In less than two decades, the rural landscape of Gurgaon has taken on an urban identity. Yet, without a shared vocabulary for spaces, zebra crossings are “peopled” by buffaloes and busy mall roads have “herds” of shoppers making suicidal attempts to criss-cross a sea of racing vehicles.

In Gurgaon’s patchy landscape of high-rise apartments, glass-and-steel office buildings, and glitzy malls on the one hand, and village clusters, slum sprawls, buffaloes and cows on the other, the old and the new are reinventing old spaces, and creating new spaces that often exclude more than they include. This audio-visual documentary explores the ongoing negotiation of space and meaning in a rapidly urbanizing semi-rural environment in India.

Part 1: Which DSLR camera?

Let me get to the DSLR question first, because to me that answer is simply ‘don’t’. Yes, I mean don’t buy it, or at the very least try to resist the temptation. I am convinced that most people do not need a DSLR, and you could very well be one of them. My view is that unless you can come up with some strong reasons why you need a DSLR and a good P&S is not good enough, you should not buy it.

Don’t do it for sexiness. Don’t do it because you think onlookers with ‘puny’ little P&S cameras will make way for you, and look at you with deference. It won’t happen. Especially because you will often find yourself at the spot, armed only with your phone, because you would have left the fancy DSLR at home. Trust me, even the smallest and cheapest DSLR systems are so big and heavy that unless you are a real oddball you will not have the energy to drag along a bulky camera bag everywhere you go. And you will miss some of the best pictures of your life.

If that does not dissuade you then let me tell you this: buying a DSLR is akin to buying an elephant – you end up paying for it for years, and many times more than the cost of the original purchase. Once you have the camera, you will want lenses, you will want flash, tripod, monopod… and then you will want bags to carry it all. Yes, bags because you are never going to find one bag that satisfies all your needs. And then you will also want Lightroom and/or Photoshop, which needs to be upgraded ever so often… Next you start toying with the idea of buying a second body or even a full-frame body… And that is not all, soon you will start dreaming of infra-red triggers, off-camera mounted flashes, about specialized equatorial mount, tilt-shift lens… you get the picture (pun intended).

Consider carefully: can you really afford another expensive addiction? If you can, then go right ahead and buy yourself a DSLR but do yourself a favour and buy a good P&S too, because you will need it. For the rest of us a ‘good’ P&S is the answer. The exception being, as I said earlier, if you believe that you have already exhausted the limits of a good P&S camera. If you find yourself saying things like ‘I wish I could get a much shallower dof’, or ‘I wish I could have better bokeh in my portraits’, or ‘I wish there was lesser noise in the high ISO pictures’, or ‘I wish they could do something about the shutter-lag’ or ‘I wish I could use flash with a slower shutter speed’, then, by all means you should consider a DSLR. Till then, invest in a good P&S.

Every year the limits of what you can do with a good P&S are being pushed back. Some time very soon there will be P&S cameras in the market that will deliver picture quality and camera controls that will be very close to what a good DSLR offers. I will happily trade in my DSLR for it. I think some of the high-end P&S cameras are already good enough for me, and therefore I have decided to trade in one of my APS-C DSLR for a high-end P&S. You just can not beat the convenience of pocket-ability. Sometimes the difference is taking a picture or not taking it at all, because you left the monster camera at home.

Part 2: Which P&S camera?

Ok, so now we get to the difficult question. Which point-and-shoot camera? Have you ever tried to answer the question ‘which car’? It is difficult, unless you narrow it down to a class of vehicle. You can not legitimately compare a SUV, a luxury sedan and a little electric car. Similarly among P&S cameras you need to start by narrowing down to what is it that you want to do with it. How important is pocket-ability? Will you use it largely for family and holiday pictures, or do you actively travel around looking to make candid portraits? How important is low-light performance? Do you like using the flash? Do you have the time and energy to shoot RAW and then process each image individually? Do you like shooting video? Do you like your video to be HD?

You should create a wish list and then order it by importance, because you will not get it all in one camera, irrespective of how much you are willing to pay, at least not at this time. So you will have to make trade-offs. Once you have the list, your job will become a little bit easier. Here are some of the key things you need to decide on:

• Size: You can find cameras that can fit the front pocket of tight jeans and some that will need rather large baggy pants or perhaps a small bag.
• Camera RAW: If you are looking for your first camera then you probably need not worry about this. But if you have been shooting for some time and think of photography as a serious hobby then you should. I’d advise that you shoot RAW even if you do not have the time to individually process the images. Perhaps one day you will find the time to come back and work on some of the old images. You will thank me then – please remember to send me a thank you note
• Video: In some of the higher-end still cameras you can shoot pretty good video. Even HD video. At the time of writing the high-end ones were doing high definition at 1280 x 720 pixels and not what is called full HD, but then this is pretty darn good too. Some P&S cameras offer full HD but they do not have RAW capture. So you need to make a call.
• Lens: Two important things to consider are focal length range and speed of the lens. Long lenses look very seductive, but in the 25 odd years that I have been playing with cameras I have found that the long lens is nearly not as useful as the wide one – unless of course if you are a wildlife enthusiast. In which case you should not be in this P&S section anyway. So in my view a wider and faster lens will help you take significantly better pictures of your kid cutting a birthday cake, or of the family at dusk in Goa.
• Cost: The range starts from about Rs 5,000 ($100) and goes on endlessly, but you could get some serious stuff at about Rs 25,000 ($500) or so.

I suspect that for a true beginner this is getting a little too complicated. Therefore let me make some suggestions in a couple of different (somewhat arbitrary) categories. I am not a professional camera reviewer and the list is far from perfect. In the interest of simplicity I will keep the list short and will not offer detailed reviews. If you are interested I can point you to websites that review cameras for a living. If you have a strong view on the subject and can help improve the list, please feel free to contact me. I will gladly acknowledge your contribution here. I will use that feedback as well as new information (the world around us continues to change very rapidly) to update the list occasionally.

Recommended P&S cameras (last updated in November 2010)

• If you are the kind who does not need to worry about price tags:
  1. Leica X1 12.2MP APS-C CMOS Digital Camera

• If you can afford to spend in the $400 to $500 range:
  [Camera RAW, good lens, HD video, solid build quality]
  1. Canon PowerShot S95 10 MP Digital Camera with 3.8x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3.0-Inch inch LCD (more pocket-able, one of the fastest lens in the category, is on my personal wish list
  2. Canon G12 10MP Digital Camera with 5x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.8 inch Vari-Angle LCD (almost identical specs as the S95, a little bulkier with an articulating screen, and a slightly longer zoom range, but a slower lens)
  3. Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 10.1 MP Digital Camera with 3.8x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3.0-Inch LCD (Black) : Slightly larger than the S95 it compares well with the other two in this category. Uses a 24mm Leica DC Vario-Summicron lens.

• For mid budget (>$200 <$350):
  [No camera RAW]
  1. Canon PowerShot SX210IS 14.1 MP Digital Camera with 14x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3.0-Inch LCD (Black)
  2. Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 12.1 MP Digital Camera with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3.0-Inch LCD (Black)

• For low budget (<$200)
  Don’t have one on my list right now. Will add latter…

I don’t have recommendations for DSLRs right now. Perhaps I will come back and add that at some later day.

For those in need for a more technical analysis and detailed advantages and disadvantages kind of discussion should head over to this article at the Digital photography school

]]> http://jaiman.org/blog/2010/11/linkedin/which-camera-should-i-buy/feed/ 5 http://jaiman.org/blog/2010/10/cycling/manali-to-leh-self-supported-cycling-trip/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=manali-to-leh-self-supported-cycling-trip http://jaiman.org/blog/2010/10/cycling/manali-to-leh-self-supported-cycling-trip/#comments Sun, 10 Oct 2010 11:07:33 +0000 Ajay Jaiman http://jaiman.org/blog/?p=340 Continue reading →]]> After years of thinking about it and weeks of planning we finally did it. Close to 600 kms of cycling from Manali to Leh (because Tanglang La was closed and we had to take a detour at Debring and go via Tso Kar and Mahe bridge).

We rode with all our gear including clothes, sleeping bags, tent, stove, utensils, food, water, cycle spares, on our cycles — an estimated weight of about 25 kgs (not counting the weight of the bikes, pannier racks, and bags.

It was hard work (some of the 5000 mtr passes never seem to seem to end), we had our share of broken bridges, riding trough streams, sand storm (yes, sand storm!), dust, grime, and cold, but by and large we did not get into any real trouble…

Click here to see s slideshow of Manli-Leh Cycling pictures (opens in a new window and requires Flash). You can also see individual images here.

Two riders: Sanjay Jaiman and Ajay Jaiman
September 4th to 14th, 2010

It is an absolutely incredible way to see the countryside. The slow pace of waiting for buses and hitches, or walking the mountains gives you all the time you want to experience the landscape in a whole different way — I should know because I have been through this valley multiple times before, but I saw it differently this time. And if you like landscape photography then the slow pace allows you to see the landscape again and again in changing lights too…

Some pictures from the trip:

The International League of Conservation Photographers, a fellowship of the top professional conservation photographers working today, was recruited to nominate nature photographs that the member photographers considered to be ‘the best,’ in whatever way they chose to define it, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day

via Top 40 Nature Photographs – a set on Flickr.

A rather upright hill in the middle of an expansive, flat valley that jostles with lush green farms and endless bamboo groves, houses this little guest house. It just sits there whitewashed plastered bamboo walls and rusted tin roof, under a glorious blue sky and stinks to high heaven. A pity? Or perhaps a minor inconvenience for keeping the geography inaccessible to people who don’t yet know how to drive without high-beam or use a camera without flash.

An Apatani tribal woman in Arunachal Pradesh

But then you do not go the other end of the world — trust me, that is how getting there feels — to enjoy the hotel. You’d rather just stay out in the country side, spend time with the locals and get to know their customs. And this part of the world has a lot of it — inhabited by Apatani tribals, whose women have traditionally worn large nose plugs and characteristic tattoo on their face, running from the forehead to the chin. Ostensibly these practices were supposed to make their women unattractive to the males of the neighbouring tribes.

They of course make compelling portraits, and I chanced upon one such lady sitting on the ground in her doorway and busy with her housework. You could tell that her eyesight, like her tattoo was beginning to fade. I am sure she would have weathered many a storm, and now in the winter of her life she just sat there upright, and did what she had to do, with absolute dignity.

She did not seem object to my approaching her tentatively, as I often do, to ensure that I don’t infringe someone’s privacy and am always willing to apologize and quietly retreat if they express displeasure. She did not even seem self-conscious as I knelt down to make some portraits. Pleased with what I saw on the small screen of the SLR, I stepped forward to share it with her. Perhaps I crossed some cultural barrier or perhaps she mistook my advance as a threat, the old lady literally sprang up like a young martial artist and threatened to attack me with the long knife she had in her hand. I suspect she did not intend to hurt but teach me some etiquette. And I must say she succeeded, as I now approach older women folk even more carefully.

A tribal craftsman in Arunachal Pradesh

Most of these kids had never seen a camera before, let alone handle one. However, they were off to a flying start within minutes of being handed over a digital camera.

You can see the photo-documentary produced by kids in rural Karnataka, however the kids in remote Ladakh or Arunachal Pradesh had equally fascinating stories to tell.

[If you are on a slow connection the movie may take time, consider downloading the movie to your computer and viewing it after the download completes. Right click here to download the movie to your computer]

Rural kids in Karnataka working on their photo-documentary

On a test ride with pannier bags

Map and elevation profile of the cycle ride (click to enlarge)

I started riding from Ranikhet (Uttarakhand) and the plan was to ride up to Gwaldam and then turn back. Four or five days would be a long enough to give me a sense of how it really feels. It turns out that just one day was enough. There was much to learn about self-supported cycle travel. And I am sure I still have much to learn, but here is a sampler:

1. Carry less weight: No matter how strong a rider you are, carry as little weight as you can get away with. Critically evaluate every little thing in your luggage and then ask yourself again, can I do without it? Carry the smallest possible tooth paste, better still carry one that is almost ready to be thrown. If you can get something in a sachet buy it. If you can transfer it into a zip-lock, do it. I can tell you that on steep climbs you seriously start thinking about opening your bags and start throwing out all but absolute necessities. I was carrying over 30 kilos and I really had to pay for it.
2. Carry a small tent: Yes, I know, I just said carry less weight. But it appears to me that you can not really be liberated from ‘tourism’ unless you can pitch your own camp. Also see the net point.
3. Don’t try to set a scorching pace: If it is a race you like then find one. But if you think of yourself as a traveler then take it easy. Enjoy the sight and the sounds. And the smells too… When you are on a cycle, you are natural magnet and local people want to know more about you and what your are up to. It is a great opportunity to make some friends and get to know the local culture. Don’t rush. Trouble is that you are bound to be a little anxious if you have to get to a hotel 30 kms further and you are already tired and know that it may get dark before you reach. Unless of course if you have a tent.
4. Start very early and plan to finish you cycling by early afternoon: If you start early and finish early you have all the time ion the world to find a good camp site — or hotel, if you really want one, and some times you will. The other advantage of starting early is that even if you get waylaid by local sights and sounds or by mechanical trouble, or in numerous things that can and will go wrong, you will have some buffer time.
5. Plan the route and time of the year carefully: Keep in mind that in the mountains you may have to come down to a low valley before you start to climb again. In summers you often end up staying high so you climb down in the morning, and it is early afternoon by the time you are ready to cycle out of the low valley. You can’t. Or at least I couldn’t. It was way too hot, so I had to wait for the sun to start dipping. And then it was a race against time to climb out of the valley and reach the hotel on top. This may be a lesser problem if you are at very high altitudes ? for instance in Ladakh or Spiti.

Well that is what I have for now. I am sure there is much more to learn ’till then’

Slightly bemused by my adventure

Looking down at the fields

The farm at eye level

Play of light

The exhibition was inaugurated on October 9, 2009 by the Indian Ambassador to Germany – Mr Sudhir Vyas and will be on till the end of November 2009.