Glittering Mysore Palace

13 Oct 2013

Navaratri is one of the energetic days for me. Most of the durga temples in my native will be heavily crowded especially the Kollur Mookambika Temple which is right beneath beautiful Kodachadri Western ghats. The last night of Navaratri, we were in Mysore Palace :-). As expected, there was huge crowd. I have been here plethora of times during Navaratri days and non festival days too! Never captured the sparkling Mysore palace with lights. This time Rajesh wanted to visit Mysore during Dasara time and hence we visited Mysore on Sunday. That gave me an opportunity to capture glittering Mysore Palace. I do not have a wide angle lens and grabbed whatever could be with 18mm ;-). So here are some pictures from lightened Mysore palace. Hope you will enjoy the same ;-).

THE ENTRANCE TO LIGHT!

HAD THERE BEEN NO PANDAL, THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT SHOT ;-)

CULTURAL PROGRAM

ILLUMINATED DURGA AT ONE OF THE STREET!

It's quite easy to take such pictures. Only thing is shun off the flash light. I guess even with soft flash, we can get far better results. When the frame is entirely filled with such picture, the camera's light metering evaluates really poor. As a result, the exposure goes beyond 1/5s which may not be desirable. The camera evaluates based on entire frame and it is time for our brain to do metering ;-). These are situation when one needs manual intervention in light metering. If we look at the picture, we really do not need people too fill our frame. The interesting matter is only palace lights. The solution is to restrict light entering image sensor by under-exposing way beyond -1.6EV. This can provide beautiful effect wherein people are darkened out while we see only shining palace :-). The second good thing is that by underexposing, we can get greater depth of field and considerable shutter to compensate shakiness in midst of heavy crowd. EOS-550D does not produce favorable results beyond ISO-800 and hence with f/7.1 gave me 1/30s shutter. With this shutter speed, it was easy to shoot a steady shot. If you can afford cameras which can provide faithful image beyond ISo-800, its great :D. But higher shutter speed may not provide glittering look. Only solution is to practice and experiment a lot when you have an opportunity ;-).

THE VISTA!

Nowadays, I have stopped cribbing about not having wide angle lens. Wherever possible, I bracket panorama shots and stitch with Hugin. The annoying part is the barrel distortion at middle :-(. Nevertheless the picture has come good except for the distracting platform at left and flying whistle in middle ;-).

PANORAMIC STITCH!