Akshay Charegaonkar Nature Photography

Name: Akshay Charegaonkar Nature Photography
Address: Mumbai, IN

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Akshay Charegaonkar Nature Photography

Akshay Charegaonkar's Photography of Indian Birds. India is home to hundreds of species of beautifu

18/06/2023

I'm back after a little break with new equipment. I switched to a Sony A1 and Sony 200-600G lens. Since I like to shoot action handheld, a bigger/heavier lens was out of the question.

This is a Pied Kingfisher diving into water in front on an egret who's also busy hunting.

This photo is from just Mumbai, India.

Shot with a Sony A1 + Sony 200-600G lens. 1/3200th second @ f/6.3, ISO 1600 at 600mm. Processed with Lightroom + Photoshop + Topaz AI Denoise.

I like to shoot in Manual mode but with auto ISO. I leave the aperture wide open all the time. I control the shutter speed based on the type of action and the available light and the camera controls the ISO to get the correct exposure.

23/02/2017

Osprey sunning himself on a cold winter's morning on the Zuari River, Goa in November 2016.

I shot this photo from a boat with a Canon 7D Mark II and Canon 300 mm f/2.8 II + Canon 2X TC III.

The light was good, so it was fairly easy to handhold this combination because I could get a high shutter speed without worrying about the ISO. A high shutter speed is needed for hand holding and it becomes even more important when you're on a moving boat.

26/05/2016

Montagu's Harrier - male

This photo was taken from a safari Jeep in the Tal Chappar blackbuck sanctuary.

It was just after sunset. The harriers were coming back to roost. This guy as standing on a small rocky outcrop next to the road.

Ideally you want to shoot bird photos at the bird's eye level. We couldn't do that here because we are not allowed to get out of the safari vehicle inside the sanctuary .

Canon 7D + Canon 100-400L . 1/200th second /5.6, ISO 1600.

22/05/2016

Himalayan Bulbul.

Photo from Mussoorie, Uttarakhand in April 2016.

My planned birding was unfortunately washed out by heavy rain in Mussoorie. So I shot some photos in and around my hotel. This curious little bulbul came and sat down right next to me.

Canon 7D + Canon 100-400L. 1/640th second @ f/8, ISO 400.

02/05/2016

Demoiselle Cranes

Photo from Tal Chappar, Rajasthan in January 2016.

Canon 7D + Canon 100-400L

1/1000th second @ f/8, ISO 200. Shot on a bright and sunny day.

21/12/2015

Purple-rumped Sunbird.

Canon 7D + Canon 100-400L. 1/500th second @ f/5.6, ISO 400.

Photo from Mulund, Mumbai in August 2014.

28/10/2015

The Day of the Jackal

We were sitting on the main road that runs from the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust to the highway in Uran, Navi Mumbai looking for harriers. Suddenly this curious golden jackal popped out of the mangroves to have a closer look at us. He warily maintained his distance and eventually left when he determined that we were not a threat. Perhaps they had some young ones in a burrow somewhere...

Photo shot handheld with a Canon 100-400L lens on a Canon 7D camera. 1/1000th second @ f/7.1, ISO 1000.

27/10/2015

Scaly-breasted Munias

I saw this flock of scaly-breasted munias bathing in a roadside puddle inside Bhandup Pumping Station, Mumbai. They congregate in large numbers inside BPS to feed on seeds of the various species of of grass that grows inside.

I got down on the ground and kept my lens foot in the mud. Photo shot at 1/640th second @ f/11, ISO 1250.

I stopped the lens down to f/11 to get as much depth of field as possible. At 400mm, the depth of field is something you need to worry about especially if the subjects are close to the lens.

12/08/2015

White-rumped Shama, male.

This guy is a resident of the Mortaka trail inside the Karnala Bird Sanctuary near Mumbai.

I shot this photo with a Canon 7D camera and Canon 100-400L lens. 1/125th second @ f/5.6, ISO 3200.

It is important to get the exposure right in camera, so I keep an eye on the histogram at all times. The camera tends to underexpose bright tones. Since the bright forest canopy was the background, I had to add +1 stop of Exposure Compensation to the exposure suggested by the camera.

29/06/2015

Rufus-gorgeted Flycatcher, from the Tunganath Mandir area in Uttarakhand.

If I could have gotten even lower to the ground to take this photo, it would have been enhanced.

Photo shot hand-held with a Canon 100-400L lens on a Canon 7D camera. 1/640th second @ f/5.6, ISO 500.

14/06/2015

Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher - the jewel of the Konkan Coast. Photo from Dapoli, Maharashtra in June 2013.

Oriental Dwarf Kingfishers, also known as Three-toed Kingfishers or Black-backed Kingfishers, visit the Konkan coastline during the monsoon season to breed. Males and females dig nest holes in the muddy banks of streams under dense forest cover. ODKFs always require a stream of running water inside thick forests to breed.

I took this photo with a Canon 7D camera and Canon 500mm f/4L lens + Canon 1.4X teleconverter II. The settings used were 1/200th second @ f/5.6, ISO 800. Suppoer : Gitzo 3541LS tripod legs + Benro GH-2 gimbal head.

This photo was among the top 10 photos submitted from 500px to Reddit, as you can see here :

https://iso.500px.com/10-most-popular-500px-photos-ever-according-to-reddit/

05/06/2015

An Osprey (also known as a fish hawk or river hawk) is seen here plucking a fish off the surface of a saltwater lake in Uran, Navi Mumbai.

This is a composite of 4 photos, shot in burst mode and added together using Photoshop. My camera shoots at 8 frames per second, so these 4 photos were all taken in the span of half a second.

It's been one of my photographic dreams to take this kind of a burst shot showing the decisive moments of action by a bird of prey.

I shot these photos in burst mode using my Canon 100-400L lens on a Canon 7D body.

Then I opened the first image (the leftmost photo of the osprey) in Photoshop and tweaked the RAW to my liking by changing contrast, saturation, black level etc.

I opened the other 3 images and made sure that the EXACT SAME settings are applied to them as well. If the exact settings are not applied to all the images, the osprey will look different from shot to shot.

Then I zoomed the second osprey image to 200% and carefully selected the bird. This takes a lot of time and there's really no way around this. After that, I selected the border of the bird and gave it a small dose of Gaussian blur. If the border of your selection is too sharp, it looks weird when you paste it in another image.

I pasted the bird as a layer onto the first image and dragged the second osprey around till it looked right.

I followed the same steps for images 3 and 4.

Then I set to work on the final image containing all the 4 osprey photos. I used a combination of cloning, dodging, burning and spot healing in areas of the selections which did not look right. There is no secret here, just edit till it looks "right". I applied selective sharpening to the ospreys and selective noise reduction to the background.Then I resized the image to display size.

Address

Mumbai

Website

https://500px.com/akshay_charegaonkar

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