Guys,
Lets try to have a thread for the photography pro for Bangladesh where we can share our experience in this field and can make a strong community for the overall betterment.

anybody can tell me from where i can get cheaper lense. Recent i am planning to buy a wide lense 10-28 mm. but the acctual price at the store is too expensive except in Ebay. but ebay is not a reliable source to get it.

Omer, I hope you were able to get a cheap wide lense. Show us your work when you get a chance.

Great idea. We do have a few good photographers here and don't know what to do with them.

Well -- wide zoom lenses (wider than 24mm) won't be "cheap" -- but if you call about US$500 cheap then Sigma's new 10-20mm zoom is a good choice (most nice new digital non-zoom lenses will still be at least US$300). Sigma 10-20mm has an HSM AF motor (very quiet focusing).

In digital crop factor it is 15-30mm (1.5x) range (what you'd call 35mm equiv.) and (v. imp.) it is a rectilinear lens -- suitable for wide shots with lines straight to the horizon. Sigma's lenses used to be flimsy -- but this one isn't.

Here's a page with samples,

http://www.photosig.com/go/photos/browse?id=34834

And here's the Amazon page with reviews,

http://www.amazon.com/Sigma-10-20mm-4-5-6-Digital-Cameras/dp/B0007U00XK

You did not tell us what digital SLR you use. If it is a Nikon or Canon -- then Sigma, Tokina and Tamron all have $500 lenses in the wide range, review here,

http://www.nikonians.org/nikon/nikkor-12-24mm/review.html

--edited--posted on a new thread

Dear manbil777,

i fully agree with your information, but right this moment i cant afford this much price as i have bought my recent cam nikon d40x.

come on man, $500 is not a cheap number for me.
anyway, you may visit here.

http://www.panoramio.com/user/606532

Agreed. $500 is not that cheap for just a hobby. Maybe you can plan for it in a year or so. If you get good in doing calender shots then $500 won't be a big deal anymore.

I know several photographers personally in Dhaka who use $5000 cameras (e.g. Canon Mk. III's). But they actually make money with their images.

For now, you can try stitching together photos. Initially, you can do 'rows' of pictures. Later you can do multiple rows too. A wide effect is possible in digital with the 'stitched panorama' effect. See here for a selection (I personally like PTGUI and HUGIN),

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/panorama/Panorama_Creation_and_Stitching_Tools.htm

Hi,
Thanks for your cool info. it seems all those software comes with demo version only unless i buy it. Can you find some alternative instead of buying them?
Besides i do photography as hobby so dont have that much guts to invest more at this moment.

The panorama software I mentioned before mostly comes free. They aren't expiring demo software. Especially PTGUI. However the PTGUI is a bit tougher to learn than using Photoshop's panorama feature (photomerge).

I think every photographer in dhaka has photoshop so they can use this feature too. Here's a tutorial.

http://www.takegreatpictures.com/Articles/Details/params/object/3648/default.aspx

^^Thanks. Any linux versions you are aware of?

Majhi Bhai,

If you're talking about panorama software for LINUX then HUGIN and ENBLEND are both available for LINUX.

I use these in my UBUNTU box and they run fine. Of course UBUNTU is a debian type distro.

By the way -- for people who are wondering, HUGIN is for stitching pictures together to make panoramas -- while ENBLEND is to blend the exposures so the panorama seems seamless.

HUGIN Link & tutorial:

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/index.shtml



Enblend Link:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=123407

tutorial here:

http://enblend.sourceforge.net/

Thank you Manbil. I am learning a lot.

Fake HDR photos in Photoshop

http://www.nill.cz/index.php?set=tu1

HDR in the GIMP (using only a single jpeg)

http://gomake.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/how-to-make-a-fake-hdr-in-the-gimp/

Before

http://clip2net.com/clip/m7984/1217991629-clip-282kb.jpg

After

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj50/amar11372/2kb_fhd.jpg


The only problem with this process is that it does create lots of noises.

HDR in the GIMP (using only a single jpeg)

http://gomake.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/how-to-make-a-fake-hdr-in-the-gimp/

The only problem with this process is that it does create lots of noises.

Amar -- you can use "Neat Image Demo edition" to clean up the noise. Works great for me. And this version is free for personal use. Give it a try. Here's the revised 'cleaned' file.

http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn110/manbil9/2kb_fhd_filtered.jpg

Here's the link (http://www.neatimage.com/download.html).

Amar -- you can use "Neat Image Demo edition" to clean up the noise. Works great for me. And this version is free for personal use. Give it a try. Here's the revised 'cleaned' file.

http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn110/manbil9/2kb_fhd_filtered.jpg

Here's the link (http://www.neatimage.com/download.html).

WOW that look awesome. :cheers:

WOW that look awesome. :cheers:

Thanks Amar. :)

I've seen other cleaned-up images that were more dramatic. You didn't have a whole lot of noise to start with.

wow... you all seem pretty good at photography and graphics.

any idea if there is any open source web development software. i need something easy to use - like frontpage or dreamweaver - for my boss.

wow... you all seem pretty good at photography and graphics.

any idea if there is any open source web development software. i need something easy to use - like frontpage or dreamweaver - for my boss.

Well -- that's kind of a wide area Majhi Bhai...

maybe do a search at Sourceforge.net

Linky (http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=web+development&sort=score&sortdir=desc&offset=0&type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=projectsWithServices)

Manbil Bhai - is there any way of blowing up small photos on the internet without loss of resolution?* Thanks.

Manbil Bhai - is there any way of blowing up small photos on the internet without loss of resolution?* Thanks.
Yes there is, However if the image is bad initially it won't get better. Once you save the image -- you can use the Photoshop technique called bicubic interpolation (smoothing). There's an article here (http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/resolution/a/increasingres.htm).

The best commercial software for image enlargement is Genuine Fractals (http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=7) (version 6 now).

Also, here is another one from Alienskin (http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pluginsfilterseffects/gr/asblowup.htm) -- which offers results a little better than bicubic. Apparently the claim is 1600% blowup without jaggy pixellated edges.

And finally -- here's a photoshop CS tip from one of the sites,

"Go to Image size, and click on percentage as your scale. set it to 10% and set your sample to bicubic softening. Do this 10 times, and you can make your image 10X larger with very VERY low pixelation.

This trick is used by Pro photographers all around the world, right now it is the only way for people to blow up images without losing res....enjoy the tip....."

wow... you all seem pretty good at photography and graphics.

any idea if there is any open source web development software. i need something easy to use - like frontpage or dreamweaver - for my boss.

There are many. Perhaps you could get started here:

http://www.designvitality.com/blog/2007/10/25-open-source-web-design-programs-and-tools-you-should-already-know-about/

http://www.openwebdesign.org/

Yes there is, However if the image is bad initially it won't get better. Once you save the image -- you can use the Photoshop technique called bicubic interpolation (smoothing). There's an article here (http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/resolution/a/increasingres.htm).

The best commercial software for image enlargement is Genuine Fractals (http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=7) (version 6 now).

Also, here is another one from Alienskin (http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pluginsfilterseffects/gr/asblowup.htm) -- which offers results a little better than bicubic. Apparently the claim is 1600% blowup without jaggy pixellated edges.

And finally -- here's a photoshop CS tip from one of the sites,

"Go to Image size, and click on percentage as your scale. set it to 10% and set your sample to bicubic softening. Do this 10 times, and you can make your image 10X larger with very VERY low pixelation.

This trick is used by Pro photographers all around the world, right now it is the only way for people to blow up images without losing res....enjoy the tip....."

Thanks, I will try this...this is for some mostly low res images so don't know how well it will work...if I am unsuccessful I might post the pictures here to see if you can.

From Bangladesh, a Photo Festival Builds Bridges

January 4, 2013
By JAMES ESTRIN


There are well over a hundred photo festivals around the world, and new ones pop up almost daily. Many claim to be international, usually exhibiting a few local photographers alongside some international — read Western — photographic luminaries.

What sets apart the Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is that it is not only truly international, but is also perhaps the world’s most demographically inclusive festival. Running this year from Jan. 25 through Feb. 7, it will feature photographers from 23 countries and every continent except Antarctica. This year, separate programs, presentations and exhibits focus on photography from China, Russia, Nigeria, Latin America and the Middle East as well as Bangladesh.

The festival was started by Shahidul Alam, the founder of the Drik Picture Agency and the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute and the force behind the ascendance of Bangladeshis in the global photographic community. The festival lets fine art photographers, conceptual artists and photojournalists explore issues of social inequality, injustice and cultural and economic hegemony. This year’s theme is fragility.

“At Chobi Mela, we actively try to engage with photography that is not so well known but is from a very different perspective and challenges the predominant culture of photography,” said Mr. Alam, who is the director of Chobi Mela.

Since it started in 1999, Chobi Mela has had many noted international participants, including this year Eugene Richards, Graciela Iturbide, Walter Astrada and Anastasia Taylor-Lind. But there are many more photographers who are little known in Europe or the United States.

That combination of photographers lends the festival a syncretic touch — sometimes exemplified in the same person. Maïmouna Guerresi was raised a Catholic in Italy but converted to Islam after encountering an African Sufi community in Senegal. She is a sculptor, video artist and photographer who lives both in Italy and Senegal.

At Chobi Mela, Ms. Guerresi is exhibiting images (Slides 1 to 7) of mystical figures from Islamic Africa that she created by posing her multiethnic family in robes that are also sculptures she made. Only her subjects’ faces, hands and sometimes their feet are revealed. She views the images as metaphysical, photographs that are not about “people or facts but represent ‘infinity and cosmic space.’ ”

“Maïmouna is looking at a religious and a cultural phenomenon in a visually arresting manner,” Mr. Alam said. “But she is also describing it in a conceptual way as opposed to the more literal, documentary rendering we’ve seen about Sufism by and large.”

Mr. Alam also selected the documentary work of Saiful Huq Omi for this year’s festival. He is a Bangladeshi photographer (Slides 8 to 12) who has been documenting the plight of the Rohingyas, a Burmese Muslim ethnic minority. Tens of thousands of them have fled oppression, human rights violations and violence in western Myanmar and now live as refugees in Bangladesh.

Their life there is hardly better. Women living in refugee camps have been gang-raped, sometimes more than once, and they have been forced to marry local musclemen. The refugees receive little support from the government of Bangladesh and have been classified as illegal immigrants.

“In Bangladesh, the Rohingyas now survive in inhumane conditions — 16 or more refugees live in a room that is barely more than three square meters with food and medicine scarce,” Mr. Omi wrote in his exhibition statement. “Almost 80 percent of children and 53 percent of adults were reportedly suffering from chronic malnutrition.”

Mr. Alam said he created the Chobi Mela festival primarily so Bangladeshi photographers could be more widely exposed globally, extending to international audiences.

“I wanted to create a bridge,” he said. “But it also gives us a chance to take stock of this remarkable transformation that is taking place within photography in Bangladesh.”

News Source:
The New York Times

Check out the slideshow here:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/from-bangladesh-a-photo-festival-builds-bridges/