Hebbal Lake is en route to Bangalore International airport and offers some good variety of birds for photography. An early morning outing with like minded fellow photographers from BWS (Bangalore Weekend Shots) in a group of 10 people made a good outing meeting new people and knowing more in the field of photography.

Any group outing is bound to teach you something, be it tip or a trick to free the motion of flying motion. It has taught me many such small tip which i have felt are extremely helpful in field while shooting.

It is very interesting to feel the voices of different birds and then concentrate even harder to sight the bird. There have been occasions when the bird was sighted and then as I get ready to freeze the shot, the bird flies away.

It is sometimes disheartening to wait patiently for long in tracking the bird and then bird just gives you a glimpse and flies teasing away. But that is also the exciting part wherein the shooter runs around silently to photograph the bird following their voices.

Follow the link below to find the gallery for this place.

If you would like to go there, try an early morning outing when you can capture the sunrise as well behind the trees and emerging from under the lake.

The holy trip to Tirupati was a 2 day weekend tour from Friday night to Monday morning. We started our journey from Bangalore at 10 pm reaching Tirupati by 4 am. It was a picnic time more than a pilgrimage since we were venturing out of Bangalore for the first time. Adding to the fun was the fact that it was an all friends outing for the next 2 complete days.

Day 1:
Once we reached Tirupati early morning we had to take tickets for entering the temple which is on a hilltop. The ticket has slot timings allotted to a devotee. It is only during this time that we can visit the shrine. Also there is a limit of tickets which can be issued to prevent the temple from getting overcrowded. Lord Balaji is the second richest god after Vatican and the security in this temple is high. We purchased ticket for darshan from base and got the slot time of Sunday evening. Since we had more than a day, we were to cover all the temples at the base of hill that day. The next day we would see some more temples and then drive up the hill. After getting tickets we boarded the coach again to reach the hotel where had to stay. It was a decent room but without AC. The climate in that region was hot and humid and difficult to sustain without AC.

We managed to upgrade our rooms and slept for some time. We then got ready to visit all temples in the planned package tour itinerary. We covered 4 temples in that area whose architecture just amazed me with beautiful carving on the exterior. The temples stand tall visible from quite a distance made up of rock boulders or stones. This makes the temple floors get quite hot to walk on when the sun is in its full fury. The humidity inside the temple also increases with rising temperatures.

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It seems like a season of marathons are happening all around. The past month has witnessed marathons for running, walking, bicycle and now photography marathon.

It was an event hosted by Canon where about 230 photographers participated. It was a one of its kind experience where the participants were given 3 themes after every 2 hours. The photos had to be clicked on the day and then submitted before the announcement of next theme.

People from all age groups were seen. The youngest member was around 10 years of age with his photographer father and the eldest one being over 60. A nice mix of people with varied backgrounds and creative skills.

It was a fun activity and I was surprised to see so many shutterbugs at the venue at 8:30 am on a Sunday morning.
You see all of us are motivated enough.

The first theme was Read more

In the recent posts of my trip to makedatu I wrote a long enough travelogue for people to use as a guide. The travelogue was written as a web page and hence people might want to keep it as a copy while traveling.

I have created a PDF document from the same travelogue information with a little bit information rephrased and corrected.You can grab a copy of the pdf document by clicking on the screen shot below of the travelogue document opened in Acrobat 9 professional.

The pdf file is about 350Kb in size. The image quality within the travelogue might not be greatest as I have tried to compress the data and keep the file size minimum.

Please take care before finally Read more

It was a single day trip, to Makedatu which is located about 80km from Bangalore. We hired a cab for the journey to be undertaken by 3 people including 2 of my friends.

It took us about 2 hours to reach the first destination of the journey called Sangam. We started early from our houses reaching comfortably by 9:30 am. ‘Sangam’ is a Hindi language word meaning meeting place for rivers. It is a place where Cauvery and another river merge. Makedatu is about 5 km from this place. Makedatu is a Kannada language term comprising of “Make” meaning ’sheep’ and “Datu” meaning ‘gorge’. Thus the saying that the gorge was separated so close that even a sheep could cross it.

We got off the cab and had to cross the river. On the other side of river was the starting place for a bus service to Makedatu. The river was knee deep and we enjoyed crossing it. After consulting we got to know that the bus would start at 11:00 am. We had one hour with us to explore the surrounding place.

We could see rocks everywhere and water flowing around it. Since it was not monsoon season water level had receded allowing us to go quite inside the rivers. The rugged natural terrain was also looking good in bright sunlight.

We were done with the exploration in about 30 minutes and inquired again for departure of the bus. The service was now postponed to 1 pm as there were not enough passengers to fill up the rickety bus. We decided to trek the distance of 4 km.

The trek was Read more