness set off by the green grass of the
hillside and side lit by a late afternoon sun’s golden rays, the horse gave him the
great shots he had seen in his mind.
But he discovered something that I had filed away in my mind for just
this sort of eventuality. He used to get over-exposed pictures, shooting at long range
with long lenses to compress distance, as he was now doing, to blur those lovely but
distracting purplish-blue mountains behind the horse.
Bracketing saved him now. ‘Bracketing’ is taking one or more frames
at ‘correct’ exposure, then two or more frames which are intentionally over exposed
by varying degrees, and some more frames progressively under-exposed by up to
two full stops, is a safety measure taken by pros who have spent a small fortune to
set up a shoot in some remote, exotic location. At least one frame or two will turn out
to be right on the button! (Many auto-focus, auto exposure SLRs available today
offer auto-bracketing as well).
73
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Seghers found, just as his experience told him, that the frames that
were one to 1½ stops under-exposed were just right. For some odd reason, under-
exposure of this magnitude was called for in such long-range shooting. If only I had
remembered this, and shot the stampeding swamp deer at 1/1,000 th of a second, I’d
have got well color-saturated pictures that would have been even sharper because of
the higher shutter-speed! Back home, I kicked myself in frustration for not
bracketing. Too late!
The next day, we come across a Tharu encampment. The Tharu
tribals are the last of a stone-age peoples who still lead a nomadic existence inside
this forest preserve. The men are wiry, and good archers—they can bring down a
flying duck with a single arrow. The women are small, slim and bare-breasted,
festooned with silver medallions and copper and iron jewelry. They lose their
shyness after they cadge a few cigarettes from us, and do not object to having their
photographs taken.
With the golden afternoon sunlight as backlighting, I go into my
favorite ‘portrait mode’, using weak flash to provide fill-in for shadow areas, in these
against-the-light shots.
With the superb Nikon multi-coating on the lens’ internal surfaces,
flare (reflections inside the lens that degrade image quality) is ruthlessly eliminated
even in these into-the-light shots, and the lens hood
shuts out extraneous glare. The legendary 80~200 mm
f4.0 Zoom-Nikkor does a fantastic job. Truly, Nikon
have every right to call this lens one of the sharpest
lenses in all 35 mm photography.
As we are driving off reluctantly from this great Jurassic swamp (so
like the primeval swamp of Pal-ul-Don straight out of the pages of Tarzan comics), a
grinning Fisher Cat, sitting right next to the road as if for a portrait, gives us a parting
gift. The shots are perfect; Chitrangada Sharma is the most enthusiastic of all as she
leans out of the window of the Matador van and clicks frame after frame with her
OLYMPUS OM-4T, with its titanium shutter, and 50~150 mm f.3.5 OLYMPUS zoom.
74
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Then we hit the dusty road to Delhi, taking us back to our dreary,
humdrum everyday existence from which we have escaped for a few days, days that
we’ll remember for a long, long time.
I gift these cherished memories to you, dear reader…memories of
days long vanished into the mists of time, in the hope that they will entertain as well
as inspire you to undertake similar adventures, if only to give the city-cramped
lenses a well deserved outing.
Beyond
Photography
PART FOUR
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
~ Sigmund Freud
LIGHT
One of the things I belatedly realized was that where there is no light,
there is no photography (an earth-shattering discovery!). In fact, the word
‘photography’ itself means ‘writing with light’—from ‘photo’ and ‘graphos’, the
Greek words for ‘light’ and ‘writing’ respectively—so much so that I realized that
film reacts to light (unless you want to include airport X-Rays, which can fog film
unless you take the precaution of wrapping it in a lead-lined bag) howsoever it falls
on it.
75
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
76
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
before entering the lens while the shutter is open, and (c) no colored light from any
other source has influenced the results (how about orange-hued sodium-vapor street
lights?)]
Tungsten light (the light that comes from the tungsten filaments of domestic electric
bulbs or even non-electronic flash studio lights) has a lower color temperature, about
5,200º Kelvin, and is yellowish (or ‘warmer’, as we photographers say) as far as
color film is concerned, hence color pictures exposed by this light source on daylight
film have a yellowish colorcast. I am told it is possible to take normal-looking
pictures on daylight color film with tungsten lighting, by fitting a blue filter on the
lens. I never got around to trying it, though, perhaps because I had no such filter.
Conversely, there are special films that are designed for professionals
in mind, balanced for the 5,200º Kelvin color temperature of tungsten lighting (or the
sun-guns used by videographers) that some studios still favor. In case this ‘Tungsten
film’ has to be exposed to the 5,600º Kelvin color temperature of daylight, it is
probably expeditious to fit a yellow filter over the lens to balance the light to the
color that is correct for this particular film.
Neon lights give a greenish-blue cast to pictures on daylight film exposed by their
light, and in case you often need to correct this, special FL (for ‘fluorescent’) filters
are available that are balanced to the color temperatures of the variety of neon
lighting available today. Neon can be quite a nuisance for those very particular about
the color authenticity of their images, and especially so in available-light
photography with daylight color films.
We always have to keep in mind that light travels at 186,000 miles a
second, or about 300,000 kilometers an hour. Even brief exposures are enough for
light from various different (and perhaps quite unlikely or unanticipated) sources to
enter the lens, either directly or by reflection, and influence the color of your frames.
I was once doing an impromptu portrait session in a friend’s flat, and
failed to take the magnificent maroon-colored velvet curtains into my calculations. I
was using bounced flash (with an electronic flashgun that had a head that tilted by
degrees from –7º to 90º (i.e., from a little lower than horizontal, to straight up at the
ceiling), with another off-camera flash triggered by a cordless remote slave unit.
77
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
I was dismayed when the transparencies came back from the lab…all
the pictures displayed an overall slightly reddish colorcast that, I later realized, was
due to light bouncing off the extensive coverage of maroon curtains in the apartment.
I would try to avoid using bounced flash where the walls are any color
other than white or off-white. Otherwise, bounced flash indoors is a marvelous way
of eliminating harsh shadows (especially those unflattering shadows that appear
under eyes and noses). It gives a more diffused look to the picture, and a good user
of bounced flash will produce photographs that look so natural that only common
sense intervenes to remind us that in no way could an indoor picture be taken other
than with the aid of flash / professional lighting.
But we were talking about bounced lighting, if I remember right, and
the effect that warm colored reflecting surfaces have on daylight color film. Just as
an example, if I were to try for a warm mood in my picture (colors suggest moods as
we all know, from ‘red-hot’ to ‘cool’ blue), I would encourage the light to bounce off
the maroon curtains...or switch on a tungsten light fixture
It will defeat the whole purpose of this book, if I were to append here
a list of rules and how they can be broken. I credit the reader with more intelligence
78
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
than having to depend on me to remind her, at every bend in the road, of the
possibility (or even the need) of breaking the rules. If we were to spell out the ways
of doing so, they might even evolve into more rules!
So all I can request the reader is that she stay alert as she goes through
the text, for there are innumerable clues to jog her brain and bring it alive to the
possibilities where the rules can be bent, if not done away with altogether. This is
where I challenge the reader to spot the clues and work on them to come up with
fresh approaches. In her own interest, therefore, I refrain from spoon-feeding her
with a list of such possible outcomes.
One of the great things about photography is that there are so many
parameters, that they lend themselves to a plethora of misuse! Breaking the rules is
often a good way of getting a picture that is out of the ordinary. It goes without
saying that those who do things the way they’ve always been done, will end up with
results that have been obtained umpteen times before. To get something a little out of
the ordinary, methodology a bit out of the ordinary has to be organized.
Though it’s always an advantage to have S. Paul’s panther-like
reflexes and astounding visual and mental perception that sees a prize-winning
photograph in an everyday scene that other people walk past unawares, this is simply
not possible. That kind of gift comes but once a century. But we can all try and train
our eyes to spot a picture within a picture, or capture a ‘decisive moment’, as did
Henri Cartier-Bresson.
79
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Since life often contradicts itself, in keeping with the nature of the
duality of our existence on this plane, we often have to contend with paradoxes. So,
in order to illustrate that S. Paul is right when he says that he refuses to be typecast
as a ‘decisive moment’ photographer, his vast number of reflexively shot pictures
notwithstanding, I append a few lines that speak for a more contemplative,
introspective style of picture making:
80
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
There is a time to act, but there is also a time to wait. Learn how to
tell what time it is, for great things can happen for those who learn
to wait. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well: "Adopt the pace of nature;
her secret is patience."
[Adapted from Steve Goodier's A Life That Makes A Difference]
81
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
You’ll know what I mean when you develop the ‘cloudy sky’ pictures
you’d taken minus a yellow filter. You’ll find to your dismay that the prominent
white masses of cumulus have blended with the general sky tones, robbing the scene
of all its impact.
Next time you go outdoors in search of B & W atmospheric shots, you
won’t forget to take your yellow filter, will you? To add even more drama (by way of
greater contrast), take (and use!) an orange filter. This does a much more thorough
job of darkening blue items than a yellow filter, giving dramatic sky effects. A red
filter produces extravagant, ominous effects that are better seen than described. Try
one. With judicious under-exposure, you can even get pictures that look as if they
were taken at night/ by moonlight.
I always try to remember that the apparent ‘sharpness’ of a picture is a
product of good lens resolution (of both camera lens as well as enlarger/ projector
lens) as well as good contrast…of tones. Filters do much here, separating the color
frequencies and adding depth to monochromatic photographs, especially valuable
when lighting or subject are both inconducive to ‘modeling’, i.e., rounded contours
suggestive of three-dimensional solidity. They add contrast by influencing B&W
tones resulting from the primary colors in the subject.
Special-effects filters
82
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
rationale always struck me as questionable. But don’t let that stop you from giving it
a try. Who knows what extraordinary effect you might capture? Experiment!
Yet, I feel it’s my duty to add a note of caution here: it’s easy to get a
little carried away by filters (as it is with all photographic equipment). The large
majority of successful pros and amateurs do not use much more than the UV, 1A or
1B filters permanently fitted on their lenses, and maybe a polarizing filter and/or
neon/ tungsten filter on certain occasions. Unless one is careful, filters can become a
nuisance. Use them with caution, more in B&W than in color.
WHICH SYSTEM?
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the
mistake of marrying the whole girl.
This is the first question that most beginners ask. It’s a difficult one to answer
truthfully. I always say, ‘use the system that makes most sense to you, in terms of
price, features, expandability and durability. The fact that there are so many camera
manufacturers around today (almost all of them Japanese), that they must all be
doing something right.
The early battles among 35 mm cameras were between the Zeiss
Contax (not to be confused with the later high-end camera by the same name
produced by Yashica…a ‘stand alone’ brand that anticipated Toyota’s Lexus), which
produced sharp pictures but with smoother, lower-contrast tones from its Carl Zeiss
83
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
optics, and the Leica M2/ M3 rangefinder cameras, which gave sharp, contrasty
pictures from the razor sharp Leitz glasses.
Guess which of the two makes became the best-seller? Neither. They
were overtaken by Nikon’s runaway success, a rangefinder camera exemplified by
the Nikon S2 model, which saw action in the Korean War, and which incorporated
the best features of the Contax (with its Carl Zeiss optics) and the Leica (with their
legendary in-house Leitz lenses), and was incredibly rugged, and relatively
inexpensive. Nikon never looked back thereafter. Today, Nikon’s
Nikon’s Nikkor lenses are
acknowledged as being among the best in all 35 mm photography.
So, choose the camera system that comes closest to fulfiling your
personal preferences, style, and budget. An excellent ‘lower-down-in-the-pecking-
order’ camera that often gives the ‘Big 5’ a terrific run for their money is Ricoh.
Many Ricoh SLRs have features (like a provision for making double exposures)
found only in far more expensive cameras, and they are quite affordable. Besides,
they accept lenses made by many independent manufacturers (since they use the
Pentax proprietary bayonet lens mount), thereby affording access to a major camera
maker’s arsenal of lenses, apart from several independent lens manufacturers.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, however, and even today I
often pine for my first SLR, the Minolta XE-1, with its Hanimex zoom and the 58
mm f.1: 1.2 normal lens. If there was a camera to top it, it was the Nikon FE2 with
its MD-12 motor drive and the 28~125 mm f.3.5~4.5 Kalimar zoom.
But any camera that comes sweetly to hand, like a good gun, and
whose controls seem to be instinctively operable by you, is better for you than the
latest SuperDuper 15000GTX4 with its ‘f.1: 0.5’ hypersuperfast normal lens…which
leaves you totally befuddled; all thumbs and with nary a clue as how to get the show
on the road!
WHEN TO SHOOT?
The time of day is crucial to outdoor pictures. The best times are early
morning to about 10.00 am in the tropics, and again, late afternoon/ evening, say
from 4.00 pm to about 5.00 pm. This is because the light, coming in at a low angle, is
84
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
warm with magic, and casts shadows that give modeling to a subject. As you must
have seen in drawing class, it is shading with a soft pencil or crayon that adds depth
to a flat two-dimensional subject.
To make a 3-D subject retain its depth on a two-dimensional medium
like film, we again need shadows as well as texture (as when light sweeps across at a
low angle over a lawn), and warm lighting coming in low supplies this ‘modeling’ in
good measure. The angular light source provides the shading, and the warm colors
add color contrast as well.
Harsh shadows can create problems, however, and where this is
undesirable (it may be most desirable if the portrait is that of, say, an eighty year old
snake-charmer with his deeply-seamed face reflecting all the ups and downs of his
long life), well-balanced, diffused fill-in flash will do wonders. For landscapes or
most other outdoor shots, this morning-evening light coming in at a low angle is
almost always the universal choice. I break this ‘rule’, however, whenever I feel the
justification for it.
Most portraitists focus on the eyes (break this rule only when you
have a point to make), unless it’s a powerful close-up, in which case a shallow depth
of field just might make the tip of the subject’s nose a little blurred. Remedy this by
either checking dof by looking through the lens at actual taking aperture (i.e., by
using the stop-down preview button, if your camera has one), or by focusing on a
point somewhere between the nose and the eyes. But if that means that both will be
unsharp, its better to stick to focusing on the pupil of the eye.
One or two experiments and you’ll get the hang of it. And always try
for a catchlight in the subject’s eyes (a ‘catchlight’ is a shiny refection, a spot of
light, caused by the eye reflecting light from the lamp or bright scene). This adds life
and depth to the face and its expression. Look closely at any good portrait, and you’ll
probably see a catchlight.
I don’t know about you, but I learnt a lot from the great portraitists
and landscapists…from the Great Masters of painting. Study the paintings of
Vermeer, for example; you’ll notice (if you haven’t done so already) that he has used
‘selective focus’. Very subtly, but unmistakably, many of his masterful indoor scenes
show the foreground and background just a bit out of focus.
85
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
86
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
to have one’s cake and eat it, too. No wonder a photo-artist of the stature of S. Paul
refers to digital photography as a guru…it teaches you shot by shot, frame by frame.
Yet another important advantage of digital photography is that one
saves on film. Depending on the particular camera that one is using, it is possible to
shoot the equivalent of dozens of rolls of film…all on one tiny digi-card that can be
wiped clean by downloading the digital images onto a computer hard disk, thereby
enabling it to be re-used. The savings, in terms of film consumed, can be substantial.
A third major advantage of the digital image is that superlative
retouching or cropping can be done in the photo lab, using any of the computer
software programs like PhotoShop that have been expressly designed for the
purpose. Now we can practically do away with soft focus lenses and conventional
darkroom sleight of hand, because the image can now be digitally enhanced to an
extent that far exceeds the capabilities of the earlier technique. That includes the
time-consuming and often exasperating traditional methods of smoothing away
crow’s lines around the eyes and ‘airbrushing’ away unsightly eyebags…within the
limits of credibility, of course.
To push an advantage further, the 10-megapixel SLR cameras now on
the market mean that resolution is as good if not better than that of the slowest, finest
of 35 mm films. Given that lenses are being continuously improved as better glasses
and coating techniques are being devised, there is nothing that one has to lose by
going digital. And for those who yearn for the ritual of loading and reloading film,
camera makers like Nikon have models that start off as conventional film cameras
but offer optional digital backs that allow you to switch to digital photography any
time, since the basics of photo making remain unaltered—correct composition and
exposure. All sorts of effects can be incorporated via the digital route that would be
very difficult to do with regular film.
If at all there is a disadvantage to the process, it is that it can
encourage a more casual approach to photography. Knowing that an image can
usually be repeated means that many are going to approach their image making with
a cavalier attitude reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw’s accusation that 35 mm
photography was like the cod that lays a million eggs so that one might hatch. Now,
the danger – if this criticism holds water – is vastly magnified.
87
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
SPECIAL EFFECTS
88
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
89
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
90
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
We could take a shot of the moon like this, using a normal lens. We
could then fit a 200 mm lens on the camera, put the rig on a tripod, and make another
(normal) exposure of the moon just where we had left the big blank patch in the
frame during the previous exposure. The result: a night scene with our usual moon,
along with another, huge moon four times as big as the one we are used to seeing!
The possibilities are endless, as I said.
I once made a long exposure at night, from a high vantage point, of
the traffic on Marine Drive, Mumbai (formerly ‘Bombay’), in Maharashtra, India.
Since it was a long exposure lasting several seconds, the red taillights and yellow
headlights of vehicles traversing the dual carriageway left long streaks of light on the
frame. This was a reproduction of a shot I had seen on a magazine cover. But I made
an addition.
Against a dark night sky, I made another exposure on the same frame,
from a low angle, of a friend leaping high, ballet style, taking him against the dark
sky: the high-speed exposure of the electronic flash ‘froze’ him in mid-air. The
resultant transparency showed the sharply illuminated figure of a man leaping over
the vast expanse of Marine Drive at night with the light trails of cars glowing far
below. It was quite surreal and spooky.
The more powerful the electronic flash, the briefer the pulse of light.
This is because, as we have seen earlier, exposure needs a certain amount of light to
reach the frame. TTL (through-the-lens) flash metering means that the camera can
sense that enough light has reached the film, and terminate the flash output. We are
talking in terms of milli-fractions of a second here.
The really fast and powerful multi-flash set-ups, of the type used by
National Geographic photographers to capture Sunbirds (often inaccurately referred
to as Hummingbirds which are a related, but different species) can produce flash
exposures of 1/40,000ths of a second to freeze the amazingly swift fluttering of the
wings of these tiny, gunmetal-blue, long-billed birds as they hover in front of (enter,
and even reverse out of) a flower full of nectar! This effective shutter-speed of
1/40,000th of a second is also useful in a variety of scientific and industrial
applications. The famous ‘drop of milk’ picture, where a drop of milk scatters into
91
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
droplets on hitting the surface, the whole taking the shape of a diadem, was shot with
high-speed flash. So also was the image of a dart puncturing a balloon.
A powerful light-source can often be the difference between success
and failure, for example in macro-photography. The higher the magnification, the
narrower is the zone of sharp focus (depth of field, or ‘dof’ for short). A very narrow
dof could, however, be unacceptable when we are photographing a three-dimensional
object, no matter how small. The only way under the circumstances of deepening the
zone of focus is to stop down the aperture. Macro lenses routinely offer apertures
going all the way down to f.32, and even f.64!
But imagine the infinitesimal quantum of light reaching the film, even
with long exposures (which aren’t always feasible, either on account of outside
vibrations—perhaps from heavy traffic or due to the action of the camera’s mirror
itself—causing blurring, and also because of the color shift associated with long
exposures on color film).
The only alternative left is to prodigiously increase the amount of
light falling on the subject (the closer to the subject, the better, since light falloff is
inversely proportional to the square of the distance). Powerful, multi-rig, high-speed
electronic flash is the answer. But in a pinch, I have used a mirror to reflect sunlight
onto a tiny object. 93 million miles away it may be, but there’s still nothing quite like
our sun, in the immediate neighborhood. You’d have to travel for 4½ years at the
speed of light before you reached Alpha Centauri—the star nearest to Earth!
I once happened to spot a tiny, white garden spider that was
ambushing little insects as they landed on the Zinnia where he had stationed himself.
He would dart out and grab the tiny bug before it could fly off again. With my
normal lens retro-fitted (fitted on the camera by means of a reversing ring, which, on
one side, screws into the filter thread in the front of a lens, and, on its other side has
the appropriate bayonet or screw mounting that allows the camera to accept it, for the
reversed normal lens doubles as a very sharp and powerful macro lens), I fixed a
makeshift lens hood to the erstwhile rear-end of the lens and started taking pictures.
Stopping down the aperture manually (the aperture ring and the back
element of the lens were now out in front), I realized that shutter-speeds were too
low for safe handholding. It was only at f.22 (which was the smallest aperture setting
92
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
on this lens) that I had all the dof I needed, but I didn’t have enough light for a
decent (I wanted over 1/60th second) shutter-speed.
Hey presto! A handy little folding traveling mirror with an adjustable
stand enabled me to reflect sunlight well enough onto the small assassin to get some
interesting transparencies, hand supported (I was flat on my belly in the grass, where
I’d placed the flower). Some white cardboard bent around the scene of the action,
and opposite the mirror, reflected a fair amount of light back into the subject. I was
now able to get some fairly respectable transparencies before the spider scuttled off.
Reflectors are always handy, and even a newspaper held by a subject
as if she were reading it, will brighten up shadows under the chin and eyes that
would be very unflattering. We all learn to improvise in the field. I even carry a small
plastic bottle with a minute nozzle, full of water, for flower pictures. One or two
squeezes, and there’s ‘dew’ on the petals to add that authentic touch of a dew-fresh
early morning bloom!
For close-ups of flowers in the field, many specialists carry (rolled-up
in their camera bags), three of four cloth backgrounds in different colors, usually
smudgy orange-red, blue-white, green yellow, or jet black in color, which an
assistant can position suitably (behind the subject, naturally), should the available
background be unsatisfactory in terms of color, contrast, or both! Again, a 3-sided
wrap-around white cardboard (kept well out of the frame, i.e., the viewfinder) will
soften harsh shadows and reduce excessive contrast, which film cannot handle.
For flowers (as is true for all subjects), the larger the negative format,
the better the results, everything else being equal. This means that a 35 mm slide on
Kodachrome cannot quite match the magnificent detail of a 70mm x 70 mm
transparency shot on a Hasselblad or a Rolleiflex, to name but two makes of larger
format SLRs. And this will pale in comparison to the results possible with an 8” X
93
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
94
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
but the results would far outweigh the initial outlay, I’m certain, if panoramas or
group photography happen to be your area of special interest.
It sure beats the pants off the arduous task of taking several prints of
negatives shot at slightly different angles of vision, and then joining them by the cut-
paste method. Such attempts are never quite satisfying because there are usually
small color and contrast differences between the individual prints that are joined
together, and the joints can never be fully camouflaged because of the shift in
leveling that usually takes place, frame to frame, without a good tripod having a
panorama head.
On the subject of tripods, I cannot emphasize too strongly the
importance of buying a good one. Sooner or later, you’ll need one, I kid you not, and
a sturdy one is preferable to a flimsy contraption that will topple over in the slightest
breeze. There are several good, telescoping models in the market, with names like
Linhof and Gitzo leading the pack.
Some models even allow the camera to be mounted underneath the
central shaft, making very low-angle exposures possible by using a right-angle
periscopic viewfinder eyepiece accessory. A good lockable pan-and-tilt fluid head,
allows smooth, jerk free horizontal movement (thanks to the dampening effect of the
fluid head, that also enables you to ‘pan’ the camera to follow a moving subject),
and, conversely, tilts from nearly vertical to steeply downwards, to add greater
control.
Many photography buffs never get past the stage of infatuation…
cameras and lenses become a life-long passion, and avid camera collectors can pay
thousands of dollars for a rare collectible, like a mint Leica IIIG, IIIF, M3 or
Leicaflex. Jason Schneider’s words, from his column ‘The Camera Collector’ in an
issue of POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY Magazine published over twenty-five years ago,
sum it up for me: “Using a Leica is like driving a Ferrari on a winding road; the
sheer excellence of the machinery creates the overwhelming illusion that one’s
modest capabilities have been vastly extended.”
Fine cameras have a mystique, an aura all their own, and merely
holding, say, a Leicaflex or the redoubtable Nikon F, evokes powerful emotions
which I would be the first to admit to. But if the ultimate goal is photography, pure
95
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
and simple, it’s better to inoculate oneself against the malady by focusing on the
ends, not the means. Easier said than done!
Beyond
Photography
PART FIVE
96
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
photography’s oldest rule ~ now, shoot against the sun!” While this was a way of
trumpeting the magnificent multi-coating (various rare-earths and other exotic
substances vapor-deposited on the lens surfaces, that tame internal reflections that
would otherwise degrade image quality) on their lenses, it also allowed one to recall
an old rule: shoot into the light and you’ll get hazy pictures with strings of octagonal
‘ghost’ images produced by internal reflections bouncing off lens elements and the
aperture iris.
Now, I’ve seen such images in the movies, and I love them. So I’ve
always had a fascination with taking against-the-light pictures that have some extent
of internal reflections. (I do much of my shooting in the late afternoon, around 4 pm
or later). Moreover, I also noticed that if I use a discreet amount of fill-in flash (i.e.,
provided my shutter speed is 1/125th of a second or slower, with the Nikon FE), I get
very lively pictures with plenty of golden highlights in the subject’s hair. And so it
came to pass that – by a process of trial and error – I started composing my portraits
against suitable natural backgrounds in order to separate the subject from the
background by means of contrast, in terms of dark and light tones, or of colors.
To bring up one more golden rule – and one very useful to stick to,
until one discovers ways of breaking it for the better – is the nine-box grid, as given
below. The idea is to position the most important element(s) of the picture at any of
the four intersections where the lines cross each other. This is said to ensure that the
eye is not treated to a static, lifeless picture, with the subject pinned helplessly right
in the center of the frame, like a butterfly in a glass display.
97
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
98
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
99
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
grid has been imbibed, you might find that something within tells you when not to
apply the rule. It is useful to get that tingle in your gut that tells you what’s right…
and don’t forget the unusual, serendipitous element that might crop up in a picture
frame. Bank upon it happening; in fact, look for it. I think we start seeing things
when we’re half expecting them to happen.
Here again, I refer to a sort of sixth sense that many photographers
(and hunters, anglers, etc.) develop, one that leads to flashes of insight that inspire a
composition quite unusual at first, and one that often flies in the teeth of
conventional wisdom. But in retrospect, and encouraged by exclamations of surprise
from viewers, you’ll be thankful for that little voice in your heart that tells your head
to compose the picture just so. Try to go with a blend of right-brain and left-brain
propulsion.
The only way I can explain it is that photography is, first and
foremost, an act of creation, and not a way of merely recording something. And if
you have to ask as to what creation has to do with photography, which is merely a
record of what’s happening right before one’s eyes, it might surprise many of us to
know that, according to Quantum Physics and some of the latest theories about the
physical world, we see what we want to see—what we wish to see tends to appear
right before our very eyes! We do what we think we can do. No more, no less.
This is perhaps what self-fulfilling prophecies are partly about. We
usually end up with results – and I’m not talking just about photography here – that
we’re programmed to produce. A child, whose parents have drummed into him that
he’s a dunce, will usually flunk his tests. A man who knows he’s good can be relied
upon to come up with the solutions. We are what we think we are — another thought
I’d like to leave with you. We do what we think we can do. We see what we believe
we’ll see, often enough to destroy the argument that it’s due to coincidence. I
sincerely believe there are no coincidences in life.
The eye is much less like a camera system than what we were taught
to believe in High School; there’s a whole lot of mental processing of the image
involved both before and after we take the picture, and thought, being energy, (if we
remember our High School physics) is what matter is made of. Ergo, thought can
influence matter (and even create or destroy it), if one is inclined to accept accounts
100
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
of the mystic powers possessed by great sages and mystics of India that one can find
within the pages of books like Yogananda Paramhansa’s fascinating Autobiography
of a Yogi.
Suffice it to say that it is very important to keep an open mind: if only
for the obvious reason that a closed and stultified mind cannot grow, because of its
inability to absorb (and benefit from) new ideas, or even generate them… and new
ideas mean new picture opportunities. Creative visualization is a tool I have often
used with a fair amount of success. Shakti Gawain has written the standard book on
the subject. Who can deny the fact that a negative thinker usually attracts negative
outcomes to himself? The same thing applies to positive thinking.
I am told by minds far greater than my own that the thought energizes
whatever it dwells on lovingly and longingly; it has the ability to draw those things
to oneself. I know too little about the working of the human mind to elaborate
further, but I have a hunch that there is much to be said for stilling the mind and
allowing it to freewheel and daydream…a much maligned but supremely creative
activity said to take place when the mind is connected to the universal unconscious,
whose existence was postulated by Freud’s breakaway former disciple, Carl Jung.
Thus it may be seen that photography at its highest levels is an act of
creation, and as a means thereby of making things happen. I cannot stress this point
enough, though the utilitarian aspect should certainly not be dismissed—it has
undoubtedly played a major role in society as a means of communication, and right
useful has it been, too, all the way from the tiny negatives shot by the diminutive
Minox ‘spy’ cameras, to the 120 format moonwalk photos of Buzz Aldrin and Neil
Armstrong taken with a modified Hasselblad (a superb Swedish SLR camera,
largely handmade and very, very expensive).
However, photography is, at bottom, art…a type of human activity
that one can define as an act of creation. Creativity – to take you back to what was
mentioned in the introduction – is what sets Man firmly apart from the rest of the
animal world. Like all other art forms, photography draws on life (of both the
observable as well the visually undetectable variety) – its raw material and its
sustenance – much as does writing, painting or sculpture.
101
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
It may not seem as plastic a medium as, say, painting, but in truth, a
realized Master like S. Paul will create his pictures, compelled as he is by the
selfsame urges and indeed, powers that flow from attunement with higher
dimensions of living that transcend mundane reality.
Great pictures, whether on celluloid or on canvas, are invariably
created in the mind of the artist. This is because, in some way very hard to describe –
and analogous to the adage that when the pupil is ready is ready, the Master arrives
(or the book idea, or the theme for a painting–how else can one explain a book like
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, or a painting like the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da
Vinci, better known for his sculpture?) – a photograph, existing in an unseen world
of possibilities, manifests itself when the cameraman is ready for it. While turning
the camera outwards, then, the true lensman falls back on Wordsworth’s inward eye
for effecting the essential connection with the realm of the Collective Unconscious
where the picture really exists.
If you’ve ever seen S. Paul’s evocative picture of a bird at the exact
moment when its wings are fully extended in the glorious freedom of flight 6, as are
its tail-feathers, you’ll know what I mean. One could hardly conceive that such
ethereal beauty could exist in the flight of a common rock pigeon, until a cameraman
like S. Paul freezes that very instant of time and showcases the wonder of this
incredibly lovely event. What triggered his reflexes to react at precisely this
fractional moment in time? It is not coincidence, for he has created many such
pictures.
We see the world through lenses that are not made of either glass or of
organic matter. Our perceptions are all unique, just as we are all unique, like
snowflakes are. No two snowflakes are identical—they never were and never will be.
And neither are we; from the dawn of creation to the Last Trumpet, there will never
be anyone like you or me or S. Paul. Such is the ineffable grandeur of Nature.
In other words, no two photographers possess identical perceptions of
the world, and never can two lensmen take identical photographs. Try it. Ask three or
four of your friends to go out and take pictures of, say, a rose. The outcome of each
6
The photograph is entitled “Sheer Beauty”, and was shot with a Nikon F 301 and 105 mm f.2.8 micro-
Nikkor. It won 1st Prize at a prestigious international photo contest, in the “Inspirational Image” category
and earned $10,000 for S. Paul, like hundreds of his other international triumphs.
102
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
effort will be different, even under studio conditions, with identical equipment! Even
if they are shooting from almost the same angle, each will imbue his particular image
with elements that set it apart from the others. This is because we all vibrate at
different frequencies, though some are very close to others. They say great minds
think alike…perhaps this explains why.
At that mysterious level of matter where things are forever in fluid
motion, a quantum soup comprising sub-atomic particles like electrons and quarks –
thought to be the very building blocks of atoms and hence the solid universe we
think we know so well – things seem to be mere projections of the observer’s
predilections and aspirations, mere mindstuff. This is perhaps what prompted Sir
James Jeans7 to note: “The universe seems more like a great thought than a great
machine.” Thus do we come to sense that the world is indeed a mirage of our own
making, just as the Bhagawad Gita says it is. And people tell us to be original, when
in fact we are all unique, each and every one of us!
The reality is that we cannot help but be original; it’s societal
conditioning that’s responsible for compelling us to conform to so-called norms. The
norm actually is that there is no norm! All great Masters know this, which is why
many of them have not bothered with acquiring a ‘good’ education, in the
conventional sense of the term. They have voluntarily opted out of the diminishing
influence of a procrustean educational system that spares no effort to perpetuate
mediocrity by dulling the intellect and discouraging creativity and self-expression.
As Mark Twain always maintained, we should never let book learning
come in the way of our education. This is why I insist that a book (including this
one) should only guide, share, create awareness, encourage introspection and
galvanize into action; it should especially avoid prescribing what is right and what is
wrong. There is no right or wrong, only different ways of seeing and interpreting.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Masters are far more educated – in the
real sense of the term – than the usual lot of PhDs and the so-called intelligentsia, for
they eschew learning by rote and, by taking the road less traveled, get where they are
driven to go. This is true whether we are talking of Pablo Picasso, Tyab Mehta,
Maqbool Fida Hussain, S. Paul or Ansel Adams. Guided by the Masters, and taking
7
“The Mysterious Universe”
103
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
inspiration from them, we too can say with Newton that if we see further today, it is
because we stand on the shoulders of giants.
PORTRAITS
104
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
are in vertical format, but there was this portrait that I once took of a cousin who’d
just come to India for a brief vacation. I made it in horizontal format, and somehow
managed to capture his typically roguish expression.
It isn’t a particularly tight composition, either, as is my usual practice,
so I guess one just has to go with the feel of things when taking someone’s picture.
But it was shot against the light, bringing out burnished highlights in his hair—with,
again, weak fill-in flash to light up the shadows. Today, it’s his favorite picture of
himself, perhaps because the thick black hair in the portrait is now receding as
rapidly as his memory of it when it was in pristine condition!
All said and done, however, my favorite portrait lens is the incredible
Nikkor 105 mm f.2.5. When I expect to do a lot of zooming (especially when I can’t
get close enough to the subject, or wish to get a series of images at different
magnifications) I like to use an 80~200 mm f.4 Zoom-Nikkor. These two lenses –
apart from a 50 mm f.1.4 normal lens (in case one encounters bad light, or if very
shallow dof is needed) – are all one needs for good portraiture.
I admit to frequently using a non-Nikkor lens as well – a delectable
push-pull, macro-focusing 28~105 mm f.3.5~4.5 Kalimar zoom – and find its results
extraordinarily pleasing. It’s certainly great indoors, if only one lens is practical. At
f.1: 3.5, it’s fast enough to give a clear viewfinder image under normal room
lighting, and my automatic Nikon Speedlight 90 couples very happily with the
Nikon 8008 to add just the right amount of fill-in flash.
I’d also advise you to use a matching lens hood, a deep rubber
viewfinder eyecup (a very cheap but very useful accessory) to prevent peripheral
vision from distracting you as you peer at the image in the viewfinder…and a good
SLR body fitted with a motor winder or motor drive, since manually winding on to
the next frame is a nuisance for the portraitist whose full concentration is on the
subject.
Camera orientation is very important. I prefer taking close-up
portraits in vertical format, as I’ve said before, but there’s no hard and fast rule here.
I’ve seen some very effective portraits in horizontal format. When there are two
people in a picture, the horizontal format is usually better. I’ve also come across
some very interesting portraits where the camera was held at a 25° to 35° tilt out of
105
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
the vertical, so that when the photograph was viewed as a vertical format, the subject
was canted at a very dynamic angle. I’ve tried it, and am impressed with its potential.
In which direction the subject will be looking, i.e., the direction of the
gaze, is something for you to decide. Some portraitists like to have people look
straight into the camera. This is not a bad idea, as it evokes a direct appeal. For this
very reason, however, introverted or shy subjects often prefer not to stare directly
into the lens, but choose to look sideways. Select the angle of vision that’s just right
for your subject. It’s really great, though, when kids look directly into the camera;
they haven’t been conditioned like adults have, and their native curiosity is mirrored
in their round, wide, innocent eyes that make a child’s picture so appealing.
‘red-eye’ – caused by light from a flash bouncing off the blood vessel-rich retina of
the eye and entering the lens, is unknown to SLRs; it belongs to the realm of
compact cameras, whose built-in flashguns are positioned near enough to the lens to
practically guarantee red-eye. Perhaps this is what prompts some people not to look
directly into the lens…effectively ruining the immediacy of the picture.
Spectacles do not mar a subject’s appearance, in my opinion. In fact,
I’ve often found that they serve to enhance beauty. It must be realized that, to others,
one’s spectacles are a part of one’s face! They also often serve to underscore
character.
I once took an impromptu portrait of my father in his favorite golf
cap. He used to wear steel-rimmed glasses, and I supplemented the room lighting
with a table lamp on one side to highlight his determined jaw and the deep creases on
his strong face. With weak fill-in flash, I made a portrait with the XE-1 and a 100 mm
f.1: 2.8 Rokkor lens set at f.4, at 1/15th of a second, using the back of a chair for
support. I think he freaked out on that picture, and for years it stood on Mother’s
chest-of-drawers. I must remember to look for it, because I can’t locate the negative.
But, as the saying goes, Beauty lies in the eye (viewfinder) of the
beholder (photographer). Funny thing is, when you really see and feel Beauty, you
can almost always capture it on film…as you often can in words. This is, perhaps,
the secret of that mysterious quality known as ‘photogeneity’ (or ‘inspiration’, in the
world of writers). I often wonder whether the camera takes a picture…or the heart!
Here is a piece I call ‘The Heart Also Sees’:
107
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
power. It was pure poetry, it was pragmatic prose, it was a projection of her inner
beauty and emancipation. Untrammeled, undaunted, unafraid, it was a delicious
challenge to life itself…
If there was such a thing as melody, it was in her voice. Chimes came
to life and keened in sympathetic response to the clarity and sweetness of its dulcet
tones. Flowers turned their faces away from the sun to listen to her, and nightingales
flew away, crestfallen, shocked at their inability to match the music that issued from
her lips as speech. When she sang, as she often did in a quiet forest glade, the wind
hushed its murmur in the branches, and little rabbits crawled out of their burrows to
draw closer to the heavenly music. And when she laughed, all nature laughed with
her. The angels heard and were moved, for if mortals could sing the way she did,
half their work was already done.
Or was it simply that he saw he saw her, not with the aid of his eyes,
but with his heart, a heart that chose to selectively filter out the dross…a heart that
perceived the precious essence of her...an essence that was of the eternal, and not the
fallible humanness that all flesh is heir to. Angelic, immortal, ever pure and
unsullable: that was how he saw her with his heart. Which was why he adored her:
as the magi adored the holy infant they had traced by following the star of
Bethlehem. An angel she was, and a baby, too, if one cared to remember her
mischievous ways and her pranks. Humor, love, happiness, vitality, and radiance
108
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
were embodied in her. Those that saw her with the heart were never the same, ever
again. She captivated and enthralled. He was her karmic pawn…life after life.”
stubborn Englishman who epitomized the gritty defiance that the English are famous
for. After having led Britain through the war years against a foe as powerful as Nazi
Germany, Churchill became as famous a symbol of dogged tenacity as his canine
counterpart…the British bulldog!
Halsman preferred to light only the subject’s head, but kept the rest of
the scene jet black. In one shot, he even got the subject to wear a black turtleneck
pullover, so that only the head registered on film (the meter reading was from the
area of the well illuminated head, ignoring the blackness beyond it). The result was a
head, in sharp detail, emerging from a sea of blackness…a very effective way of
reducing the subject to its bare essentials. As always, lighting plays an extremely
important role in portraiture: the point is worth stressing again and again. But we can
break the rules and light only one side of a face, throwing the other side into
mysterious darkness that blends with the hungry shadows beyond the frame.
110
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
111
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
112
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
~John Gardner
But all she said was, “I liked the perspective; in each of them, from
‘Village scene’ to ‘Sunset at Ranikhet’ to ‘Portrait of a young girl’, your unorthodox
viewpoint was very refreshing…a village scene caught from a low-angle, with a
bull’s horns framing the picture!” she chuckled. “The artist must have been a crow
perched on the bull’s neck!” The high grades were not for my rotten drawing and
smudgy coloring but for my choice of perspective!
The lesson sank home—try to develop your own viewpoint, and tell it
to the best of your ability. I really don’t know whether I carried it into photography
or not, but I did try to give free rein to my imagination in my short stories…but that’s
another story!
The reason why I brought up all this old stuff here was to share with
you my realization that we only stand out from the crowd – and satisfy, in the
process, our deepest self – when we follow our heart and do what it tells us to do. It
is a learnable attitude, as any behavioral scientist worth her salt will tell you, in
situations where such learning is reinforced, i.e., encouraged and suitably rewarded.
Originality is the hallmark of S. Paul’s spectacular pictures, backed up
by immense technical virtuosity and lightning hand-eye coordination. It’s very hard
to match, but worth a try, for inspiration from the Masters is a good thing to have
with you on the endless road to mastery.
CAPTURING LOVE
113
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
The most powerful and the most indefinable of the great emotions, the subject of
love has fascinated, frustrated, exasperated and motivated poets, painters, (and now
photographers) down the centuries. Can the camera actually capture an emotion? I’m
sure it can, but it’s a very subtle thing that shines in the lover’s eyes. You have to
rope in the most powerful instrument at your command – your heart – when it comes
to capturing the subtle aura of love on film.
Have you noted, in any of the photographs of Arun Nayar and Liz
Hurley, their deep commitment to each other? Did you catch the sense of emotional
homecoming in Liz Taylor’s soft smile every time she was snapped with her dashing
Irishman, Sir Richard Burton? Did you sense something was missing from pictures
of Charles and Diana?
celestial Being, I’d like tell it in my own way, and dare you to do your worst. It
won’t make the slightest difference. I am forever bedazzled. So here you go…
When you hold her in your arms, you are as a God: you are
invincible. The world sees the love in you and is kind to you, for ‘all the world loves
a lover’. Every little ditty becomes a Beethoven symphony, every joke is a side-
splitter, books reveal themselves anew, a single beautiful word can move you to
tears, every little restaurant is the Ritz, every road you travel with her is the
enchanted road to Gulmarg. The heart, bursting with love, becomes a temple
dedicated to the worship of Pallas Athene, to Eros and to Aphrodite, through the
sacred scripture of its own rapture.
To one’s now vastly extended sensibilities, the very air seems
surcharged with an overdose of oxygen, loaded with some exotic scent. Every
shabby little sideshow is a Disneyland, every movie is the greatest motion picture
ever made, every man is your brother, no sacrifice is too much, no road too long
when she waits at the end of it. Moments with her stretch to Eternity, Time ceases to
exist; nothing else seems to matter anymore.
You feel the whole of Creation is your playground, the stars are well
within your reach, you are immortal, and if you wanted to badly enough, you could
speak with God. For when He has blest you by giving you the miracle of her, He
surely will not resist the urge to remind you of it. Your sense of identity is extended
into the persona of the other, you become one—one body, one soul, one mind,
glorying in the Greater Being.
115
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
The passion, the euphoria, the dementia, the sheer abandon of it, all
these signify arrival at a higher plateau of experience that all true lovers reach, a
place where the Gods themselves live, for once envious of mortals. Love takes man
outside himself to a never-never land beyond the stars of an everlasting tomorrow,
back to Alpha and Omega, back to the End…and the Beginning of it all.”
116
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
by in a train or a car; but how may of us take the trouble to actually look at – and
truly perceive – a scene, a tree or a flower?
And when we do, we become inattentive to, say, the tree itself,
becoming preoccupied with trying to recall its botanical name, or with admiring its
colors, shape and so on. In other words, as soon as we ‘see’ a tree, our mind starts
prattling about it, getting in the way of perceiving what might be seen as a towering
monument to patience. I think we can only really perceive something when we
‘disconnect, when we let the mind fall still and silent, when the yammering or
echoes in our consciousness subside.
When we look at the Milky Way galaxy at night, do we really
perceive the extraordinary beauty of it, or wonder at the miracle that brings the light
from distant celestial objects to our eyes? I’ll never forget a night I once spent under
the stars, high in the mountains. A canopy of brilliant pinpoints blazed down on me
as I dumbly admired their naked splendor. Who could have guessed that there were
so many of them up there? ‘City lights must overpower them’, I thought. The
starlight ambled across thousands of light-years of space-time, pitifully slow in
negotiating the immeasurable cosmos. Some of the stars that unleashed those
photons no longer existed. It happened too far away and too long ago for me to
comprehend. Yet those wave-particles, once emitted, had journeyed for eons across
the void to reach my eyes—mind-boggling stuff…and so reminiscent of my muse.
And let me also ask you: when you perceive beauty, do you not also
experience love? Are beauty and love identical? Without love, perhaps there is no
beauty, and without beauty perhaps there is no love. “Do you love me because I'm
beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me?” was the conundrum posed by
Oscar Hammerstein II, lyricist (1895-1960). In the ultimate analysis, would you say
that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder?
Beauty is in form, beauty is in speech, beauty is in conduct. If there is
no love, conduct is empty; it is merely the product of society, of a particular culture,
and what is produced is mechanical, lifeless. Our love shines through our thoughts
and actions, in the words we choose to use, in our work. When the mind perceives
without the slightest flutter, then it is capable of looking into the total depth of
things, and such perception is really timeless.
117
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Late Ripeness
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Czeslaw Milosz. New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001.
(Harper Collins Publishers - 2001).
118
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
I would venture to say, then (and you are at liberty to disagree with
me) that photography is, at bottom, a combination of four things—planning,
serendipity, inspiration and intuitive foreknowledge. I feel that, in a very curious
way, the four are one and the same, because of the intrinsic nature of life…all things
being inseparably, inscrutably and irretrievably linked in some inexpressible way.
As such, ‘attunement’ – a term I use to describe this state of oneness
with all things – brings discernment and foreknowledge, since barriers of space and
time do not exist on that higher plane of existence. In other words, photography is
really about connecting with the larger universe beyond optical vision, with a zone
of eternal Truth, Light and Beauty that lies outside the reach of all but our higher
senses.
Whenever I perceive these three vital elements that form the crucial
touchstone of timeless value, I love, for I know that all things are as much part of
me as I am of everything else, and everything must always come full circle.
The Fountainhead
“Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about
nature.”
~ St. Augustine
119
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Publilius Syrus insisted that ‘The eyes are not responsible when the
mind does the seeing’. Though he omitted mention of the heart as an instrument of
sight, I agree with him that the real things in life are the things of the spirit. By that,
I mean things pertinent to a purely non-physical way of knowing and experiencing,
things that not only give one a clue as to what photography is really about, but
which also afford one a peep into the nature of all life, and thereby, into the very
salience of Creation itself.
120
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Did you ever ‘know’, even before you opened your mailbox, that an
email from a certain friend was about to appear in your in-box? Did you ever wave a
reluctant farewell to someone...a day before she died?
121
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Did you ever visualize (I mean that literally: did you ever ‘see’ it in
your mind’s eye?) the work environment you felt you’d be most comfortable
in...and have it came true, right down to the very last detail? Have you ever dreamed
of finding the perfect friend—such as you’d never met in your life—one who’d
open your mind to vistas never glimpsed before, one who’d show an interest in what
made you tick, one whose boldness and candour would snap years of mental
stagnation, one who’d help you to unearth whatever little latent potential for self-
expression was submerged in you...did you ever find such a friend?
Did you ever have a dream-like experience where you see yourself
meeting your soulmate...and actually come across the very person who—the only
one out of all the other people in the universe—is the one you seek? Did you ever
feel that you meet that person life after life?
Did you ever have a gut feeling that the money you needed to meet
an urgent expense was about to arrive...even when there were absolutely no
indications to that effect...till it suddenly appeared! Did you ever sense that the
package your favorite uncle handed to you on your birthday contained the very
watch you craved, the one your best friend had? Your uncle lives in a distant city,
you hadn’t met him for years, and it was an impulse purchase he’d made on the way
to the airport; he couldn’t have possibly known how badly you wanted that
particular gift—or did he? But how could he have known? You’d never told a living
soul about that dream watch!
122
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
There are. It’s in the brain, and it’s located in the right temporal lobe,
although medical textbooks of today have little to say about it except that it stores,
processes, and interprets memory. It is still too early—despite the enormous body of
research that points conclusively to its role as a unique instrument—for medical
science to accept its role as a receiver/ transmitter for tuning into a Greater
Consciousness, call it God if you will.
Yet we all possess a highly refined instrument that has the ability to
connect us to what Jung called the Collective Unconsciousness—the Universal
Mind of the New Age philosophers. I am talking about the brain; more specifically, I
am referring to the right temporal lobe, an area of the human brain that more and
more scientists are the calling The God Spot. Through this lobe we access the place
where all knowledge (as many an inventor maintains), all memory resides,
everything that ever happened, is happening, and everything that will ever happen in
a finished, complete universe that science today acknowledges is no longer a myth
created by mystics and philosophers.
123
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
need to again repeat Blake’s ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ verse to get my
point across.
This ensures that the individual ‘I’ predominates (giving rise to the
aggressive assertiveness that is so essential in coping with the individualized
challenges that are constantly thrown up by a highly-competitive and often dog-eat-
dog work environment). But this over-developed sense of the ‘I’ is also the undoing
of modern societies, responsible as it is for spawning much of the ills of that plague
men who have lost touch with the soothing sense of harmony and oneness with the
universe and everything in it.
124
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
theory unveils worlds at the sub-atomic level that question the very foundations of
the older physics, man is beginning to re-remember an old truth: that the mind and
the body are subtly linked, part and parcel as they are of a universe that holds all the
answers...if we but care to look.
The key to looking, learning and responding, for a creative artist, is
the Right Temporal lobe. It can be electrically stimulated, it can be kicked into
responding by mind-bending drugs...but it can also be induced into action by
meditation (which could mean nothing more than sitting quietly for about twenty
minutes and fixing the mind at some neutral point, slowing down the frequency of
brain waves to about the pre-sleep level of 8 to 10 cycles per second).
Scepticism is both natural and healthy. It winnows the wheat from
the chaff, and, when finally overcome by overwhelming evidence and conclusive
repeatability, makes acceptance of new ideas and paradigms all the more welcome.
Old habits and ways of thinking die hard. Ulcers, for example, were always thought
to be the result of stress until it was proved that a simple virus causes them, and that
antibiotics can cure them. But even today, ulcers continue to be treated as though
stress was the cause, by doctors who refuse to change their thinking.
The story of science—whether astronomy, cosmology, medicine,
psychology, anthropology, or biology—is nothing if not a series of anecdotes about
new ideas that were derided when first mooted, examined, experimented with, and
ultimately accepted to the extent that they became commonplace. Ideas start as
heresies, mellow into self-evident truths, and finally live on as superstitions.
Doctors have long believed in their gut feelings. Many a CEO acts on
his hunches before rationalizing them with analytical studies and market research
(Akio Morita’s development and launch of the Walkman is a case in point—read his
book ‘Made in Japan’). Intuition, according to top security and police officials, is
often more valuable that body armour and guns. Any pilot knows the ‘feeling he has
in his bones’ about a flight. We know people know at once when they meet the girl
or boy of their dreams (sometimes)...the fabled ‘love at first sight.’ So what are
these signals, and where do they come from? How come they—and dreams,
properly interpreted—are often so accurate? It’s the right temporal lobe at work.
125
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
126
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
The stage was set for an arranged marriage, something I was not too
keen on but did not exactly buck, having seen the success of my parents’ marriage.
Proposals started trickling in, but none seemed right, although they were all about
bright, qualified, attractive girls from good families. My mother began to lose heart
as I summarily rejected one proposal after another. There weren’t too many such
girls of the right age just then in our somewhat exclusive Brahmin community. But I
was adamant: arranged marriage or no, until I felt like marrying a particular girl, I
was going to stay single. The trickle of proposals gradually dried up, to my relief.
I use the word ‘told’ with full knowledge of its implications, but I
insist on using it. I had been ‘told’ to marry her...by ‘Whom’, I cannot say. Four
months later, I wed the girl in the picture, and was utterly, blissfully happy...really
so. For the first time in my life, I knew what companionship meant. Now, how does
one explain such a unique experience?
Five years ago, I wrote a short story. Entitled ‘Tabula Rasa’—it was
the outcome of a response to a challenge from a friend to see whether I could write a
story about a man who wakes up with apparently no memory at all...an amnesiac! I
wrote—in the span of a day—a tale about a Neanderthal man catapulted by a freak
127
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
time warp into modern times, who went on to display amazing powers of intuition
and endurance to run rings around everyone else, and become very rich, very fast.
He seemed to possess senses far beyond those that modern man had.
In ‘The Heart also sees’ I wrote about the way we perceive people by
means not solely confined to our five senses. I put it down to the fact that an
unknown agent—the heart, as far as I could tell—perceives reality in a very
different way, one quite opposed to our conventional notions of how we see.
Moreover, a lucid exposition of the ever-shifting quantum reality that is merely a
product of the way our brains are configured, and which we appear to ‘see’ and cope
with, was lucidly explained in Dr. Morse’s book—something I’d already sensed
intuitively!
And in ‘Through all Eternity’, I have woven a romance around the
reincarnation theme...a topic I later discovered Dr. Brian Weiss has examined in
depth. Was this the reason why I, who had actually gone to do a market survey,
found myself buying his books...and then not reading them for six months? It was
128
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
The ‘other’ senses we had been gifted with withered away, even as
the Dark Ages saw large-scale persecutions of those who retained their powers;
many of those who relied on intuition and precognition were condemned as
‘witches’ who ‘consulted the powers of darkness’.
129
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
that will see man shape his own evolution as he reaches for the stars from which he
came, and to which he will ultimately return. I have seen too much science fiction
come true in my fifty-plus years not to believe in this wholeheartedly.
Left lobe usage (which has reached its zenith today) increased further
in medieval times, as society gradually succumbed to forces of de-stratification.
New theories and attitudes challenged the old as use of the right temporal lobe
declined even more. The great flowering of art and culture we call the Renaissance
may have been a sudden despairing, defiant upsurge by the right temporal lobe –
now diminishing in importance – as it linked to higher reaches of reality and
triggered off a brilliant flowering of human capability…just as the Eastern mystics
do.
In fact, Eastern societies, more holistically oriented than the west,
have always given due importance to ‘right brain’ activity. It hasn’t served them too
well in the past, in ‘practical’ terms, but now, as the world shrinks and the global
economy integrates, it is no coincidence that the greatest advances in research and
electronics are coming from people of Indian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese origin.
‘Intel outside, Patel inside’ is a wry dig at the situation by western observers.
You can bet that Indian photographers will be in the thick of the
action, telling the world where it is and where it’s going…in stunning, iconoclastic,
right brain generated imagery.
130
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
&
EPILOGUE
131
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
132
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
universe (as there are in ourselves, for we are all miniature macrocosms), some of
which can ensnare the unwary explorer, trapping her in the bog of equipment
worship, sometimes allowing her to escape only to plunge into the quicksand of
melancholia. Like everything else, practice maketh perfect, but an unshakable
confidence in one’s personal vision will help us pull through.
For that is what photography is all about, I guess: conveying our
special way of looking at our world to other human beings, interpreting our very
own reality for others to glimpse. Perhaps, the better we are able to do this, the
better the chances of our efforts being appreciated, for phoniness and plagiarism will
not sustain us for long. In the ultimate analysis, the camera is only a tool to project
our inner vision—realistic, imaginative or abstract images triggered by the
freewheeling unconscious mind. I have only tried to highlight some of the mental
and spiritual processes and inner realizations that assist in this process, to lay bare as
it were, the overriding program.
Many photographers spend a lifetime recording the changing face of
the land, of picturizing the misery of populations traumatized by war, famine or
natural disasters, the despoliation of the habitat as rampant commercialization and
industrialization get a death-grip on the environment. I also realize that really
successful photographers identify with – and interpret – great themes.
They paint on a larger canvas; they taste deep of the bottomless well
of life. Some choose to underscore human misery and chaos, while others celebrate
life, with all its pathos, romance, magic and timeless beauty…all equally valid
representations of their individual visions. But they all operate from a common
platform…and they all speak the same language, though the words are different.
These Masters live in another universe; they hear other pipers, they
march to a different drummer. The curious thing is that all the great themes flow into
One Great Theme…Life. Life is what the Masters seek to interpret, and well do
they succeed in their efforts, wrenching our hearts while simultaneously instigating
horripilation and bringing the blood to our faces with the exhilaration that comes of
seeing the Truth through someone else’s eyes. A masterpiece is unmistakable; it
produces such a powerful neural reaction that it jolts us to the core of our being.
133
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Masters are great encouragers, too. Instead of only looking for faults,
they are people who point out strengths and encourage us to excel. Like all
successful people, they look for positive qualities. They see potential where others
see failure. And they encourage success in others. Empower them. True leaders, as
Neale Donald Walsch says, do not have followers, because they are too busy setting
up other leaders.
True leaders – like all true Masters – serve. Mark Twain put it like
this: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people
always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too, can become great.”
Masters teach us to how to learn, which is where the road to mastery begins; they
help us find our own road to where we want to go.
As we learn at the feet of the Masters and struggle to learn, initially
by trying to replicate their efforts, we should be using our skills to develop our own
‘signature’, so that our images begin to show signs of a new maturity and a
distinctive style…not being different from others just for the sake of being different,
mind you, but different in spite of ourselves (for men usually prefer to go with the
herd). It takes courage initially to step away from the beaten path, but those who
take the road less traveled are always the ones who fulfil themselves.
In encouraging us to shy away from tradition and to explore new
worlds both visual as well as non-visual, including the abstract or even the
submerged parts of our psyches, photography helps us to realize and project our
uniqueness as human beings negotiating the astoundingly diverse, desperately
misunderstood and yet magnificent experience we call life. Whether it involves
breaking fresh trails in aesthetic endeavor or the innocent joys of immortalizing the
family picnic, it is a great way to circumvent time and project our thoughts and
vision into a future that will know us better for the images we leave behind.
NEVER MISS AGAIN! TIPS FOR BETTER PHOTOS
Just as a composer uses all the instruments in a symphony to create a
stirring piece of music, you should compose each picture so that its parts
work together to create a work of beauty.
134
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Each item in a picture has an effect on the whole, so don't just point and
shoot! Take a little time to compose each picture into the masterpiece it
could be.
Also try to keep the following options/ actions in mind while composing
your picture:
If your subject is not in the center of the picture, you need to lock the focus to create a
sharp picture...
But to improve pictures, you will often want to move the subject away from the center
of the picture.
If you don't want a blurred picture, you'll need to first lock the focus with the subject in
the middle and then recompose the picture so the subject is away from the middle.
135
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Second, recompose the picture, i.e., reposition your camera (while still
holding the shutter button) so the subject is off center.
And third, finish by squeezing the shutter button all the way down to take
the picture.
This technique is especially useful when you are taking a snap of two
people with a space behind them, with a distant scene in the centre (on
which your lens would normally autofocus on, throwing your main subjects
out of focus!).
136
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
USE A PLAIN
BACKGROUND
AND FOCUS LOCK ON
TARGET!
You have a choice of fill-flash mode or full-flash mode. If the person is within five feet,
use the fill-flash mode, beyond five feet the full-power mode may be required. (With a
digital camera, you’d use the picture display panel to review the results).
On cloudy days, use the camera's fill-flash mode. The flash will brighten up people's
faces and make them stand out. Also take a picture without the flash, because the soft
light of overcast days sometimes gives quite pleasing results by itself.
137
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
WITH FILL-IN
DAYLIGHT FLASH!
MOVE IN CLOSE
If your subject is smaller than a car, take a step or two closer before taking the picture
and zoom in on your subject. Your goal is to fill the picture area with the subject you are
photographing. Up close you can reveal
telling details, like a sprinkle of freckles
or an arched eyebrow.
But don't get too close or your pictures
will be blurry. The closest focusing
distance for most cameras is about three
feet, or about one step away from your
camera. If you get closer than the
closest focusing distance of your
camera (see your manual to be sure),
your camera’s shutter will lock.
CLOSE...
138
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Start by playing tick-tack-toe with subject position. Imagine a tick-tack-toe grid in your
viewfinder.
139
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
What is your camera's flash range? Look it up in your camera manual. Can't find it? It’s
about ten feet with 100 ASA film. Position yourself so subjects are no farther than ten
feet away. Film users can extend the flash range by using any films faster than 100
ASA, such as 200 ASA or 400 ASA film.
140
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
If you want to show a wrinkled face full of character, use harsh sunlight.
Don't like the light on your subject? Then move yourself or your subject.
141
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
For LANDSCAPES, try to take pictures early or late in the day when the light is
orangish and rakes across the land, highlighting the contours. This emphasizes depth,
adding a 3-D quality to a picture.
TAKE SOME
VERTICALLY FORMATTED
PICTURES, TOO !
Is your camera vertically challenged? It is, if you
never turn it sideways to take a vertical picture. All
sorts of things look better in a vertical picture, from
a lighthouse near a cliff to the Eiffel Tower to your
four-year-old niece jumping in a puddle.
142
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
So next time you are in the field, make a conscious effort to turn your camera sideways
and take some vertical pictures.
LANDSCAPES:
143
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
BE A PICTURE DIRECTOR
Take control of your picture-taking and watch your pictures dramatically improve.
Become a picture director, not just a passive picture-taker.
Most pictures won't be that involved, but you get the idea: Take charge of your pictures
and win your own best picture awards.
144
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
PHOTOGRAPHING BIRTHDAYS
Whether it's baby's first, junior's sixth, or great-grandmother's ninetieth, these tips will
make your birthday photos special.
CAPTURE THE
EMOTION
Catch the grins, tears,
surprises, and hugs that
make for memorable
pictures. Keep your camera
handy and turned on so
you'll be ready for those
spontaneous expressions.
GET CLOSE
145
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Fill the viewfinder with your subject and create pictures with greater impact.
Step in close or use your camera's zoom to emphasize what is important and exclude the
rest. Check the manual for your camera's closest focusing distance.
AVOID RED-EYE
Red eye is easy to remove these days with picture-editing software or at a professional
studio. But why not prevent red eye in the first place? You can’t always ask your subject
to look at your shoulder rather than directly at the camera. Turning on all the room
lights helps. If your camera has a "red-eye reduction" feature, use it.
146
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
and ceilings. Subjects that are outside the flash range will be either too dark or too light.
Check the camera manual and try to keep your subject within the flash range.
PHOTOGRAPHING PEOPLE...
A MAJOR RULE…HAVE FUN!
Don't work too hard to position your
subject. The goal is for him or her to
relax and fall into a natural pose....to
have a natural facial expression.
147
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
Meaningful props, like a trophy, a musical instrument, or even a fish, can add interest.
Use your camera intelligently, and you will capture the essence of life. Always
remember—it’s the photographer who makes the pictures. The camera only takes them.
148
Beyond Photography ~ The Quest for the Ultimate Image
The End
149