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 we will be able to photograph some birds

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. This time however, I’m going there with a BBC crew to do some stories and short films for the website. Paul and David are down here from London, and Mandanna and me are all following/chasing the monsoon during rest of month along the Western Ghats. Most places do not have any phone access, but whenever I do have access, I will post updates to my twitter feed. So stay tuned.

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 surprises at you.

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 me now.

So kindly update your RSS feeds guys as my new blog is here : http://kalyanvarma.net/journal

Anush and Gowtham helped me move the posts and customize the WP theme. Thanks a ton guys. The new blog still has some rough edges, but will fix all them soon and I will cross-post for few weeks till I move fully.

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 threaded-comments ?

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 years worth of wildlife photographs. It took more than 2 months, but was worth the hard work as now I feel I have control of my photographs again.

I have updated my new website with photos till end of 2007. But in the next few days and weeks, I will upload few hundreds of photographs from 2008 and all the fresh ones from this year.

So do go check it out and do let me know if you encounter any bugs or have any feedback.

I had one of the most amazing leopard encounters last week. Here’s what happened :

We were driving on the Bandipur-Mudhumalai highway at around 5:30 in the evening and as usual I was scanning around on either side of the road for any interesting wildlife. As we passed by a stationary car full of family, I wondered if they were looking at anything. So I slowed down and scanned on the right side of the road and Bingo.. I suddenly see something move parallel to the road and it was a leopard. I pulled my camera out and started clicking away.

The first glimpse of the leopard

It walked away and we thought we had lost it. We drove ahead just in case and then in the bushes we found not one, but two leopards. Then we realised it was a mother and a cub. They were both sitting in the understory and there were a lot of vehicles moving around without realising there were these leopards sitting by the road.

Mother and cub hiding in the understory

As I was photographing them, I suddenly witnessed something that I have never seen in the Indian forests. The leopard got up in a jiffy, kicked up a lot of dust and ran straight towards us. Since I was shooting, it just disappeared out of my view and I had to put the camera down to see what was happening. The mother came about less than 5 meters off my vehicle and then stopped. While this was happening, I could hear a Bonnet Macaque call onto the left. Then I realised that all along, the leopard was trying to ambush a macaque. I had seen this macaque earlier but had not paid attention to it and the macaque was next to my vehicle in the hope to get some junk food from us.

The macaque ran up a tree and started giving out the alarm calls. The leopard gave up the hunt at this point (assuming since the macaque already alerted the whole area)

Leopard looking at the macaque

This is when the mother suddenly realised we were actually there. I do not know if she realised it earlier or not, but she looked at us very surprised, growled and then relaxed.

Leopard realised we were parked there

Somehow the leopard decided to give it a second try and bolted towards the macaque again. At this point it crossed the road in front of me and since I was in the driver’s seat, I could not shoot anymore. The leopard disappeared in the understory and I thought the leopard would try to climb up the tree to catch the macaque.

Leopard dashing again to catch the macaque

While all this was happening, the cub was still sitting at the same place looking at its mother. I guess the cub knows then the mother has gone out hunting and knows it must not move. After a minute or so, we saw the leopard again on the left side. It did not get the macaque and was now sitting and calling out. We realised it was calling its cub and we also heard the cub respond back to the mother.

Thankfully when the leopard crossed the road, there were no vehicles. But soon a lot of cars that were passing-by saw the leopard sitting on the left side of the road and were slowing down. Luckily none of them stopped. They looked at it for a few seconds and drove away.

Mother waiting for the cub to cross the road

Then the worry started. The mother I assume was calling the cub to come over. So the cub slowly came out of the understory and was slowly walking towards the road with great caution. By this time we had driven a bit ahead as we didnt want to give away the leopards if any cars went by. Just when the cub reached the edge of the road, a huge truck came on the road and another car which was trying to overtake it honked.

The poor cub panicked and ran for its life back into the forest.

Cub running back into the forest

The mother continued to call and the terrified cub just sat down far away in the understory. After a few minutes, the mother walked inside the forest and we lost track of the cub too. We got really anxious as we didnt want any leopard road accidents, but we also realised, maybe the mother and cub were hesitant because of our presence. So we kept our fingers crossed and drove away

I really hope the mother and the cub got to re-unite later in the day. I actually wonder how many wild animals are suffering because of this busy highway through the forests.

Just a clarification

Wildscreen and the master-classes are open for ALL and anyone can drop in tomorrow and the dayafter for any of the master classes. Check out the schedule

Yahoo! has announced that it will discontinue Y! Briefcase service. Well it was about time as really never knew anyone who actually used this service.

What Y! Briefcase did contribute to was a series of innovative abuse-prevention measures. When the service was launched, storage of any kind was very expensive and Yahoo Briefcase offered 30MB of free storage online. (Remember these were the days when your email capacity was few MB’s). It was frustrating when you had more than 30MB to store online and one had to buy a premium user accounts to store more.

Some intelligent hackers decided to write a small application, which would go to Yahoo Briefcase, create few thousand accounts and then take large amounts of data, split them into chunks of 30MB, and spread them across these accounts. So you had free, almost unlimited storage online and this application was using Yahoo Briefcase in the background. These applications were suddenly using up more than 60% of the system resources alloted for Y! Briefcase. How would one stop this ?

I was privileged to be part of the team that had to solve this problem. Udi Manber who was the Chief scientist at Yahoo! at that time decided to step in and help with these problems. We had just heard about a small research project named ‘CAPTCHA‘ which was being tested in Carnegie Mellon University. We looked at it, played with it and finally decided to roll it out to remove automated creation of accounts. We had few hiccups, and over time learnt to build a bulletproof CAPTCHA product. This as far as I know was the first large scale deployment of CAPTCHA which of course today is used in almost all web applications. Of course some people got around the CAPTCHA problem by using real human.

A lot of other anti-abuse and rate-limiting measures were first introduced thanks to Yahoo! Briefcase which are used across Yahoo as well as across many web applications today. This was also the only project which I ever had to write entirely in C++ (I’m still a big fanboy of procedural programming languages). Though the service is dead, it did help fuel a lot of webapp security tools which everyone uses today.