Mandanna came running and said he just saw a leopard next to him, relaxing on a wall with its legs on either side of it. He had gone to pick up something from my Scorpio which was right next to this wall. We all rushed out and went back to see the leopard get up and jump into the tea bushes next to it. We got excited but got back to our work and Mandanna went to drop off our friends at a home stay. When he got back again after an hour, he came in and said that he…
The last few days have been tough. Tough not because we could not find what we wanted to film, but because it has been raining almost non-stop and because of the high altitudes, it has been bloody cold too. To make matters worse, our cameras froze up – both my still camera and the Sony XDCAM video camera. Both the cameras could not take the continuous 98% humidity, wetness, and I guess, partly the cold. Both of them are back in order now, but not up to their full capacity. We are going ahead, but these things slow you down…
If you have been strolling the ‘magazines sections’ of book stores lately (in India), you might have noticed the new GEO magazine. It has come to become my second favourite science magazine after National Geographic. The articles and photographs are great made more alluring by its high quality printing. Few months ago, T R Shankar Raman wrote a nice little piece about the Brown Palm Civet using my photographs and sent it to Wildlife Conservation magazine. Sadly the magazine shutdown last month, and we had to find a new publisher for our article. We decided to try our luck with…
We are at the Thattekad Bird Sanctuary at this moment to photograph and film the Srilankan Frogmouth. We tried last evening, but it rained cats and dogs and we did not find any either. This morning however, the rains held on and we managed to find two pairs roosting in their regular spots Finding them ourselves is next to impossible. Eldose was with us, who is the best bird guide in south India. He pretty much can find you any bird you ask for. Its pouring as I make this post and I hope the rains settle down soon and…
If you are from India, you know that the monsoons are the lifeline of the country. It brings joy and celebration to the land, the people, and most of all, the wildlife. Over ten meters of rain falls in the Western Ghats in this season transforming the land completely. Many plants fruit now, all the frogs emerge out, mate and lay their eggs and all the birds would have finished nesting just in time so that the hatchlings have plenty of insects to feed on. Every year, I spend the monsoons up in the hills to really experience it fully….
I have always wanted to photograph hornbills with the rainforest canopy in which they live in. I am in general a fan of animal in its habitat kinda photography and yesterday I was lucky enough to photograph this in Anamalais tiger reserve. There were two of them and they kept on hopping from one tree to another. Because of the rains and the clouds, the light was very low and this is one of the sharpest photograph that I could actually manage. Frankly did not expect to see too many Great Hornbills during the monsoons, but wildlife always throws those…
Finally moved out of LJ for good to a wordpress install on my site. I resisted for few years, but finally it was about time. When I started using LJ back in 2002, LJ was my social network, my rss aggregator, my friends page, and my twitter and facebook. Most of all, it was run by an amazing team who really cared about LJ. But things have changed now. LJ gives a damn about its users. All my social network happens on twitter+orkut+facebook and all my LJ friends are already there.. My rss aggregator is Bloglines and LJ does not have any meaning for…
If you are in Bangalore this weekend, then do swing by for a 2 hour free workshop on Photography which I’m doing with National Geographic. More details here. The exhibit of the winners of the Nat Geo Moment Awards will be displayed for rest of the day at the British Council after the workshop.
Starting tomorrow, I’m on a 10-day trip to Central India visiting Bandhavgadh and Kanha. Being summer, I hope to see quite a few tigers and hopefully get some decent photographs. I’m also excited about staying at Taj Safaries and doing the Tiger Photography Safari. Since LJ is no longer most convenient blogging tool, I try my best to post live updated on my twitter feed. On that note, once I get back, I hope to move my blog from here to WordPress on my site. Has anyone figured out how to export all your LJ archives to WordPress along with…
Sometime after my 2007 end Namdapha trip, I stopped updating my website. The old system was not scalable, was too dependent on linux-gimp-php-apache-mysql-imagemagick workflow. So after keeping it stagnant for more than a year, I finally got down to re-writing the website. The new system is not platform specific and the whole thing works more of less on exif information. I have also moved to Adobe Lightroom on my machine to tag/manage my photographs though I still do most of my post-process in combination of Capture NX, Photoshop and Gimp. In the process, I managed to clean up my 5…