Fly me to the moon, part deux

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Originally uploaded by Dopeyrizer.

I'm happy to see I'm getting incrementally better at this. Taken from our balcony with Gorillapod tangled to the railing.

Almost Zen-like

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Originally uploaded by Dopeyrizer.

Leela Palace Hotel in Bangalore has a fantastic Asian restaurant, Zen. Their Sunday brunch has become an essential part of at least every month for us here. The space is nice, the service quick & friendly, food sublime and the background music... utterly horrendous ancient Euro disco, loud enough to be distracting.

Bailando, anyone?

China cherry broken

Somehow I had managed to avoid going to China all these years. I've visited most Asian countries for business, pleasure or both so it's weird that there was never any reason to go. Until now, that is. I had the opportunity to participate in a leadership course that was held in Sofitel Wanda Hotel and to do some limited sightseeing squeezed in-between. Here's them results...

Bike trip around the nearby countryside

Went on a very relaxed bike ride with the whole family and took these pictures. Many people when they visit foreign places try to find the "real" experience. In Bangalore it's not very hard - all you have to do is pedal a few kilometres out of town and the feeling gets very real quickly going through rice fields, villages with hens running around and schools full of children who behave if you're first white-faced camera owner they've ever seen...

Anti puncture

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Originally uploaded by Dopeyrizer.

Off-road biking in India means lots of sharp spikes from bushes etc. going through the tyre like a hot knife through butter. The remedy was supposed to be an inner tube with liquid sealant inside. Granted, there was no punctures as the valve broke in half the second time I tried to pump air into it after about 20km riding distance.

Life inside the gates

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Originally uploaded by Dopeyrizer.

An HDR fisheye view to Palm Meadows community under cloudy skies of dying monsoon season. About 500m in each direction, India.

Saturday morning outside the Palm Meadows gates

Sat down outside the Palm Meadows (community where we live) gates to capture a little taste of India. The contrast between life inside the gated community and what goes on outside is truly striking - smells, sounds and sights are totally different. While I definitely like the real India it's also nice to be able to escape from it when there's just too much of everything to digest. Some of the "models" that noticed me taking pictures were less than amused by the photo shoot, but most people just smiled.

Mysore photos without a clever title

A slide set of photos from our trip to Mysore this weekend. More explanations to follow when I'm a bit less tired. Zzzzzzz.

Fly me to the moon, let me sing among the stars

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Originally uploaded by tormave.

My DSLR photography 101 continues with trying to get a good picture of the moon. I've been taking quite a few moon shots this week with the 70-300mm lens and this is the best one yet, shot from our upstairs balcony with the camera on a monopod.

The moon is surprisingly bright so that even hand-held shots come out allright. This was shot at shutter speed 1/320s, focal length 300mm, aperture 1/8, ISO 200.

Our house, in the middle of our street

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Originally uploaded by tormave.

Got a Samyang (although my lens says Rokinon) 8mm F/3.5 fisheye lens delivered yesterday. I got it from USA through Indian eBay, which offers a sort of overlay on US eBay to order stuff to India. The prices shown are in rupees with taxes, customs, shipping and everything and payment can be made straight from on-line banking. It seems to work amazingly well considering how many things here really don't.

Got home before dark and took my first photo with the lens. The result is quite heavily photoshopped as there was just no way to get the lighting correct with such a big viewing angle (almost 180 degrees horizontally). While I was getting the sky show some colour I decided to go really overboard with the rest of the picture too. It looks like a HDR image, but it's really all from one exposure. I did try exposure bracketing and HDR software, but the surface texture of the house and the palm trees swaying in the wind made this a ghosty, noisy mess.

The picture somehow reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, in a good-ish way.