Blooms on blue

I own a top in a beautiful blue color, with small white flowers and leaves embroidered on it. I’ve always loved this top, but it’s only when I clicked a macro of it for this SL-Week theme (Blue) that I noticed that the fabric’s texture looks very much like knitting! Macros just show so much more of the world, don’t they — all the stuff that we never usually notice. Because I too knit, my love for the top has now doubled. 😉

The title ‘Blooms on a bed of blue’ passed through my mind for this post, but that’d be way too much alliteration, right? 😛

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.

Wedding

A traditional South Indian wedding. The priest runs the couple through a series of rituals, while the relatives of the bride and groom shower the couple with blessings.  get together, catch up on gossip and try to pair up ‘eligible’ singles they know. Weddings everywhere are the same, I guess…? 😉

I applied some blurring and solarization effects to the photograph, mainly because it was a slightly old, low-resolution image with not-so-great colors, and also because it was fun playfully distort the picture while still maintaining the spirit of the ceremony. Distorted picture or not, the bride is the most eye-catching person at a wedding!

For SL-Week: Wedding.

Ta Prohm: before I left

While we were touring Cambodia, we had to visit the famous Ta Prohm temple. (Lara Croft, anyone?) It’s just amazing to see how the tall, beautiful trees there are one with the ancient, dilapidated buildings.

As we left the temple, I glanced back the way we came, and saw the crumbling structures, the swaying trees, the absorbed tourists. I felt like capturing it all, so I clicked a series of shots thinking of assembling a panorama from them later. I still have to process most of the photos I clicked there, but this panorama was one of the first ones I worked on! I used Hugin to stitch 4 photographs for this one, and had to use quite a few post-processing skills later ( 😛 ) to remove duplicate people and solidify ghostly ones. 😉 It isn’t a 360˚ (or even a 180˚) view, but I like how it reflects everything that my eyes saw then.

For SL-Week: Panorama.

Rowing woman

Clicked at Kompong Phluk, Tonle Sap lake, Cambodia.

Kompong Phluk is a ‘floating’ village built on stilts, and tourists can pay to be taken around on a boat ride through the place. I was not a huge fan of the experience; the village certainly does not seem to reap any benefits of the money paid by visitors. Anyway, here is a photograph of a local woman rowing about going about her chores nonchalantly. 🙂

This picture was kinda blurred, but I didn’t want to throw it away — I really love the half-turned torso of the subject. To make the photograph usable, I decided to make the background monochrome and apply a selective blur, and highlight the woman and her boat in the foreground. However, the varied blurriness required of the elements made my first attempt look weird and unnatural. So I started working with the boat and the woman separately. Frankly, I’ve forgotten the myriad effects I played around with. I remember going crazy with the Colors tool for the boat, and using edge detection and softening and various blend modes and transparencies for the layers. The final changes I made were smudging, shading and healing the subject to make her blend in with the background.

For SL-Week: Women. Happy Women’s Day!

Temple trees

Temples in India, at least ones that have a courtyard around them, have trees in the courtyard. I clicked this tree at the huge courtyard of the Lepakshi temple. Of course, the picture doesn’t do justice to the size of the tree — it extends far beyond this frame, but the view of the tree through the pillared frame, in turn leading to glimpses of sky (and the temple) through the tree’s branches, was too good to resist a couple of clicks! 🙂

For SL week: Trees.

Stairs at a garden

The royal palace of La Granja, Spain, has huge gardens surrounding it. Sections of the gardens are at different elevations. We visited the place on a cold, rainy day, and the lack of crowd made for some pretty leisurely-clicked photographs. This one’s an experimented-on version of a picture that I clicked of one of the stairs between two such garden sections.

Hey little birdie!

A Steller’s Jay that I saw while on a vacation at Oregon, USA. It slightly turned its head right at the moment I clicked it, and its crest is almost hidden as a result. I just love the blue on it!

Though I say ‘little birdie’, this jay is not so little — it is almost as big as a crow…

For SL-Week: DoF.

Gerbera monochrome

A monochrome photograph of the red gerbera that I’d clicked a while ago. The two pictures are refreshingly different! (They look similar but they’re not the same shot, they’re just the same flower…)

Revisiting my gerbera post reminded me that I’d started a Flowers series but have completely forgotten about it. I should probably work harder on keeping this series alive, heh? 🙂

This photograph also goes as my submission to Sylvain Landry’s SL-Week series — this week’s theme is Macro. Coincidentally, I submitted the red gerbera photograph as my first ever entry to the SL-Week series!

Well, isn’t this gerbera related to one too many facts on this blog…?

The Maremagnum bridge

On my Barcelona tour with friends, we visited the Maremagnum shopping mall. This mall is mostly surrounded by water, and there’s a contemporary wooden bridge — called the Rambla de Mar — that allows us to access it. The structure of the bridge makes it appear to drastically get narrower at the far end, but that’s just an illusion. 🙂

A lot of people were around with us that day, probably because it was super-sunny. I had to actually move a bit ahead, away from the general direction the crowd was taking, to avoid bumping into anyone while clicking this shot. I did some post-processing with color curves and gradient maps in GIMP to give a retro feel to the picture. I’d originally wanted to post a different monochrome photo, but liked this retro picture so much that I decided to post this instead. Sorry monochrome, another time!

For SL-Week: Narrow.

Dragonfly

Dragonflies are brutal killers with superpowers; their eyes, apparently, are the most advanced in the insect species. (They beat human eyes effortlessly.) That this dainty-winged creature has not wreaked havoc in killer-insect horror movies shows that Hollywood does not do its research. 😉

I clicked this particular dragonfly while on a vacation at Bali. I used the highest zoom available on my camera for this. No tripod, of course, so I was happy this restless one stayed still for as long as it did! 🙂 While it is not one of those breathtakingly clear and detailed macro photographs by a long shot, I do love the transparent wings and huge compound eyes. I made a tight crop of the shot so I can fully appreciate the beauty of its subject.

For the Weekly photo challenge: Eye Spy, and the SL-Week challenge: Transparency.

Alone, but not lonely

Sitting by herself

Alone, yes, but not lonely

Lost in her daydreams

For this week’s SL-week theme: Alone. I don’t really know if this lady was daydreaming, but if not, I hope she was at least enjoying people-watching!