Wesak Festival - A religious and cultural festival - a night photography heaven..!

Wesak festival in Sri Lanka. One of the most exiting opportunities for night shots on the streets of Colombo.

These photographs were taken in May 2011 during Wesak festival week. All these photographs were taken during a small walk around a "Bare Lake" at the heart of Colombo.

 All these shots are taken with ISO 800, spot metering and mostly 1 stop under.

Night lights were beautiful but the reflection on the water was even more beautiful. It was a nice atmosphere where several lot of photographers were capturing these images and posting on their Facebook pages or other galleries pages on a daily basis during the festive week.

When photographing night lights and reflections, the tripod is a handy equipment which I could not carry on that day. If I used a tripod and given a longer exposure rather than hand held camera, the reflections on the water could have been more beautiful The water surface could have been totally colored for a longer exposure of 5-10 seconds.



Looking forward to Wesak Festival 2012 and be in touch for another set of photographs. This time I will go with the tripod. :-D

(Click on the images for larger view)

High Angle..!

One day I had to spend some time at Kandy, Dalada Maligawa (temple of tooth relic) waiting foe one of my colleagues. I had the camera with me and took some shots from the above. Personally, I do not like high angle shots but I made some color changes and did some touch-ups to give these pictures a mood. Unfortunately only few people liked these. Just have a look whether you like them or not. Feel free to email me if you like to make a serious comment..! (nirmanaj@gmail.com)

 Even though this seems a very simple photograph, the way the child and mother walk downwards made me stop at this. They are walking with eyes on the ground and the front is dark. Its just like the future is not clear but we just descending to the darkness without knowing what will happen next. 








This elderly mother was waling in to the shade..I felt like she is moving towards the darker period of life.

Sunset & Digital Photography

Sunset is a very common photographic event. When i started my photography while in school, capturing a nice sunset on film was a difficult task which required lot of training and patience. But today, the digital camera has made this task extremely easy. Any one with a DSLR or even with a point and shoot digital camera can capture stunning sunset pictures. 

 Nice sunset pictures are not a way of show off your talents any more. Most digital cameras have special scene modes which allows the user to capture professional looking sunsets at ease. Once I took some of my sunset shots to my photography teacher and asked for his opinion. All photographs were technically OK, nicely composed..BUT the problems was..they are so common. Any one could take them. 

This is becoming common for most photography situations. Today, everyone got a digital camera or at least a camera on the mobile phone. 
We shoot at almost anything. So....we are regularly exposed to thousand of photographs on a regular basis. To take a photograph which will stand against the rest is the difficult task today. 

The photographs in this post are some of the shots I have taken while wasting some time at Wellawatte beach. I had to pick up my wife from her work place little late, waiting on the road was a terrible experience..BUT luckily I had the camera with me.