Since I’m planning to take photography a little more seriously, I signed up with the Bangalore Shutterbugs (group of photography enthusiasts) and attended my first meeting this Sunday.

Went along with Arun and met lot of enthusiastic budding photographers including Shankar, Lavannya and Renith amongst others.

Prabu (aka floatingcreeper.org and a former blogger) also joined in, and after knowing his online persona for a while, got to finally meet him in person. Found out that we both work in the same company. I was thrilled since that gives me one more person to have chai/caaffee with during breaks 🙂

While my first idea was to buy a digital, I’ve decided to invest in an SLR instead. That will allow me to fiddle around and learn the finer points of photography, which a point and shoot digital will now allow. Once I master the basics, I hope I can then go on to invest in a good digital camera.

The theme for this time’s contest was Urban Life and members showed their entries and talked about the background, how they took the photographs, etc.

It was a pretty interesting experience.

Meanwhile, I decided to take some personal inputs from Arun, who uses a Canon EOS 300 and Prabu who uses a Nikon F65. It turned into a heated Canon vs Nikon debate and I nearly thought they would come to blows 😉

But, they were really helpful, giving me lots of fundas about exposures, apertures, UI issues, DOF, continuous focus, IR ports, USM/SWM, so on and so forth. At the end of it, I was none too wiser. But, still determined to make this difficult choice pretty soon!

In the evening, both of them invited me to join them for some night photography at the Vidhan Soudha. It was a beautiful evening. There were faint traces of pink in the sky creating a really interesting effect behind the monument’s domes. Sadly, the lights were not on that evening.

Both of them tinkered with their respective cameras while I tried and put in my ‘expert’ touch. Prabu’s camera nearly toppled over once (he would probably never talk to me if I had damaged his equipment) but it was saved in time.

We had several passerbys stop and ask questions. One particular gentleman went a step further and even pointed out compositions (despite the fact that he doesn’t actually know much about photography). Some people wanted to look through the camera lens to see what we were upto.

Just when we were about to pack up, Prabu discovered the shot of the day (or should I say night). I can’t really describe the shot, but if it does come out well, I’ll definitely put it up here. And Prabu promises to walk upside down on his head for two minutes if he gets what he wanted!

Discovered yummy fruit salad at a place called Tindi Bidi (aka Market Street) near Lal Bagh. It was nearly midnight and probably the only place open in Bangalore.

Turned out to be the best fruit salad I’ve had in while!

(I had fiddled around with Arun’s camera when we went to the 13th floor. Here are the results! Well, what did you expect? I’m still learning 😉