Tag: people on streets

Cocktail in New York. Pheras in Paris.

My family and myself were in a car driving through the lesser known streets of Jaipur. There were shops alongside residential areas — greengrocers, motorcycle repairers, barbers, stationers, street vendors, metalsmiths and stonemasons. Building smaller replicas of famous statues and other landmarks seemed to be the side business of the metalsmiths and stonemasons combined, as I saw quite a few statues scattered, part finished, part unsculpted.

Libertas, that attracted millions of visitors daily in the West, had almost zero admirers on that street. She stood on a shoddy unpaved muddy sidewalk in 48°C (118.4°F).

We were instantly amused, but also bemused. What was that statue doing there? There was clearly a demand for these. In the habit of always carrying my camera, I got off the car to take a couple of photographs. The men on the site found my actions as hilarious as I found theirs.

I asked where the statue was going. “It’s for a wedding.” It saddened me to learn that these men on meagre wages were building these enormous figures for an evening party. “What pleasure exactly could be derived from these cheap replicas that cost many times more than those workers’ combined monthly wages?” I wondered. “Were they trying to fake the location through these?” “Were the business families uploading the party videos on YouTube, captioned, ‘Cocktail in New York’?”

What next? A demolition party? Where do these statues go? Submerged into the waters like Kali and Ganesha? But this is the desert state – so, no sea. Recycled? Maybe! There might just be a second-hand market for these for smaller budget weddings. Who knows!

I never found out.

Later that evening, just when my camera packed up (probably due to the heat), I saw an Eiffel Tower in the middle of a garden in an affluent residential area. The bungalow was getting ready for a wedding (one can tell of the nature of the event from the extent of the embellishments). That was definitely a wedding.

I bet there is a YouTube video of the pheras in Paris.

In my next trip, I would like to know of the fate of these non-permanent structures.

Homage To My Fisheye

Soho Square, London. Shot with a Pentax K20D + Pentax 17 mm fisheye lens
(Converted to BW, otherwise unedited)
Soho Square, London. Shot with a Pentax K20D + Pentax 17 mm fisheye lens
(Converted to BW + edited to create the fisheye effect )

I am now a full time Canonite but, over the years, I have tried very many different camera brands in film and digital both: Canon, Fuji, Pentax, Yashica, Minolta, Kodak, Polaroid, Hasselblad, and a few lesser known brands. Several models in each of these brands were tried by me, and each brand owned with several different lenses. At one point I worried I was becoming a collector.

Pentax made fine SLRs and supreme lenses. I had owned several of them, including a 17 mm fisheye. I had no idea when/how/why anyone would use it. For a photographer using a standard prime lens extensively, I found the fisheye too gimmicky for my needs. I was documenting life around me, and my eyes did not see the world like a fish’s eye.

Before I parted with the lens, I was curious to know how a fish would see London’s Soho Square. This shot was the result of my curiosity, but it failed to impress me. All the other fisheye photographers had splendid convexes, but mine was an image struggling to bloat from its belly. How can I present the mildly wide image to the world, I thought, and talk about the impressiveness of the lens? What was all that ado about when all it did was distort everything. and not do a good job at that either? What next? A Dogeye lens? Then a Coweye, a Pigeye, a Waspeye? Like the lens, the image never left my bag.

All this time I was familiar with the full frame equivalence and crop factor calculation, but it never struck the dense me that the 17 mm fisheye from the film days, now being used on my APS-C sensor Pentax DSLR, was not exempt from this. Don’t know why the calculations were restricted by me only to the ‘straightforward’ focal lengths! 😦

Now that I realise the reason behind the lacklustre result, I decided to recreate the image, pretending to be a fish wanting to correct the perspective. I used Photoshop to do this. Stretched, squashed, squeezed, pushed and pulled………..and voila! I ended up with this beautiful image. For a fish. Just kidding! I find it splendidly pleasing. There is so much more to absorb and admire. In short, it is akin to looking at the world from a different perspective, literally.

I regret cursing my lens and parting with it prematurely. Each time I see this picture, I imagine a gold fish with a curled lower lip, looking at me with annoyance and saying, “These humans and their obsession with the standard view!”

(The only reason some of us Pentax lovers moved away from the Pentax range of cameras was because it, sadly, delayed entering the full-frame market. Even now, their D-range DSLRs are highly underrated. In my opinion, they were capable of producing superior images that were on a par with those with the best Cannikons of the time)