Portrait ideas while at Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace – Bangalore - Anirudh V - Travel and Commercial Photographer/Filmmaker

First things first. I didn’t really visit Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace for taking portraits.

Making a Sunday plan

For me and my friend Farhan, it was another boring Sunday morning with no plans for the rest of the day except for eating, watching Youtube, taking rest and repeat the same again. However, after having breakfast, we went outside for a coffee. While having coffee, we started talking about some topic and somehow, it reached the topic of “visiting places in Bangalore”.

Well, talks can be like that. We start with one topic and one thing leads to another and next thing you know, you will reach some topic which has nothing to do with the topic you started.

While talking about the places to visit in Bangalore, we started listing out the places to go and, Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace came up. We checked the distance to the palace from our place and Bam! 13 KMs! That’s a 45-minute journey for us.

That people is how you make a plan for a Sunday! And I am very much thankful for my morning coffee, for making my day great again! 🙂

My whole idea was to visit the Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace and take some architectural shots of the palace. But when I reached there, I came to know that my idea of the architectural shot is not going to work as the palace was so crowded and the lighting itself wasn’t good for that kind of shots I had in mind.

When I started exploring the palace, I realized that there is an opportunity for some good portraits. I had a 50 mm f1.8 in my bag, my friend along with me and good lighting. What else do you need? And I started shooting by saying this, “You know what my friend, you are my model (again) for today’s photos”.

Let’s roll!

Blown out sky

It’s obvious from the above photos that I completely overexposed the sky and there is nothing but light outside the palace. If you are wondering why, here is the reason.

I took a photo without overexposing the sky, then I saw many people included in the frame which I think was distracting and more than that, there wasn’t anything interesting outside the palace to showcase.

So, I experimented by overexposing the light (a lot) to get a much cleaner frame. And I like the end result as it gives a mystery and dreamy vibe to the photo.

Finding Different lighting

While you are inside the palace and moving through the different parts of it, you will see different lighting which sometimes gives you even light and sometimes more dramatic.

I had some hard time with the even light while inside the palace as there wasn’t enough light to capture sharp images without bumping up the ISO. So I had to increase the ISO levels which I usually stay away from. But it’s better to capture images with some noise than not to take any. Also, keeping in mind that you can remove the noise in Lightroom up to a certain extent without doing much damage to the image itself.

Striping off the color

Sometimes, colors can be distracting. Removing colors will allow the viewer to concentrate more on the lighting and details of the image. This is what I did for the following images. I used a minimalistic approach and using black and white to showcase the scene without the distraction of color.

Conclusion

You cannot expect everything to go according to the plan as you can see I visited the Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace expecting to take some architectural shots but ended up taking portraits. The idea is to “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome,” as someone said once.

Another thing to keep in mind is not to be afraid to experiment with different lightening to get different result than the normal photos.

If you think, color does not add a good value to an image, try removing it in post-production and who knows? Maybe you might find it more interesting to view and play with.

Follow me on Instagram @fernwehphotoz to get the updates on my latest (mis)adventures 😉

And don’t forget to check out my photos in Gallery!