Tag: Photography

heart is your sky.

Posted on by Ajmal

“The sky is the limit for the extraordinary, the universe is not even the limit for the divine.” “The world is young, the sky is old, the cosmos are ancient, but the universe timeless.” “He who owns the sky owns the stars.” “Your mind is your world, your heart is your sky, your soul is your universe.” ― Matshona Dhliwayo

new year greetings! May Almighty bless us to have twenty-20 to be a year to be meaningfully purposeful, thoughtfully worthwhile and consequentially pithy. Your heart is your sky. Cherish every moment as you unlock your destiny & unlatch the divine scheme of things.

ethereal quality | Petals

Posted on by Ajmal

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that the earth laughs in flowers.

“The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower’s fragility, to its ethereal quality, something almost human, in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn’t destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-…”
― Irène Némirovsky

Notice the beautiful reddish pigment and the loft petals spread from it. Notice the aesthetically aligned petal stems decored with sub stems with yellow mini studs on them. Gazing at these details and pondering about them Photographs below are taken from a remote garden in Havelock Islands.

“Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
― Georgia O’Keeffe


“Just as a flower as itself displays an embroidery full of art and with the tongue of its being recites the Creator’s names, so the garden of the globe resembles a flower and performs an extremely orderly, universal duty of glorification”
― Said Nursi, “The Twenty-Ninth Word”, Treatise of Light.

the golden lamp.

Posted on by Ajmal

Roman Payne famously told that sunrise is the most precious gold to be found on earth. It’s a luxury that every one of us can peek at regardless of where we are or who we are. Sunrise lighting is a miraculous golden lamp that can be used to paint anything to ecstasy. If we place mountains also in this frame, what you get is pure visual bliss. We had this short stop on the way to Wadi Al Helo from the Sharjah mainland in the UAE. Travelling and riding just before sunrise through the mountain footways would uncloak some of the best visual memories and awesomeness you’ve ever had.

“Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.”
― Juan Ramón Jiménez, Time and Space: A Poetic Autobiography

“HEARTWORK
” Each day is born with a sunrise
and ends in a sunset, the same way we
open our eyes to see the light,
and close them to hear the dark.
You have no control over
how your story begins or ends.
But by now, you should know that
all things have an ending.
Every spark returns to darkness.
Every sound returns to silence.
And every flower returns to sleep
with the earth.
The journey of the sun
and the moon is predictable.
But yours,
is your ultimate
ART.”
― Suzy Kassem

“With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth

Lunar Silhouette

Posted on by Ajmal

This Illustration is based on an original photograph by dear friend MHP. This was taken when we strolled into some of the beautiful inner desert ranges in the Emirate of Sharjah, UAE. We initially went to photograph an eclipse but some cloudy patterns prevented us from taking the customary eclipse photograph and our roaming there was destined to be protracted for that perfect snap. The frame that you see was always there in the back of my mind. I’m always fascinated by celestial entities and is unapologetically fervid about stargazing. The beauty of glancing at them comprises the pattern in which they manifest of our feebleness in the grand magnificence and grandeur of the vast universe. For me, stargazing is about embracing humility and lightness. I somewhat feel the same with mighty mountains as well.

In the beautiful poetry of Serbian poet and essayist Dejan Stojanović,

“ To hear never-heard sounds,
To see never-seen colors and shapes,
To try to understand the imperceptible
Power pervading the world;
To fly and find pure ethereal substances
That are not of matter
But of that invisible soul pervading reality.
To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;
To be a lantern in the darkness
Or an umbrella in a stormy day;
To feel much more than know.
To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;
To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;
To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;
To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets
Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.
To be a smile on the face of a woman
And shine in her memory
As a moment saved without planning. ”

Said Nursi writes:
“The beauty of a finely worked object points to the beauty of the craftsmanship. The beauty of the craftsmanship points to the beauty of the name which was the source of the craftsmanship. The beauty of the name of the craftsman’s art points to the beauty of the craftsman’s attributes manifested in that art… The magnificent cosmos is a palace that has the sun and the moon as its lamps and the stars as its candles; time is like a rope or ribbon hung within it, on to which the Glorious Creator each year threads a new world. “

divine timing.

Posted on by Ajmal
“God opens millions of flowers without forcing the buds, reminding us not to force our way but to wait for things to happen perfectly in time.” says a beautiful quote. The bandwagon of precariousness drives us through events of uncertainty and dubiety but always trust in the divine timing in which events uncover like a flower growing out of a bud. For young minds reading, always relay this when important decisions or events pass your life so that we come sanguine and hopeful to pass through them with grace. God bless.

Picture in the brain.

Posted on by Ajmal

Interesting conversation with Dave Howells, advertising photographer, and ex-photojournalist as he’d love to call himself. He explains how he creates his signature frames and his experiences photographing famous people in his clientele. It’s the passion of a person towards his craft like this that puts a quintal of inspiration into you. Thanks, Becki and Chris for hosting this.

Some stuff from the conversation that I felt entertaining:

  • The earlier you get in on a job, the more input you have – one of the earliest piece of advise that he received when he started pursuing photography.
  • Advertising – clients pay for ideas. Editorials – Client pay for filling space in the newspaper or magazine.
  • He walks through his decades of experience in photography in news and media. Technologies that used to be the thing at that time pop up occasionally during the conversation (high-speed flash, for instance). Very interesting.
  • He was asked who was his favorite among the famous people whom he had photographed and he responded that his favourites aren’t famous and that everyone has a story.
  • “If I think your idea is crap, I’ll tell you it’s crap and I’ll be fairly blunt about it in a charming accent, but if it’s a brilliant idea, I’ll probably steal it“, he says.
  • “It’s not about the gear, the picture should happen in your brain long before it’s got to your fingers“
  • ” There’re a lot of photographers who photograph what people look like, but there’re only a few who take pictures of who they are!” Wow.
  • “The more you shoot, the better you get.“
  • ” Ready, fire, aim“

 

‘Golden Pothos’ – Propagation Craft

Posted on by Ajmal

I am really fond of money plants and try to grow them in literally every container I get my hands on to an extent that Netta on getting an empty bottle from any corner of the home or from groceries, she would routinely ask me ” Here’s a bottle, wanna grow in ’em? “. If you have been reading here for long, you might recollect this earlier post wherein I had shared an illustration. Money plants have a multitude of names. You might have heard names like golden pothos, Ceylon creeper, hunter’s robe, ivy arum, money plant, silver vine, Solomon Islands ivy, and taro vine. All basically refer to the same thing.  For this post, I shall call it a money plant. It’s very easy to propagate a money plant if we know a simple technique. Initially, when I started with money plants, I used to cut them randomly at different points and they used to wane off and don’t develop roots. I would like to share an easy-peasy tip on propagating money plants effectively. I’m posting this after trying and testing with different sets of plants and it works really well. In fact,  It’s a very simple procedure. You take out a considerably large branch of an existing well-grown money plant and cut at either side of the stem at the root of each individual branch.  Take a look at the illustration below:

Cut a set of around 5-6 leave like this to grow a complete bushy set.

Carefully hold them and insert them into a clear glass bottle with clean water and leave for 4-5 weeks. You’ll find roots gradually developing and it can be either left off in water itself or can be transferred into a mud pot. You can place it just about anywhere.

Living embellishments!

Posted on by Ajmal

Here is another slice into the ponder series of The Border of a Mind. To rehash the theme, these chapters are an effort to take our minds through subtle sub-layer things that we fail to ponder or think about in our daily routines yet which magically turn around as miracles in on itself. If you have come here before, you’d recollect about the journey of birds or the perception of our brains which we skimmed around. During my last visit to India, I saw this beautiful butterfly on a wall of a skyscraper (scroll down for the photograph). As we know, it’s very difficult to spot a butterfly these days, especially if you are living in a heavily urbanized setting.

Anyone would admire the beauty and elegance of butterflies with their color wing patterns and flights. The title of this post is attributed to the ornamental beauty in them owing to which we can’t take our eyes off them!

The incremental stages of formation of a butterfly is a masterpiece of process art. Silkworms are among the animals which lay the highest number of eggs. We are talking of about 450 to 500 eggs. Since there are way too many eggs, there are chances that these may be get scattered or even strewed by the wind. To prevent this, silkworms attach these eggs by each other by a special material it secretes (string). Caterpillars on the lookout for a nice place to have their eggs laid discover one of these “branches” of eggs, if you will and would stick their eggs with the same string. Cocoon building with the string starts at this stage. Caterpillar would turn around thousands of times and would secrete around 1500 metres of strings!. At the end of this stage, the caterpillar metamorphosizes into an elegant, beautiful butterfly turning out to be another embellishing ornament around us.

If you didn’t know, for the butterfly to fly, its body heat has to be at a certain temperature. Butterflies use amazing techniques to accomplish this. For example, one such type is the colias butterfly and it won’t be able to fly if its body temperature drops below 28-degree celsius. They then open their wings at a certain angle so that their upper sides are exposed to the sun. If it reaches 40-degree celsius, for instance, it rotates by another 90 degrees in order to receive sun’s rays horizontally. Using this methodology, they absorb little heat and accordingly regulate their body temperature. I bet you didn’t know about this thermal engineering expertise in butterflies. We must have noticed beautiful spots on the butterfly wings. Yeah, they are aesthetically breathtaking and adds a gradient, but did you know that they serve another purpose? These spots help serve the butterfly to maintain higher body temperatures and these spots are located close to the points that are to be best kept warm. These spot portions generally warm up quickly compared to other parts. The location of these spots is in such a way that the distance that needs to be covered for heat transmission is shortened. As you know, a pair of lenses can be spaces and angled properly to concentrate light at a certain spot and make the area hot. Some butterflies species such as Pieris, for instance, use the same technique. I believe, thinking deeper and delving deep into such intricacies would help us better appreciate the miraculous nature of these things. How do such magic happen around us when we are too busy to even put our thought into it. Ponder! : )

Encompassing’ art.

Posted on by Ajmal

“I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”
― Helena Bonham Carter

oeuvre papyrus!

Posted on by Ajmal

The title is inspired from the late 19th-century French word oeuvre which broadly refers to the body of work of a painter, composer, or author is normally a work of art, music or literature. Let’s adapt it to books and the way of presenting them beautifully.

So this is one of the days where you get inspired by the art of photographing books.  This is one of those ‘photography genres’ if I may say so, that’s refreshing in any of its formats. Internet is no short of ideas to get that perfect book shot. E-book bandwagon cannot replace the feel of a paperback on paper.  And books are one of the most patient subjects that you can find to craft your art. I recently tried a shot with some warm afternoon light and with some backgrounds around me. The usual stuff includes coffee mugs,  lights, etc.  I went off with some money plants and a vintage film camera and with some Airpods sprinkled into the scene. So here is a shot of this kind that I tried for the first time with a beautiful book by Elif Shafak.  And a bonus, that’s a nice book too!