Ayudha Puja

Ayudha Puja, a set on Flickr.

Our car gets pimped with veggies, fruits, flowers and painted symbols for Dasara. Click here for a slide show with all the point & shoot pics of the event, sans any post-processing.

New lens, new possibilities

Macro photography is one of the reasons I got myself a DSLR in the first place. There's just something so cool to look at the eyes of a spider or wings of a butterfly in extreme close-up. I thought this could be done on the cheap so I got myself a set of macro extension tubes. You can take macro pics with those, but man they're a handful. You need to fit the tube between the optics and the camera body and once there, you'll only be shooting macro. That is, if you fit the right size of tube for whatever lens you have on - for some lenses the focus point moves inside the objective when you fit a too long tube on making it impossible to focus on anything. When you can focus you normally can forget about AF as there's a fair bit of light lost in the tubes. Thus by the time you're ready with the equipment, the butterfly will have flown away and the spider died of old age.

So having tried the cheap way, I decided to try the expensive way next and got me a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM macro lens. Canon also makes a "non L" version of the same lens with the same aperture and focal length, which costs about half of the price of the "L" version. The more expensive version is weather-sealed, comes with a lens hood as standard and has slightly better optical performance. Most important difference is image stabilization for those moments when the butterfly refuses to come near your tripod. Both of these act as a normal 100mm prime lens with reasonably large (f/2.8) aperture, but can seamlessly also focus very close to offer macro level magnification. You need IS with long lenses, so it's a bit counter-intuitive why you'd need it for things that are close, but believe me it's the same thing.

The Canon IS system can compensate for camera movement (up/down, left/right) as well as camera tilt. What it can't fix is movement towards or away from the target, and this even at f/2.8 would definitely be needed as the focused distance is extremely short. You sway a bit towards the target or away from it and all you get is blur.

So I went for the whole enchilada and walked around the house yesterday with the new lens looking for things to shoot. You can see some samples around this post - I'm simply amazed at what kinds of pictures came out even on my first time test shoot. You can see all my macro photos here - the same set includes also the ones I took with the tubes early on so it's easy to compare.

The best part about this macro lens is that it's also a very good short telephoto objective. With a crop sensor it's a 160mm equivalent, but with f/2.8 aperture. My telephoto zoom lens can do no better than f/4 at that focal length and render less details. I can see myself walking around town with this lens attached to take building detail pictures as well as people action shots too. Canon does have a f/2.8 telephoto zoom but that's just too much - too pricey, too heavy and too large to carry around all the time. Finally, if I ever do switch to a full frame body, I now have at least one lens that won't be out of place. There's these rumours about Canon making a full frame enthusiast camera with lower pixel resolution and fantastic high ISO performance. If they do that I will be very tempted...

The rat snake incident

My wife Tuija was shocked found a rat snake chilling out on our garage-top patio / balcony last Friday. She had to put this out of her mind while she went to yoga, but once back, it seemed the snake was gone. After careful inspection from safety of our home she and our maid noticed something one of our cane chairs to be more lively than the others. After a few calls they managed to get a hold of a guy called Mohan, who catches snakes as hobby in-between hours logged in at some Bangalore IT company. What an interesting hobby!

Once the Mohan the snake-catcher-master came in, she had calmed down enough to click these picks with old & trusty point and shoot camera. The snake catcher fellow was bitten by the small snake a couple of times as it wasn't going in the drinks bottle voluntarily. All's well that ends well tho as the snake apparently found a new home in Bhanneghatta and our balcony is now snake free. I think there's hope now the maid will not forget the doors open anymore as she's really scared of snakes - even small gecko's make her jump. All the pics as slideshow here.

Farmer's market in Varthur Village

Farmer's market in Varthur Village, a set on Flickr.

Varthur is a little village on the outskirts of Bangalore, situated on the shores of an ever shrinking lake by the same name. Every Sunday they host a popular farmer's market.

Usually I just ogle at the proceedings from the backseat of my car, returning from the golf course. This time I spent an hour walking around with Tuija and my camera.

Slide show link.

Who said Bangalore traffic is slow?

Time-lapse video of commuting to work today morning.

Camping in Kabini

Last weekend we went for a trip in Nagarhole National Park. The trip from Bangalore took us some six hours, with one stop for breakfast in an utterly forgettable hotel in Mysore, one stop to change a deflated tyre and final stop in a place called Handpost to have the deflated tyre fixed. While our driver was fixing the tyre, I had a chance to take pictures of the beautiful paddy fields surrounding the spot where the tyre let go. These make up a pretty constant scenery after passing through Mysore.

Our target was a campsite / resort called Bison right on the border of Nagarhole. The accommodation is in tents similar to those one would find in high-end wildlife resorts in Africa. Ours was a triple-accommodation affair, set high on stilts, with 2 bedrooms inside the tent and bath room outside of it. We were a bit worried about mozzies, but needlessly so. I must mention the owner / manager of the place, Shaaz Jung. His leopard pictures decorate the common areas and they're amazing. Things went slightly downhill from here, however. First we were told that it would be unlikely to see animals from the resort itself as the monsoon had grown the lake so big it reached into the jungle.

Secondly the government had banned the resorts in the area from driving tourists with safari jeeps in the park. Finally there had been a shooting incident between the local people and park officials and the park was deemed unsafe for tourists. At the end we went in for a short drive on a normal vehicle and just on the main road passing through the park and saw some baby elephants and spotted deer that had ventured outside the thick undergrowth.

In the evening there was a bonfire in the resort with all the guests attending and Shaaz let us know that a boat safari was organized for the morning despite all the hassles mentioned earlier.

Off we went and were immediately surrounded by sights and sounds of the jungle. On the water there were a lot of birds to see and take pictures of. On land we saw one more deer and a big elephant lumberjack cutting his way through a thick growth of bamboo to reach the juicy leaves growing near the top. We stopped to admire this big a determined animal for a long while before it was time to head back to the resort, have breakfast, pack up our things and start the long drive towards Bangalore.

I'm really happy with how many of the pictures turned out. Especially in the jungle it's a difficult balance between aperture, ISO and shutter speed with so little light available. In retrospect I should've gone for bigger ISO value and dealt with the noise in post-processing - the models refused to stay still and with 300mm focal length it's difficult (at least for me) to get truly crisp handheld shots even with the image stabilization. You can see all the pictures as a full-screen slideshow by clicking this.

From coffee coupons to kettlebells - buying stuff on-line in India

I recently started using foursquare. This is not to fulfill any basic need, I was just curious to find out if this was something fun, useful or both.

So far the first tangible benefit I've found in foursquare is with Cafe Coffee Day: if you check-into one of their cafeterias they'll give you a discount every third visit. In theory. In practice, they don't. The address they give where this discount coupon is to be collected is not responding and I am willing to bet money on the local barista having no clue about any coupon discount even if the address worked at some potential future date.

This is not a huge surprise, unfortunately. Bad consumer experiences are everywhere in India. Domino's pizza can be ordered on-line and a couple of times I've actually managed to do it. A couple of times out of many more when I tried and failed. Movie tickets are sold on-line by all major theatres but I've never completed the process with any of them successfully. Something is always, inevitably, broken.

This is why I've been so throughly impressed with eBay. Their service simply works and even when a merchant misbehaves they automatically refund the money. Most brick and mortar shops in India don't really have any meaninigful information in the Web and have pretty poor selections on sale, which makes the advantage eBay has vs. conventional merchants even bigger - I can choose from a big selection and compare prices between vendors. Finally, the competition inside eBay really seems to bring out the best in these entreprenours.

Earlier this year I tried to buy some kettlebells. On eBay there was just one local merchant with too light ones and due to the weight using Indian eBay as a proxy to the US one made no sense as the shipping would be too expensive. I sent a message to the local merchant to message me back when heavier ones became available. I continued searching and found this company, which manufactures kettlebells near Delhi. Only thing is, while they can make 'em, they sure can't sell 'em. At least to me. I gave up trying to make business with these guys after a few phone calls and emails. Fast forward to yesterday and I get a message from the eBay merchant I mentioned earlier announcing that he's got the sizes I'm looking for, some 6 months after I sent him the question.

It seems that there's still hope for on-line retail in India.