Tag: birds

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Suddenly it is cold! week before last it was as if we are going to have an early summer and now the temperature has dipped ushering an extended winter – I love winters in Nagpur specially sitting in the warm sun on Sunday afternoons.

It has been a very hectic past few days with Swati playing nurse/foster parent to her niece who has had an accident and then to Aasim’s class teacher who was operated upon to have her appendix removed – Swati’s verdict – She (Aasim’s teacher) is a 27 year old Aasim :P I guess anyone who see’s Yoda in Degobah when under anesthesia rightly qualifies as such! Swati’s also discovered that how being empathic towards the physical suffering of others can sap you up emotionally… this is something which I use to complain about when I was practicing but one needs to experience it first hand to truly understand what I meant….

Yesterday morning saw us again at the near by Wena Lake for watching birds – this time while Aasim, Swati and Raju roamed about I sat inside a hide which Raju had fashioned out for me using Ipomea branches right on the spot. I had the thrill of seeing Common Teals, Greater Cormorant, Little Ring Plover and some more waders at nearly handshaking distance – unfortunately the close proximity also meant that they could not be photographed really well :(

Late afternoon turned out to be very creative and fruitful – we have finally found a new model (after interviewing and rejecting many dumb tweenagers) who is intelligent, creative (she is a Kathak dancer), 30+ and most importantly comfortable working the way we want her to… looks like the year is going to be interesting! B-)

Weekended

Fun started right from Saturday afternoon once the barbecue party was confirmed.

All the ingredients were just right for a great party – a few friends, great white wine (and rum), excellent prawns, lots of chicken with great marinade from Swati and crisp dried easy to light coal… sorry no pictures were taken, slept at 1am but was again up at 6am. I just can’t seem to sleep late no matter what but on the flip side it gives me a lot of time all by myself, I post processed a bunch of pictures for https://nagpurbirds.org – if you have not looked at the birds on the site I would suggest do take a look – It now has 910 pictures of a total of 181 species.

The birds some how sensed that we were home and were creating a ruckus outside so for a large part of the morning Swati and I sat out in the sun feeding all our familiar courtyard visitors, it was heartwarming to see all the old friends coming, inspecting, muttering, chirping, tweeting in excitement or displeasure. The most vocal amongst our visitor is a pair of Common Mynas…

Early afternoon we got hooked to a movie on the cable “Neal n Nikki” which we like despite the fact that the movie bombed at the box office – may be general movie going public does not like fun being made of the stuff they really enjoy 😉

After the movie Swati just did not want to stay indoors so I called up Raju and asked if he was game for some bird watching, he was! he has just acquired a new 10×50 and I baited him with my fresh copy of Ripley’s Guide, within 20 mins we were off to Wena Lake situated about 20kms away. For the first time I saw a flock of “Pacific Golden Plovers” and there were 9 of them….

Ummm, seems like awfully small number of words to describe the awesome amount of fun we had over the weekend – but thats that.

Dissecting a Sunday…

So it was a Christmas Sunday… It started early with a resolve to tinker around in my so called photo-studio which was threatening to turn into a dumping ground for the household junk and thus had to be redeemed to its former glory.

Ahem! I love hyperbole 😉

It was nice to note that lights still work the backdrops had not accquired fungus during the rain and I could pretty much light familiar subjects with ease, though now I am want to aim for more elaborate setups with my up coming new project. By the time everyone else woke up and breakfast was done the sun was in the courtyard and Swati wanted to sit out so that we could warm our aging bones… Unfortunately we still havn’t got used to the luxury of not doing anything and Swati had the wonderful idea to practice her Sitar lessons, now that she is playing reasonably it was a pleasure to soak in the music along with the warmth of the winter sun, time eased itself effortlessly into the lunch hour.

Aasim had been wanting to go and check on the winter migrants since morning so Swati packed all of us into the car and we headed to the other side of Ambhazari lake, disappointingly there are comparatively very few migrant ducks this year in Nagpur but we did manage to see a flock of “Red Crested Pochards” from a very close distance – I have pictures which I will post at https://nagpurbirds.org but that project seems to have taken a backseat for a while. There was also a mixed flock of Common Pochards, Tufted Ducks and Lesser Whistling Ducks in the lake apart from the usual Coots, Egrets, Herons etc…

While during the drive back we got a call from a friend that they will be coming over for dinner – Swati did not want to serve anything ordered from outside so we got busy and quickly assembled everything needed to make Chicken Biryan as that is the easiest thing to cook once you know the proportions right. Desert was cake with ice cream, the cake has the juiciest of rum raisins which I plucked gleefully till I was banished!

After dinner all of us sat and talked till late….

Pappu pass ho gaya!

Pond Heron, 1024x768, 274KB
Pond heron

This lens is N number of other things but it is not a lens for birds, however birds, butterflies and insects around my house do not know this fact and are happy to pose for perfect portraits despite my using the said lens.

In case you have not been looking at the EXIF info at my site, I upgraded to a Nikon D70 sometime last week. After several trial and errors and almost debunking the camera as useless I did manage to take the pic on the left of a Pond Heron basking in the late evening light. When I showed the it to you know who her comment was “Pappu pass ho gaya”

I am waiting to get my TC 20e which right now seems like a needless investment but since I have the budget I might as well, it is not very often that I get to spend money anyways…

After about 2 days I realised that I can take a better (and faster) picture if turned off all the *auto* options, specially if I am shooting through some vegetation.

However I did commit a boo-boo when I shot nearly 40 pictures of a model in the studio only to realise that I had not switched back to auto-focus, needless to say the entire session was a write-off

With much better pictures on the way specially for birds and all the B-lettered creatures I am wondering if I should prune the older ones which were put on line just for record sake? Most likely I will not but I don’t like the clutter either….