I am currently on an extended visit of my home country India for reasons I blogged about here. Over the past several months I have been an active member of the Hyderabad Photography Club Group on Flickr although most of it being virtual as I live in the US. A fairly large group of us got together yesterday evening on a very short notice for an HPC tradition – the Photo Walk. I finally got to meet the people behind the Flickr handles that I have gotten to know over the past few months. It was a lot of fun and I was made to feel right at home in the tried and true Hyderabadi spirit which is unique to this city. Here are a few images from that photo walk.
Flickr Friends
13
Mar 10
An evening of fun with my new/old Flickr friends
19
Aug 09
An analogue photographer’s dilemma
Recently a Flickr contact of mine asked me a very simple question:
Is it okay for a film photographer to scan and tweak?
And here was my response to that question:
The question you have is one that all film photographers have asked themselves at some point including myself. Let me ask you this – when you look at a photograph from a distance can you tell if it analog or digital, printed in a darkroom or on a inkjet printer? In most cases you probably can’t tell unless you have your nose up against the glass 
. As far as I am concerneddarkroom or photoshop are tools, and both need high level of skill to get the most out of them. In fact my use of photoshop has been significantly helped/enhanced by the techniques I learnt in the darkroom – things like dodging, burning, masking, edge burning, contrast, toning etc. I also like the fact that now I can creatively 
mix and match analog and digital techniques to get some interesting photographs – like my state fair panorama of the Tractor Trailer. On a personal note I like being outside taking photographs instead of spending hours in a darkroom (digital or analog) and using Photoshop gives me a little bit more of that precious commodity we all know as Time.
I would love to hear your thoughts and/or comments on this.
29
Jun 09
Mission Inn 5 by fenominal
Mission Inn 5 by fenominal, originally uploaded by PK [Prabhakar] Koduri. The above image and all rights associated with it belong to fenominal
Came across this photo by fenominal while stream hopping on Flickr. Loved the photo and saw the comparison to the same photo taken with a Nikon D700. I wanted to see if I could match the digital version or even exceed it. What you see above is the version after I made some tweaks using Lightroom, which BTW is an amazing program.
Here is the original version:
The above image and all rights associated with it belong to fenominal
Here is the Nikon D700 version:
All rights to the above photograph belong to J.LY Photography
So what do you think? Was I able to achieve what I set out to do?
