{"id":9546,"date":"2013-10-27T20:36:55","date_gmt":"2013-10-27T15:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.landscape-wizards.com\/home\/?page_id=9546"},"modified":"2016-12-29T20:44:42","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T15:14:42","slug":"luminous-landscapes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.landscape-wizards.com\/home\/unseen-landscapes\/luminous-landscapes","title":{"rendered":"Luminous Landscapes (LuLa)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”<\/p>\n<\/div><\/p>\n

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Venturing into a dense snake infested jungle in the middle of the night is crazy enough, but doing it without any torch light and amidst pouring rain was truly ridiculous! And that\u2019s what we did, daring into the inky darkness looking for something that fairy tales are made of. It was our maiden expedition into the rain soaked forests of the western ghats looking for the fabled\u00a0“Luminous Landscapes”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Bio-Luminance_TL_Bioluminescence_Sriharsha\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bioluminescence<\/strong> (BL) is big in these forests and there is no shortage of organisms exhibiting this wonderful\u00a0phenomenon Kaan Yu<\/a>. Most of us have seen BL through Fireflies and Glow worms, but the phenomenon is not limited to\u00a0insects alone. This is also prevalent in a range of mushrooms and fungi, and it was our mission to find these on\u00a0our adventure. The luminous fungus we were after, grow on dead wooden barks making the whole bark or twig\u00a0glow at night. Working for the Unseen Landscapes<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span> we wanted to show the forest floors like they had never been\u00a0shown before, placing the wooden twigs with Luminous Fungi in context to its landscape geforce experience driver<\/a>. Any location with a\u00a0prominent presence of the fungi had the potential to ignite the entire forest floor and finding such a place was\u00a0crucial for our success.<\/p>\n

Our quest to find these Forest floors began 4 years ago, and eventually led us to Mhadei National park in the\u00a0heart of Western Ghats, bordering Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra only the wound<\/a>. It was a place with perpetual rain during the\u00a0Monsoons, and the prevalent wet conditions was the key ingredient to foster the growth of these fungi on dead\u00a0wood logs. I was accompanied by my fellow photographer Ashwini Kumar Bhat<\/strong>, who is an expert in monsoon\u00a0photography, and it was up to us to find a Landscape photo worthy patch of glowing fungi, and also survive the\u00a0torrential rain and avoid any nasty bites easybcd 2.2<\/a>. This promised to be an exciting adventure even before it had started!\u00a0On landing at the shoot site we decided to do an initial survey of our surroundings in daylight, it was also a nice\u00a0opportunity to see the Fungi in day light. To our surprise when our forest guide pointed to some dead twigs on\u00a0the forest saying they would glow at night, I thought he was joking. Very soon we realised there was absolutely\u00a0nothing to differentiates a bark which would glow at night from a bark which would not \uc708\ub3c4\uc6b07 \uc11c\ube44\uc2a4\ud3291 \ub2e4\uc6b4\ub85c\ub4dc<\/a>! If it wasn\u2019t for the\u00a0seasoned eyes of our guide we would have never guessed the true nature of these twigs strewn across the forest\u00a0floor. We also came to terms with the challenges in store for us.<\/p>\n

The forest floor was incredibly dense with very few opportunities for making a worthy landscape image and the\u00a0rain and wind were also hard to ignore \uc6f9\uc5d0\uc11c \uc5d1\uc140 \ub2e4\uc6b4\ub85c\ub4dc<\/a>. Keeping ourselves and the equipment dry and in working condition could\u00a0not be underestimated. We returned to the spots identified in the evening after dark to see if the luminance of the\u00a0fungi was anything like what we had hoped. Initially on arrival we did not find any sign of luminance and were\u00a0close to calling off the search when we realised the reason for us not seeing the fabled glow \ub9e4\uc785\ub9e4\ucd9c\uc7a5\ubd80 \ub2e4\uc6b4\ub85c\ub4dc<\/a>. We immediately\u00a0switched off our torches and let our eyes get accustomed to the darkness in the forest. After a couple of minutes\u00a0in complete darkness our eyes started seeing the faint glow emanating from the barks. Very soon we could see\u00a0the whole forest floor littered with glowing twigs and it was unlike anything we had seen before! It was a scene\u00a0straight out of a Fairy Tale!! \ud734\uba3c \ub9e4\uc9c1\uccb4 \ub2e4\uc6b4\ub85c\ub4dc<\/a>! Making meaningful images of this however remained a very big challenge.<\/p>\n

We travelled twice to this location in two years to perfect on the technique to capture a beautiful image of the\u00a0Luminous fungi. Our first visit was more documentary, where we made some test images to work out our\u00a0exposures. We noticed that making an image of just the glowing barks made little artistic sense unless we\u00a0included a context to the surroundings \uc0ac\uc9c4 \ud55c\ubc88\uc5d0 \ub2e4\uc6b4\ub85c\ub4dc<\/a>. This was tricky as we had to illuminate the entire landscape subtly to\u00a0bring it into the frame. So on our visit the second year we worked out a new method of illuminating the landscape\u00a0called \u201cSpray Flashing\u201d where we experimented with multiple flash settings and exposures to arrive at an\u00a0exposure which would not compromise on the glow and yet would still light up the rest of the forest in a subtle\u00a0yet beautiful way. Through our experiments with composition and exposure we learned something new every\u00a0time, and improved on our technique of Spray Flashing on our second visit \uac00\uc0c1\ub4dc\ub77c\uc774\ube0c \ub2e4\uc6b4\ub85c\ub4dc<\/a>. Our shoot would usually last from\u00a0evening 7pm and continue till 3am after which we would return back to base, to catch some much needed sleep and be ready for the next evening. It was literally back breaking work, and walking in the rain and dark looking\u00a0for promising areas with a good presence of the luminescence was anything but easy. At the end of both these\u00a0expeditions we felt that we would need to groom our learning from these visits to maximise our output as this\u00a0was by far one of the trickiest assignments we had ever done!<\/p>\n

-Sriharsha Ganjam \/ Ashwini Kumar Bhat<\/h3>\n
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