Posts by: Kalyan Varma

The last few days have been crazy. Though I’ve been in town, had to take care of too many things that were on my plate. Looks like we are heading back this weekend to Munnar/Eravikulam to film the Nilgiri tahr. I really miss still photography. When you are out with a filming team, there is no place for still photography as you are busy either filming or assisting the person who is filming and the last thing you want is a still camera distracting the whole production team. I barely shot less than 4 GB worth of images in the…

SiCKO is probably the best documentary film I’ve ever seen. Michael Moore has managed to do a much better job than Fahrenheit 9/11 (which was mostly Bush bashing). Go download the movie from your favorite torrent site.

Sorry about not updating for such a long time. I got back from Valparai last sunday and been trying to catchup with a months worth of backlog. I’ve almost taken leave and on vacation in Bangalore now. The last trip was quite tough. Since we had gone back to film mostly frogs and rain etc, it meant filming in slushy conditions. We went back in search of the Purple frog again, but even after 10 days of searching we could not find it again. I guess they really go come out and go back into the ground in less than…

It looks like the Monsoon is finally ready to bring in some showers to South India. We are heading back to Valparai now to get more footage of the frog and other creatures which will be welcoming the much needed rain. Seeya all in few days.

I posted the photographs of the Purple frog the day before noelladsa sent the link to boingboing, which they posted yesterday. I got the following mail last night : Subject: Nasikabatrachus_Life in Cold Blood From : Paul Williams Hi Kalyan, I understand that you have recently filmed Nasikabatrachus? This was one of the amphibians that really struck me when I started working on David Attenboroughs “Life in Cold Blood” a natural history of amphibians and reptiles. I met one of the discoverers, Franky Bossuyt, when he visited the natural history museum in London but for various logistical reasons we were…

This frog is a living fossil. It seems it might have split up from other frogs about 150 million years ago and has not changed much since than. There are no close relatives in terms of species for this frog and the nearest one is in the Seychelles islands. It feels like a big bag of jelly when you hold it in your hand and I must say, its a very strong frog. We managed to find few pairs of the Purple frogs and we filmed/photographed them from many angles. I think we might be the first ones to have…

Got back last night after spending 2 weeks in some of the most amazing places in the western ghats. The monsoon has not yet set in, so we did not get all the stuff we wanted, however we did get some weird creatures of the western ghats. I also did a splash and dash to Bangalore to attend the Aerosmith concert which totally rocked. More soon, while I get some much needed rest.

We had to cut short our Kabini shoot because of early monsoons. There has been heavy downpour the last two days and it meant its tough to film in the rain and and the elephants have started to disperse. But just before the rains arrived, we managed to get some amazing sequences of elephants at the backwaters and a very lovery sequence of a young calf playing with another one for a good hour the other day. Infact the day before, we were surrounded by a big group of elephants and got to see and experince all the groups dynamics…

I’m back in Bangalore for a quick trip. I got to spend only two days at Kabini, the Asiatic elephants capital of the world, trying to film the elephants that have come to the backwaters. Yesterday we saw some 200 of them and everyday their numbers are increasing. Its an amazing sight to see them in the open. The elephants are split into groups of 10 to 30 and they all come in the open areas, greet each other, the young ones find company to play with and they move on. Many males (mostly big tuskers) are in heat or…

We were suppose to have been in the Jungles, specifically at Kabini all this time. But first it was the rains that kept us away from there and than it was some paper work and last min equipment preperation. Anyway I’m off tomorrow and hopefully will try to post updates from the forest. Itching to do some photography on this trip.