Quesa Lounge is located in the the Sector 50 Market, Noida. It is a fairly new addition to the market and has quickly become a favorite haunt of college-going students and office-goers. You can find Quesa Lounge on Facebook and even on Foursquare.

So far, my favorite drink : the Virgin Mojito!

The Chef at Quesa is an absolute gentleman with a round up of some lovely food. They have quite an extensive menu to choose from.

Do not forget to try out their lip-smacking Chicken Wings! I don’t know what they put in them but they are absolutely delicious and I can’t help re-ordering them whenever I get a chance to drop by.

The Quesa Lounge also has a quirky collection of Hookahs and you can ask the go-to man, Tyagi, to fix you up with a very customized request.

And the following is a panorama of the entire lounge shot during the day.

Move your mouse left to right on the image below to view / scroll the panorama horizontally.

Overall, the Quesa Lounge is a cosy little place to hang out with your friends. Very friendly staff and an excellent Chef – you can also usually find the boys who run the place : Mayank and Adhar. I especially like the food – Noida doesn’t have many good yet reasonably priced places to offer and Quesa fits in perfectly in that empty hole.

The best sunset I’ve seen in the last six months since I moved to this apartment! The sky never looked this beautiful and I spent about 45 minutes trying to capture it on my Nikon D90 using both the 18-55 and the 55-200 mm lenses. Images with a “panorama” in the top left corner are scrollable versions – move your mouse left and right to view the entire panorama. The lovely lightweight jQuery script was edited and written by John Hobbs @jmhobbs and the script can be found here.

Looking at these photographs now, it’s hard for me to look at them like they’re from a ‘real’ sky! I’ve got a few more spectacular photographs, which I will be uploading – all of them should be uploaded by the end of next week. Hoping for more such sunsets!

This is a set of photographs of the interior of the living room at a friend’s home. Shot on the Nexus One, using the Android App called Camera 360 using HDR, LOMO cyan and LOMO cinematic filters. I think the light flares are not because of the app but because of the camera lens on the body of the Nexus One. Maybe I smudged it with some oil – there was a lot of cake around ;D

This is a set of photographs of a bathroom and some of the stuff inside a bathroom. It’s been shot on the Nexus One using the Android app called Camera 360 using various shooting modes like LOMO Cyan, LOMO cinematic, HDR, Cyan Film, etc. No editing in Photoshop, the shots are SOOC.

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.

The light streak from a couple of cars and motorcycles was more chance than plan. The plan was to try the camera remote with long exposure so as to get starry lights. After minor but many post-processing steps in Photoshop this was derived. The original image is below.

There is an upcoming photo shoot for a client who needs to take photographs of the interiors of their service apartments. I am going to be using only ambient light for the shoot and will try some photorealistic HDR instead of the usual blown out edges and halos. Similar to the effect on the above edited image. Long exposures on a tripod, with a remote – maybe I can get some starry lights in the service apartments.

I’m not sure where I’m getting the spots from at the top of the image. It could be a dirty UV Haze Filter, a ditry lens or dirt on the mirror in the camera. I hope it is the first. The full resolution image can be seen on Flickr.

Uploaded this photograph on Flickr. This was during client work at an industrial photography engagement at a rice factory / mill located on the outskirts of Delhi. It’s quite unlike me that I enjoy industrial photography but I’ve come to realize that the main draw for me is to be able to make a picture out of all the hard edges and dirt and metal. I like being able to do that. Sometimes there are glimpses of something beautiful that I see, that has further potential, after being processed, to turn into something quite unexpected. The photograph you see below is the final product.

This is a loosely documented process of how I got to it. Would be impossible for me to give exact values of tweaks that were made in Photoshop and Photomatix Pro. It is an HDR image & I usually tweak till I like what I see. Sometimes I go back multiple times to fix the image some more – in this case, I stuck with the first product of the processing.

Three exposures while shooting +1 0 and -1 : I don’t remember if I used a tripod for this one.

PhotomatixPro put the three exposures together to create an HDR, which I then tonemapped to something I liked – there’s a lot of microcontrast going on in this image. My Photoshop file still has the layers so I have the HDR product from PhotomatixPro below. You can see it doesn’t look much different from the originals. It does look a tad more ‘dreamy’.

Then I Photoshopped. Unsharp Mask and Noise Removal. If I ever decided to get this printed, I would prefer to see a more ‘smooth’ image, and a little more sharpening doesn’t hurt anyway. Using the Transform perspective and skew tools, I aligned the image to an angle that I liked a little more than the one I had shot.

Duplicate the layer and overlay at a 100% – I like doing this to HDR images – it increases the contrast and removes the pasty look – unless you want the pasty look. I prefer more ‘pop’. Skewed the angles some more.

For this particular photograph, I thought it might look better with a double overlay so I duplicated and did another 100% overlay and I liked it better. Not only does the contrast pop, it also accentuates details – makes it more grungy – so there’s an overall noise-removal smoothness but a grungy look.

I use NIK Software’s Color Efex filters and applied a cross processing using Y06. Once.

And twice.

Using the Darken/Lighten Center filter, I made a slight change to the lighting – to subconsciously allow the viewers’ eyes to focus on the main pipe – not too much otherwise it kills the effect.

I also use NIK’s Silver Efex, which primarily helps tweak black and white images. One feature that I absolutely love is the ability to increase the ‘structure’ of an image – small details jump out. So I applied the filter – there are too many choices but I used one to increase contrast a little and maxed the structure. And overlay at 50% on the color image from before.

Followed by a final ‘Burn Corner’ tweak using the Automate filter of Pixelgenius’ Photokit.

Imagine. I haven’t even bothered to play with curves, levels, alpha channels etc. that live within Photoshop. There really is no limit to what all can be done. This is how I do it and instead of following this to the ‘T’, it’s better to figure out what you like seeing & then do that. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still nowhere near finding my ‘style’ of photography. It probably depends on something as flippant as my mood! And if you’re wondering if you’re going to get photography assignments based on how well you can process – at least in India – the answer, in short, is no.

These pictures are the results of a new Vivicam Tripod and preparation for an up-coming industrial shoot. I needed to get used to the new tripod and I also needed to try out bracketing and HDR. The shoot’s been finalized for this Monday and I’m hoping to get atleast 100 passably good shots from the entire day. In the following shots, the first image is the final HDR image after post-production. Clicking on this large image in all sets, will take you to their respective Flickr pages.The four images under it include the first three which are bracketed exposures and the fourth is the original HDR image.

The above photographs isn’t too good a picture. There’s no focus. It’s a bad composition. Even in terms of the HDR, there is way too much going to fully appreciate how the HDR might have enhanced the picture.

The above is still a passable picture but the HDR result wasn’t uplifting. The only reason I like the photographs after post-production is because of the red and the blue. I still feel it’s an overbearing final result. One of the noisiest images from all the five sets.

The above is my favorite image from the entire series on this page. The photograph had some merit in terms of composition but it was bland otherwise. The HDR result brought out the highlights : colors and lighting. Which I then picked up while post-processing and pulled out even further. The HDR result was a lot dreamier – foggy, cloudy. The final post-processed photograph is sharper but still retains the ‘dreamy’ aspect because of the blown up saturation. Unlike most over-saturated images, this one doesn’t hurt the eye.

The above, staircase picture is my second favorite because of the idea / story behind it and also because of the colors. As a personal preference I tend to like colorful photography when it comes to my own pictures. I’m always looking for black and white ideas too but seem to prefer only portraits when it comes to colorless pictures. The stairs were easy to post-process – the focal point was the green lawn and the sunlight. The post-production reduced the luminosity that the HDR captured but also provided additional depth.

The above image of the water tank is my least favorite. It’s boring. No point of interest. The sky is bland, the structure is bland. After HDR and post-production, I also realized that my lens was dirty.