"Tell me how will you capture the silkiness of the flowing river?".
"Do you know why exactly why a tripod is needed for?".
"To capture a butterfly will you increase the aperture speed or reduce it"?
Just like you even I didn't have any answers to these questions.The only silky thing I had an idea about was "Silk Smita".Well this is about photography.(Ok you got the hint from 'tripods' and 'aperture').
The prologue:
Last year when I and Xerxes were in Leh,we did quite a couple of trips to adjoining places by sharing our cabs with other tourists,it was quite economical . We always look forward to someone very nice whenever we are traveling either by Train,Bus or Plane,but the chances of that happening are always very low.We turned out to be quite lucky because we had beautiful girls for company .This happened a couple of times and I remember telling Xerxes "How cool are we?".
How long does one ride on luck,we found the answer the hard way.So for our trip to Nubra Valley we hired the cab like we did earlier and told the cab driver that we were ready to share the costs with other people. So we were eagerly waiting for the strangers to turn up to share our ride.Two women started walking towards us and I Xerxes gave me his I-told-you-so look but much to our dismay they were not our fellow travelers.Someone tabbed me on my back and as I turned around I saw two gentlemen both must be in their late 40's having a very striking similarity to Laurel and Hardy introducing themselves to us,within seconds our every hope crashed.The gentlemen were from Delhi so there was nothing to ask much about but if one is from Delhi one is always eager to tell about it.Both of them removed their Nikon cameras and talked about their love for photography,their professions,one similar to Laurel was a Dr and Hardy was a Software techie.
There was a fifth person who was supposed to come as well.
The fifth person turned out to be a guy and an IITian,photographer and a Delhite.To make matters worse he was a client of the bank my friend "Xerxes" was working in.(Even I used to work there and ironically the Bank is closed now).
So we set on our 110 km journey passing through the legendary Khardungla pass.The journey which should have taken 4 hours took 8 hours for us to complete because after every 15 minutes we were stopping to click photographs.The Dr uncle did share a lot of gyaan with me about photography the principal among them was to pronounce Nikon as Naikon.The Techie & IITian taught me how about the technical stuff like light settings,aperture and ISO speed on my camera.As an amateur I was quite excited to learn new tricks from these guys but little did I realise that this will come back and bite me on my ass.
With the constant halts during the journey and the bragging about the pictures from their Naikon cameras.This trip was surely going downhill.Between all the "We love photography" talk there was an occasional talk where,the Dr uncle would discuss about his latest car the Nissan X-trail( if he had got it here at least we would have been spared),The techie about his Rolex watch and the IITian was talking about his cocaine addiction.These guys had literally sucked up all my positive emotions like the "Dementors" do in Harry potter books.
.
