During this Covid-19 Virus outbreak, everything is shut down, and we are forced to live in Quarantine. But we are a photographer; we just cannot be chained. We need to go out and shoot something. So, this last weekend, this is what I did. I went out for a shoot. I didn’t plan anything. I just took my stuff and went out without planning anything, and oh boy, I got some shots this ….

Among these shots, I got a couple of interesting shots that got a little story behind, so I thought let me write it down so you can see how with no plan, on the go, you can improvise to get some worthy frames.

Before I share any details, let me clear one thing here. The shot that I am going to share is Monochromatic shots, what looks like Infrared shot (which it is not). I have trained my mind in a way that, if I am seething and perceive/process it instantly into black and white before I even touch my camera, I just take the shot accordingly. I cannot and will not even think to take that shot in color later or at any point in time. It’s not that I cannot take photos in color, I can, it’s just that my mind doesn’t work that way. One’s I perceive any subject/person Monochrome; most of the time, I shot that thing monochromatic. 

I was going on the road, wondering somewhere near the Al Dhaid area in Sharjah, literally without any thought where to go and what to shoot. Suddenly I passed across a mosque at the opposite of the road while I was doing 110 Km/hr—that mosque marked in Red below image. While speeding across it, I just saw the mosque and the sky, and I immediately knew what I have to shoot. This took a maximum of 2-3 seconds. The question was how to capture it as a mosque passed away. Let me honest. I am a very lazy person when it comes to photography. Whooooo go out and shoot? Whooooo go to the desert? …. Whoooooo assemble the stand and put the flash on it with a light modifier? Stuff like that. But that idea incepted so strongly by someone that I decided to make a U-Turn for it, which I did like around a mile or less from the mosque.

I made a U-Turn from the position marked in orange and stopped the car near to the exit, which happens to be in front of the mosque. I took out Z6 with a 14-30mm f/4 S lens and shot wide-angle. Still, I was not satisfied. So, I made an exit marked yellow in the below image and took another shot by stopping the car marked in green. Now both orange and green positions may look like give you a similar perspective, but it’s not. Perspective not only depends on your camera position relative to your subject but also on what lens you are shooting with. This time I had an 80-200mm f/4.5 AI-S lens on my D4, and I took a few frames and moved ahead. I already took both shots from 2 locations marked in orange and green using an in-camera monochrome picture style/profile.