I’ve been featured on the Profile column in the September issue of Grazia magazine. Photographs of the article on the pages of the magazine below. The article heading is “The new breed of power networkers” and features two other ladies : Rashmi Vaswani of Rage Chocolatier @rashmivaswani03 on Twitter and Padmini Harchandrani, @paddychop on Twitter.

Many thanks to Mamta Mody for writing a lovely feature – she captured my entire ramble-on-the-phone and boiled it down to it’s essence. And she was very patient with my incessant questions – “What photograph are you going to use? Can I see the article before it’s printed? When’s it getting out?” etc.

Apart from the fact that I’m thrilled about this feature – the awesome folks at Grazia also used a photograph that I shot myself – a self-portrait – so in the credits for the photographers, I’m mentioned too! Thanks to @akanksharedhu for letting me use her mirror for the photograph!

These are photographs from the first wedding I shot on my Nikon D90 – the camera was new and the photographs are now old – from February 2008. Wedding of Akanksha and Aman. Got around to editing the photographs over the weekend. First attempt at a sort-of story-telling style – with diptychs and triptychs.

The mehendi right before the start of all the ceremonies.

The bride dressed-up at the day of the engagement and more details photographs from the mehendi.

A game of cards at the groom’s home – just before all the formalities begin. Relaxing on the rooftop.

Much dancing ensued to welcome the bride and her family – the day and night of the Sangeet at the groom’s place.

the bride with brothers and best friend at the pre-wedding party.

All dressed-up for the engagement ceremony.

The groom waiting patiently for the engagement ceremony to begin.

The bride’s turn to wait patiently while the groom completes the customary “horse-ride” – an Indian wedding isn’t quite complete without a “ghodi”.

Some more dancing right before the engagement ceremony and a huge deal being made out of the horse-ride.

Even on-the-cheek kisses are a little risque at Indian weddings – but just after the engagement, it’s easy to get away with.

The just-engaged couple. I had to be present in the capacity of elder-sister during the actual ring exchange, hence no photographs of the actual engagement in process.

Jewelery being gifted and a lovely smile from the bride-to-be.

The newly-engaged couple.

The “official” photographer had put a small backdrop and light setup in the hall and the couple was whisked inside for some quick portrait shots. I got to shoot some too.

More posing at the behest of the official photographer. The couple is now starting to tire. But just when you think they’re done…

…he picks her up and…

…they exchange some more kisses!

The wedding ceremony, puja and havan – alongwith the seven rounds of the holy-fire – the “saat-pheras”.

Offerings being made to the fire and the ritual of taking the first step together after the seven rounds around the fire are complete.

A wider view of the wedding mandap.

More offerings to the fire, the mantras being recited and smiling bride.

And it’s almost done – some running around to find more offerings for the fire.

Somre more mantras and exchange of sweets.

The bride in a hip mood after being married : throwing the rice up and behind her to signify the “vidaai” or departure and the walkway decorated on her way out.

There are a lot of lovely little things in an Indian wedding – but if I knew the details of all of them, I’d be a wedding pundit, not a wedding photographer! Always a good thing to get details of all ceremonies before actually planning to shoot a wedding. The other wedding I’ve shot was for Bharat and Priyanka if you haven’t seen it already. There’s been a huge improvement in my photography and I’m looking forward to another wedding to cover!

Camera 360 is a mobile phone application for your Android. I used the Nexus One for this review. First things first : this app has a mind-bending number of options and effects available. 90% of them are available on the free version and the developers are only now creating some additional options for the Pro / paid version. Let me make it clear at the outset – this is the only paid app on my Nexus One. THAT is how good an app this is.

Those are all the screenshots of all the various modes and features available on the Camera 360 app. The phone in the photographs is my Google Nexus One. The feature / shooting options list includes Effects, which has I’m Feeling Lucky that randomizes the effect; Enhance that increases contrast; Black and White; LOMY cyan; LOMO Cinematic; Commercial; LightCyan; Reversal Film; HDR Simulation Light; HDR Simulation Heavy; Night and the Dream effect available only on the Pro version as well as the fantastic Back to 1839 also available on the Pro version.
And that’s just the EFFECT mode. Below you’ll find photographs with the various modes applied to them and some more descriptive information on other modes.
Then there’s a Scenery Mode where your photograph shows up inside another photograph of a dude painting a canvas. The Funny Mode has options for Surrealist Painting; Surrealist Color Painting; Line Sketch; Four-color poster; Fish eye; Vertical left symmetry; Vertical right symmetry; Horizontal left symmetry & Horizontal right symmetry.	If that isn’t enough, there’s also a Tilt-Shift mode! While it obviously doesn’t give an effect like a real tilt-shift lens, if you know what the right situation is to use a tilt-shift lens, you’ll probably be thrilled with this mode. You can fine-tune the amount of blurriness, the transition smoothness, a faster effect or a more time-consuming simulation, etc. Like with any other piece of equipment / filters, one needs to know what to shoot and what subject will get some character enhancement on using a particular shooting mode.
The Shift-Color mode allows you to focus on one particular spot in a scene and convert all other colors to black and white – but keep the color you’re focussed on.
And the last mode is the Normal Mode, where you have options for No Color Filter; Mono; Negative; Solarize; Sepia; Posterize; Whiteboard [ which strengthens saturation ]; Blackboard [ black point addition effect ]; and Aqua.	And if this wasn’t enough, you should also know that in any of these modes in Camera 360, you can adjust the following things in addition to mode-specific adjustments : decide whether you want to see Composition Grids, use a Classic Golden Section or a Modern Central Division; also adjust White Balance; Night shooting mode; Flash mode; exposure times; Auto or Infinite focus and a couple other focusing modes. PHEW!
Scenes with good lighting will give you better results – unless you’re looking for a moody feel.

I can’t possibly go into more details than the above! I can, however tell you how to buy the Pro version because I had a hard time getting it myself. Firstly, buying paid Android apps, if you are in India, is not possible via the Android Market – the pro links just don’t even show up. For this particular app, you will need a PayPal account or a Credit Card. Once you have the free version, and you launch the app, you will see a white screen telling you what’s available on the Pro version and a continue link below that. After clicking on the continue button, the app launches with the camera – now, if you press the back button on your phone, you will be taken to another white screen, which has the payment options etc. I had no idea I had to press the back button. At $3.99, Camera 360 for the Android is totally worth it.

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 from the special menu created by Kanishk who is preparing to be a Master Chef. Location courtesy : Quesa Lounge, Noida.

Shot on the Nikon D90. Photoshop levels and curves and exposure for post-production of images. We didn’t have a food stylist. There was Lamb guard of honour with whiskey honey glaze served with red wine reduction, Prawns in rum and filo pastry strips, Chicken Breasts with Pepper Vodka and mirin glaze served with balsamic reduction and Cognac & Mocha Cheese Oreo Souffle. The Balasmic Reduction and Red Wine Reduction were to die for. Yummy!

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.

This is a set of photographs of the interior of one of my friend’s home. I’ve used the Retro Camera Android app on my Nexus One for this particular set. While I quite like the way the photographs show up on the phone, while looking at them on the screen, I’m not so happy with the quality. Judge for yourself.

Set of photographs of sunsets shot from my balcony, Noida, India. Photographed using my Nexus One using the Camera 360 Android App. All photographs use either the HIGH HDR filter or the LOW HDR filter built into the Camera 360 app.

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.

This is a set of photographs of a brunch as a friend’s place. Relaxed. Sheesha. Awesome food from Quesa. Awesome food. Wait. I said that already. Lots of conversation and lots of photographs. Tried out some of the photographs using the Fx Camera android app on my Nexus One.

Set of photographs of my hand when I was doodling on them thinking of a design for one of my latest identity projects. The logo is still under development. Will update this blog post with the finished logo if it ends up using one of the designs from this set! Shot using my Nexus One using the Camera 360 Android App.

The Avantha Masters Golf Tournament marked the re-introduction of the European circuit to the Indian playing field. The tournament was held at the DLF Golf Course, Gurgaon. The winner was Andrew Dodt. Andrew is a professional Australian golfer. This was also the Avantha Masters’ debut tournament.

	There was quite a turnout in terms of the audience crowd – especially with the number of children. The crowd etiquette was quite amazing too.
The runner-up was Richard Finch. You can read the Telegraph UK news story here. This was my first Golf tournament and the winner was especially gracious while posing for photographers.

Shot on a wood table mostly. With light coming in from a window on the right, the laptop on the back and a couple of paper / book reflectors. Mostly shot on long exposure. Of course wouldn’t be possible without a tripod. I’ve shot the Nexus One with the Case Mate cover, the Divoom speakers and a couple of print books that I’m giving to a client – after I shot their event.

One of the things to be careful about when shooting shiny / plain surface products is that they tend to catch a lot of dust & lint – the maximum time spent in the above photographs was cleaning them up in Photoshop because even after using CyberClean, there were lots of linty things on the black surface of the speaker, the soft blue part of the Case-Mate cover and the screen of the phone as well.

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.

Industrial photo shoot from half a decade ago. Shot on my Fuji SLR, 35mm film. A visit to the Mundra Special Economic Zone to cover all aspects of the Zone – from railways, to the Adani Jetty, the ports, the hypermarkets, an annual conference, etc.

This shoot was one heck of an experience – mainly because it was my first time on a port in the midst of all those huge cranes and containers. Photography is prohibited on ports and even though we had the requisite permissions, there were times we got chased down to show the physical proof in the from of the signed papers we were carrying.

Photographs from half a decade ago. Shot on my Fuji SLR, 35mm film. A visit to the Siyaram Silk Mills in Maharashtra to photograph the factories and shop floors. Comparing the quality of my photographs from then and now, I was quite a terrible photographer I might add.

The shoot itself was managed quite well by the Siyarams staff. This was one of the two initial paid photography shoots that I had completed. During this particular shoot, I realized that being a woman industrial photographer was slightly easier from one aspect – the workers tend to look into the camera with none of the camera-shyness that would otherwise be present.

Two of my close friends, Bharat Midha and Priyanka Sachdeva finally tied the knot on 20th of June 2010. I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to be their unofficial wedding photographer. Here are some of the selected images.

Complete gallery of the wedding photographs on the domain booked especially for them. the total number of photographs presented to them was 120. To hire us for capturing your wedding, give us a call on 99100 22104 or send us an email on naina@studioaside.com

I’m giving away one portrait session – to one lucky person. The winner will be announced on 30th of June, 2010 and the process of making that choice is random – chits with names will be added to a box and on the morning of the 30th, one piece of paper will be picked and the person will be entitled to a free portrait photography session [ which will include ten final digital high resolution photographs emailed to him / her at the end of the session - after due-editing ].

Some of the latest portraits on my Flickr photostream

Elaborate shooting setups are not my style and I prefer to shoot in natural surroundings with natural light as much as possible. Post-production of photographs is my forte.

The final choice of the winner is my decision. The winner’s travel to and from the place of the shoot will be borne by them – and I’ll be more than happy if they also serve me a free lunch The winner can decide what they want to wear, whether one outfit or five, where they want the shoot to take place – it will not be an in-studio shoot, and whether they want to bring someone along for the shoot or not – to be photographed with them – not a separate portrait session!

The pictures, after approval from the winner, will be uploaded on this blog as well. I’m thinking of one free portrait session every two months should be awesome – we all like our picture being taken – well. Throw in some awesome post-production & it’s almost perfect.

All you have to do, to apply is send me a couple of your photographs to naina@studioaside.com and RT this contest on Twitter – use the Retweet button on top left. Even if you don’t want to send photographs, RT’ing this blog post is the only eligibility factor – please do an @naina or @studioaside mention so that I know you have RT’ed this. I will be shooting only in either Noida, New Delhi or Gurgaon – if you are located some place else, this might not be such a good idea

Spy Lens from Photojojo. Experimenting whether it really works. An evening at Galleria, Gurgaon. Usage Verdict : you need to have a VERY steady hand or a tripod – which for sneaky portraits, is not going to work. And a lot of patience. Using the angles is a little disorienting, you need to get used to setting directions – when you need to capture something on the left, you need to move the camera to the right. Working with a 55-200mm lens gave me only shaky pictures – I was shooting by hand, no tripod and I think I might have been a little jumpy because of the coffee.

Product Verdict : Made in China. I was honestly expecting something made in Europe / the US. The mirror collects too much dust – there’s no way to keep it closed – it’s exposed constantly. Chances of getting caught : not unless the person being shot has used / seen the spy lens earlier.

As you can see, I did not get many shots. After a while my hand started to hurt – carrying the Nikon D90 with the zoom lens AND the spy lens attached to it. One of the downfalls. But it’s a great tool to get some candid shots and to not make people uncomfortable. Hopefully, I will put it to good use sometime soon instead of sneaking around for pictures. And not get all shaky ones either.