Cats

First a little back story.

Arefin's uncle has three cats. One is very active, one is normal and the last one is very shy. When his office told him to go to India for some training or project, he was looking for someone who would take care of the cats for three months, until he comes back from India. So he called Arefin to find out if he knows someone who would take the responsibility of the cats.

Incidentally, Naqvi was in the car with Arefin at the time of the call. Arefin asked Naqvi that if he is interested. Naqvi agreed and thats how the cats ended up in Mashrur and Naqvi's apartment.

Now, yesterday (Sunday) Mashrur called with a bad news- Naqvi is allergic to cats! So they are returning the cats until Naqvi takes the necessary medications and is no longer allergic to cats. Arefin's uncle would take them that night. Mashrur wanted me to take some photos of the cats as keepsake.

I just got my 50mm 1.8D lens. So I was very interested to see the performance of the lens. And boy, what a performance. I was blown away with the quality of the photos.

The photos were taken using a SB-25 flash triggered with Cactus V4s. The flash was faced towards the ceiling.

Enjoy-

One thing I learned was that, you have to take a lot of pictures when you are shooting the cats. They do not tend to sit still for longer than 2 seconds. Out of around 110 shots, I got about 15-20 good ones.

Self Portrait

As all other photographers, I tried today to take a self portrait. The problem is though I can get everything right- composition, lighting, position etc., the lens I am using does not auto focus. Its an very old Nikon 50mm 1.8 Series E AIS lens-

The lens is not very sharp, at least compared to modern lenses. Even my 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G lens is sharper than this one.

So when I was trying to get a sharp photo of me, I was getting blurred images or images focused on my ears. Not good.

So I thought- well, if I can't get sharp pictures, lets make a blurry self portrait. So took a lot of photos. I am posting two of the best of them.

In this first one, I like the angle of the image and reflection of the laptop screen on my glasses. Also this one is not post processed. Just changed the white balance and cropped in photoshop.

I like this one. Because though its blurry, my facial structure can be recognized and all the hills and valleys on my face is not entirely visible. Also this photo was post processed using photoshop. I changed the white balance and played with the exposure settings in Adobe Camera Raw. Then in photoshop made a BW layer and blended in screen mode.

Also I used my SB-25 flash for the lighting. It was on my desk on the left of the camera, perpendicular to my face and the camera. The flash was fired using the Cactus V4 remote triggers onto the wall to get a semi decent diffused light.

Wonderful Weekend

I had a really great weekend. Saturday, Taufiq vai invited all the Bangladeshi students to his apartment. Mithila vabi cooked us Bangladeshi style Chinese food. The cooking was awesome. Taufiq vai, Shouvik and Mashrur sang a lot of songs and we joined as chorus singers :).

Sunday, we went to the Fort Worth Stockyard at the morning.

It's a place where they gather cows from different areas of Texas by train. We heard that its like a place seen in the Western Movies. But I was disappointed, it was nothing like I imagined.

The first thing I noticed is that on the footpath there are several metal stars like this-

These stars contain the names of people who have made significant contribution in the Western Way of Life in Texas.

Then there is the Coliseum, where Rodeo takes place. The inside looks dark, may be because it was closed.

There was a separate platform with a skull of a Longhorn hung at the front. May be its the sitting place of the VIPs or the judges or something like that. It certainly looked cool-

Also the front of the coliseum looks great-

From the Coliseum, we went towards the rail station, where in the olden days, they loaded and unloaded the cattle. On the way there was a museum inside the office building. The museum was closed on Sundays, but there were two vintage cars inside the building. Took photos of one of them-

Next stop was the old train station. The rail line is not used any more. It was roofed and converted into a marketplace. There are all kinds of souvenirs there- foods, knifes, shirts, pants and many more things. Some of the shops on both left and right can be seen in the next photo.

There was little lighting inside and with the bright sun outside it looked like a dark tunnel with light at the end. Reminded me of the term "Light at the end of the tunnel". So I put the camera on the ground at took a long exposure. It turned out like this-

If you see closely, you can see a part the rail line on the left. Next there was a visitor center and a museum shop. But could not find any interesting thing there.

On our way out, we saw an old guy playing guitar. Requested permission to take a photo of him and here is the result-

So next we went for lunch at a subway nearby and after having a footlong tuna sandwich with flatbread, we headed for the alliance airport where the air show was going on.

And we were just in time. Just as we were entering the airport, a F-16 took off. And after some time a F-22 took off. The sound of them taking off was a blast. Here I got the chance to take pictures of the F-22 with its armament bays wide open. The internal central bay and smaller side bays can be seen here-

In the next flyby, its armament bays are closed-

Another one with good contrast and details-

Then the F-16 and the P51 Mustang came back together with the F-22 and flew together to show the audience the iconic fighter planes of different generations. From top to bottom- F-22 Raptor, P51 Mustang and F-16 Fighting Falcon-

After the fighters finished their show, we moved around and looked into some of the planes on the ground. First was the C-130 Hercules. It is around 53 years old and one of the longest serving aircraft in the whole world. This is the inside of this plane-

Next was Blue Angels performance. It was awesome.

The diamond formation-

Diamond formation from far-

Flying low-

There were a few inches gap between them-

Next was some formation I forgot the name of. In this one, two of them are inverted-

One of the solo pilots joined the diamond and made this formation-

The five of them made a loop-

In this move they flew away from each other at high speed, resulting in a flower like pattern of smokes-

Next, six of them together-

They made another flower like pattern-

The number 4 of the blue angel F/A-18 Hornet close up shot-

Next we took a group photo in front of a helicopter to remember this day-

And that concludes the air show. Next we went to watch movies and go home and the great weekend ended.