Rather

There are days when I’d rather be anywhere but wherever I am; but mostly, I’d rather be in the calming company of Nature..

Pigeons

Like most people, I’m not a fan of pigeons. But when I see them strutting around with their mildly colored plumage, and light reflecting off of it here and there, my attitude softens. Then I realize they’re just outside my window, probably deciding on the best place to unload, and my urge to shoo them away returns…

Magic mirror?

Is the magic in the mirror or in the photography? 😉

Fun with a compact mirror, for Dailypost’s weekly photo challenge: Mirror.

Reflection

One of those rare times when I actually like the result of photographing light reflected on a wall. 😉 The reflection is from a container of distress inks that my sister uses in her card-making.

The Lake

This lake just outside the Preah Khan temple at Cambodia. It was the middle of morning when we passed beside it, but then, I was playing with the colors in the picture later, and I absolutely loved it when I tinted the blue with yellow. This golden sky makes my heart soar with joy in a way that the original blue sky wasn’t able to, and I just don’t feel any shame or guilt for tampering with the colors so! 🙂

For SL-Week: Reflection, and Weekly Photo Challenge: Jubilant.

Reflected

Another beautiful sight of reflected greenery on the backwaters of Kerala. I love this higher-contrast, vignetted, monochrome version of the photograph, so it goes as a submission to this week’s Monochrome Madness. (Yes, I remembered to send my submission to Leanne this week! 😀 )

Reflections

Clicked using a phone camera app outside a restaurant on a sunny, windy day. The faraway lines of buildings that get reflected here weren’t click-worthy at all, but I thought the waves and ripples on the water made all reflections featureless yet interesting. 🙂

I applied a light touch of painterly effect with another app to get this final picture. (The results of painterly effects make me sigh, wishing I could paint like that, but I then console myself since I can at least apply painterly effects using these apps.)

Blurry

Not all blurry photographs, even if unintended, are eligible for the trash can. They actually look beautiful sometimes! This one, for instance —

I’d been aiming for this lamp, adjusting my settings, when ‘click!’ I pressed the shutter button without thinking. Needless to say, I was happy when I saw the result of this accident. 😉 I see it as an abstract representation of the Diwali festival — the flame, its reflection, the vague outline of the earthen lamp in the background…

I now try unfocused clicks more often. (Although what comes out of it isn’t always great.) That just goes to show that there is always some takeaway from any incident, doesn’t it?

Serenity

It’s the journey that matters, and the destination is something that one reaches eventually. I find myself agreeing to that whenever I see photographs that I’ve clicked on my way to somewhere. They are far more beautiful to me, and I find myself connecting with them more than I do with the ones I click when I reach my destination. Take for instance this one that I clicked while on a road trip —

Serenity

The scenery was so serene that even now, a long time later, I feel at peace when I see it.

DPS Weekly Photography Challenge — Reflections

This was my submission to the latest DPS Weekly Photography Challenge — Reflections. I’ve submitted my entries to DPS a few times now, but I might stop, because the default “sort by best” entries-view there makes the entries that get upvoted early on remain at the top, thereby having more probability of getting seen (and upvoted) again, and entries submitted later are shown at the bottom, and though they might be good, they never get seen or upvoted because no one scrolls past the initial few  entries. How unfortunate!