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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Client’s portrait shoot. Also uploaded in ultra-high resolution on my Flickr photostream. All photographs have been processed in Photoshop. They were shot in Nikon’s native RAW format .NEF

Elaborate shooting setups are not my style and I prefer to shoot in natural surroundings with natural light as much as possible. Anand knew that before we undertook the project and on an early Thursday morning – as early as we could make it, we found ourselves at the perfect location : the Select City Walk mall in New Delhi – the chairs outside in the ‘lawn’ and other outside whereabouts.

I prefer to do most of my work after I’ve shot – in Photoshop. The trouble with that is there’s always so much that can be done – so many different approaches that can be taken. For that, I must thank Anand, because he mostly knew what he wanted and left the other bits to me – whatever direction I wanted to take.

Anand got the above picture printed on canvas – although I’ve not seen the print myself, I’ll have to take his word for it when he says it came out real good! Again, lots of Photoshop and bokeh – the table in the above shot was quite grimy but bokeh took care of most of that.

The Select City Walk personnel were quite co-operative – Anand and I pretended to be friends shooting pictures. The back story I’d prepared was that Anand was new to town and needed to send hot photographs back home to impress his friends! Of course we didn’t need to use that story.

The last shot above is a pseudo-HDR. Pseudo because I manipulated exposure in Photoshop for the same shot and then complied them together in Photomatix Pro and then brought it back into Photoshop for bokeh and other enhancements. It’s not perfect – I would have liked to introduce a sharp, contrasting, grainy look but Anand was not looking for that approach, hence I let that be. Maybe I will work on one of those looks on my spare time.

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.