I shot these photographs at the Pantene Mystery Shampoo event that declared the winner of their 14-day contest. Katrina is one of Pantene’s brand ambassadors and the winner was crowned by her. The last photograph shows the photograph of the winner with Katrina. The event was held at Hotel Taj Lands End, Bandra, Mumbai.

So YAY! The last shot was snapped by Bharat who had accompanied me to the event – and you can see I don’t even know how to stand properly I will be uploading more portraits of the people that I shot at the event later this week or next week after I’ve closed some of the branding projects I’m working on. With more details on who the organizers were and what the whole deal was about – links to videos etc.

Levi’s is launching their new brand of jeans called the Curve ID – the launch date in stores nation-wide is the 2nd of September this year. This event was held at the Taj Mansingh Hotel in New Delhi with a fashion-show choreographed by the very handsome Marc Robinson. The bevy of beauties that represent the Levi’s Curve ID brand are all in the photographs below! [ And please give it some time to load - there are 80 photographs from the event that I just HAD to share! ]

That’s @akanksharedhu’s new Levi’s Curve ID Demi!
The stunningly beautiful table arrangements by art director Shani Himanshu [ the link will take you to his Facebook page ].
That’s me in my new Levi’s Curve ID jeans!	@akanksharedhu with her new pair of Levi’s Curve ID jeans – thanks to Tusharika’s adept measuring and expertise on the Curve ID!
The bar was well-equipped and the service was great at the Taj Mansingh.
	Didn’t get many food pictures because quite frankly, I was too engrossed in the event itself! The people were just fabulous!
Can you tell that I was absolutely mesmerized by the wonderful art direction by Shani Himanshu?! Of course both @akanksharedhu and I were enraptured by his hair as well – didn’t get a picture
That is Shani Himanshu – speaking with @missmalini [ also did not get a picture and this was the best shot I could manage - the light was really low. ]	A sneak peek of John Anderson, President & CEO of Levi Strauss & Co. Shumone Chatterjee, Vice President, Marketing, the Levi’s brand – Asia Pacific.
John Anderson, President & CEO of Levi Strauss & Co. in conversation with a couple of reporters.
Tusharika Rao, Business Head, Levi’s Women & Shumone Chatterjee. John Anderson, President & CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., Mary Alderete, Vice President, Global Women’s Marketing, the Levi’s brand
	The lovely ladies start showing up on the ramp!
An introduction to the international brand ambassadors and the three denim styles : Slight, Demi and Bold. Miss Nine, Lykke Li and Violet.
John Anderson, President & CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., Mary Alderete, Vice President, Global Women’s Marketing, the Levi’s brand
What a bevy of beauties and some really funky and stylish denims on them!
And the Indian Levi’s Curve ID Brand Ambassadors not hitting the ramp starting with Jacqueline Fernandez @Jackie_alien	Chitrangada Singh Ileana D’Cruz @Ileana_Dcruz
And I also spent quite a bit of time trying to capture Jacqueline Fernandez @Jackie_alien’s braid!	I quite loved the hairstyle on Ileana D’Cruz @Ileana_Dcruz
Question and answer time with Shumone!
The Levi’s Curve ID Bold style on Ileana.
Marc Robinson, Ileana D’Cruz and Chitrangada Singh.

Many thank to @udaibir for the invite; to Chitrangada Singh, @ileana_dcruz and @jackie_alien for being super-patient and granting us “pose please” requests; to Tusharika for helping us pick the right jeans; to John Anderson for being so gracious with the “may we take a picture please” and to Levi’s for organizing a wonderfully cute event. Oh and thank to Levi’s once again for pushing the boundaries against waist-size obsession so we don’t have to think about inches anymore – but only styles and shapes!

Four of my photographs are being used on the Network18 venture website http://www.in.com without my permission. The images are not hosted on the in.com servers, they are being leeched from my hosting servers. Network18 has very blatantly also provided a link back to where they have copied the images from and insouciantly mentioned “Images maybe subject to copyright.” Yes, it is stupid. Now, the CEO Haresh Chawla might not be aware of this – and he might be aware of this – in case of the latter… it’s a ridiculous business strategy. Below are the screenshots in all their glory – for posterity’s sake – and following are direct links till they get taken down : Image 01 | Image 02 | Image 03 | Image 04 – UPDATE : the images have magically disappeared! you can still see them here using Google’s cache Image 01 | Image 02 | Image 03 | Image 04. Thanks to @poeticgooner for the Google Cache hat tip.

They also sent me an email from the in.com website saying ” Thank you for your feedback. Can you please send us the link. Do let is know if the problem persists”.

Read : India’s copyright proposals are un-American (and that’s bad)

This incident was also covered on Chori.in.

Apparently, in.com uses a Bing.com API, which allows them to use keywords and then display search results on their website. While Bing.com and Google.com have my permission to include my images in their search results, in.com does not. Instead of first using and then removing after being caught, in.com should first take permission. in.com is a “content aggregator”, which means everything on that website does not belong to them [ that's my interpretation anyway - please correct me if I'm wrong ].

I’m not sure what Network18′s in.com missed – even though my website / blog clearly states “All rights reserved and copyright studioaside.com – they have gone ahead nonetheless. Shame on you Network18 and whoever made this bad decision for you. I’m sure they steal other content too – the written kind. You got a story, you share it in the comments.

Model & Stylist : Akanksha Redhu
She runs a segment on her blog called “Look Of The Day” and updates with photographs whenever she finds something cool to share. For details of clothes, accessories and shoes, please visit her blog. Akanksha can also be found on Twitter.

Most times it doesn’t take much to make good photographs. Every photographer has a style they can call their own. As a photographer, I tend to use Adobe Photoshop heavily – not to enhance the model’s figure or skin as much as I use it to create a mood, lighting or other effects that have traditionally been used in studios. You can’t go wrong with a Nikon or a Canon as far as the quality of your RAW photograph is concerned. I prefer to shoot in high-resolution JPG format as much as possible. My goal, currently, is to get as many good photographs in minimum amount of time. I don’t like to waste time actually ‘setting’ up a shot – most of the times. Just shoot.

I’ve not shared the before and after photographs from the Lingerie Fashion shoot that I did. Here they are.

The photographs were shot on my Fuji SLR film camera on a 49mm lens. The negatives were developed and scanned at a photographer’s store at Connaught Place, New Delhi. I forget the name of the store now. The scan quality was terrible – innumerable scratches and artifacts and the shots were not even developed in the correct ratio. So, what I got to see on my screen when I ran the CD ROM on my laptop after I got the scans from the photographer’s store – was disheartening at best. But Adobe Photoshop to the rescue and I ended up doing my first ever cosmetic / plastic surgery on Photoshop!

Clicking on the ‘after’ photograph will take you to it’s Flickr page.

We did not have a great model because it was a student’s shoot without any budget so we requested one of her classmates to pose for us and assured that we would not use the face of the model. It is a big deal to pose for a lingerie shoot for a girl – in India at least.

I had to work on the skin because the arms and legs were not waxed and had hair – although, fortunately the hair weren’t too bad. the other stuff I had to work on included the breasts and the butt and the tummy – to remove tyres and flab. I also worked a little on the arms.

I am not an expert in re-touching photographs and post-production but I was quite happy with the results I got after I was done with these photographs. It took me about three months to come up with a version that I liked enough to post on Flickr or post online.

All photographs from this lingerie photo shoot can be seen on my Flickr collection. In case someone wants to evaluate the high resolution versions, clicking on the ‘after’ photograph will take you to it’s Flickr page.

Lingerie design credit : Akanksha Redhu. The model would like to remain anonymous.