The two most striking and distinctive features of Kerala, a) the abundance of coconuts trees everywhere and b) the fact that there are more Mammooty posters than road signs.

I arrived in Kerala a few days ago, and we spent the first couple of nights in Munnar, one of most beautiful places I’ve ever been in. We were fortunate enough to get the Presidential Suite in our hotel and along with it, we got probably the best view in the whole of Munnar, a 270 degree panoramic view of the mountains and tea plantations.

On the first day, we saw quite a few places around Munnar including went for a boat ride and an elephant ride. The view from our room balcony was to die for, and I would’ve gladly spent more time in the balcony than roaming around the place.

The second day was more of travelling. We went to Cochin, had a great traditional South Indian Meal, which I’d missed a lot, and finally hopped onto the train to Trivandrum.

Travelling on Indian trains is an unique experience which every person should experience atleast once in their lifetime. It had been quite sometime since I had gone on the train and therefore, I was quite eager to get on the train. Once on the train, the feeling was great, something which words cant describe, the feeling of being back home.

We spent about half of today at the Kovalam Beach which is a very interesting beach with lots of activities and people. All civilian boats were not allowed to go in the sea today as the Vice President was visiting a place by the seaside. However, we managed to get a boatride with a fishing party in a catamaran. It was a very fun boatride, listening to the fishermen trying to spot the fish and lay the net out, and also enjoying the cool breeze of the sea and the gentle rocking of the boat.

Lunch consisted of delicious seafood, at a rooftop restaurant with a great view and an atmosphere which elevated to a land of bliss and happiness. We spent awhile in that restaurant since all of us felt a sense of calm and peace there.

After that, we went to a whole host of places, and finally retired for the day. We’ve got a lot planned out for tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to that.

Photography opportunities have popped up everywhere and I’ve clicking like a madman. I will only be able to upload photographs after I get back home as I dont have the necessary software here with me. The 365 Day Project will also be updated once I get back home to Hyderabad.

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I spent the whole of Sunday in London. It took a while to get there, and both the train and tube journeys were extremely boring and monotonous. I tried to walk from the hotel to the Heathrow, quite unsuccessfully and ended up walking in circles and finally caught a bus. Once in the main city of London, I took ‘The Original Tour‘ in an open top bus for about 3 hours. It was a good ride as I got to see most of the tourist attractions in a short span of time. London was an interesting city, with lots of places to visit, possibly in the future. And as with other English cities, the sun set at around 1630hrs and after some more walking around in random streets, I went back to the hotel.

My plane was on Monday morning to Dubai, spent a couple of hours there, walking about. My plane to Hyderabad landed at around 3 in the morning.The baggage was delayed infinitely and I had almost given up on my suitcase arriving when I saw it tottering along. I grabbed it, and ran out to be greeted by my dad. Meeting my family after 3 months was a pleasurable experience.

Being back home is a great feeling, although I do miss Essex. I met up with school friends day before yesterday, you can see the photos in ‘18-12-2007‘ under ‘Everyday Photographs‘. And yesterday, I went to Lotus Park along with friends from the Hyderabad Photography Club and we had a great time there. You can see the photos from the trip here. I also got a chance to try out a friend’s Canon 100 - 400mm lens which is a fabulous lens, but a bit too expensive for me. I tried out another friend’s Canon 50mm 1.8 too, and its pretty amazing for its price. I’ve decided to buy one before going back to University.

I played on my Wii today after a long time, it was quite fun and I had almost forgotten how fun it was playing the Wii. I also played Warioware: Smooth Moves which is a lot of fun and quite amusing.

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I finally made the ‘Everyday Photographs‘ category today. I’ve uploaded photographs that I took when I went to town today. Make sure you take a look and leave some feedback.

And News, since I dont have anything else to fill this post with.

On Sept 10th 2001 The Pentagon Misplaced 2 Trillion Dollars

TIME Magazine’s 50 Top 10 Lists for 2007

New light gives off 24/7 light for 12 Years w/o electricity

16 Inspirational Portrait Photography Techniques

Indiana Jones 4 Poster Revealed!

101 Reasons Why Hugh Hefner is The Man

Mysterious mammal caught on film

“Very Good If You Need to Write on Paper” - A Pen Review

Scientists Discover How to Make Robots Bounce on Water

Amazing Art on Egg Shell

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I went to the Gliding Club on Saturday night for my first fully fledged English Christmas Dinner. I had a great time there, food was awesome and met lots of new people. I had a taste of how a traditional English dinner was done and it was a new and interesting experience. We spent the night there and sat around talking about completely random things until 4 in the morning. You can see the photos of the event at the Gliding Club website here. Some of the photos were taken by a friend and some were taken by me.

I’ve already started planning my trip back home since I’ll be back in about a week, and I’m really looking forward to getting back home, a) for my family and friends and more importantly, b) for the food.

Also, I’ve decided that uploading a single photograph everyday is not enough to showcase all my photos so I will most probably be creating a separate category called ‘Everyday Photos’ and create sub-categories for each day. At first I was thinking that I should probably utilize the already existing ‘Photography‘ category but then I thought I wouldn’t be bothered to add photographs everyday into individual categories and this would be simpler and easier. The category will have a sub-category for each day with good photographs. These photographs can be anything I take on that day, from my friends, to macros to landscapes. And of course, if there is a special event on a particular day, it will get its own separate category. I know it sounds a little confusing but I plan on creating the categories tonight so once it’s done, it should clear up all the confusion.

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We went to town yesterday, for a huge shopping trip. Although we spent only about 4 hours there, we went to a lot of places, and spent a lot of money. We picked up many random things that caught our eye, but those things only were a small part of our buys. I also found a used Sunpak 140 Flash, which was a bargain at £2. I didn’t expect it to work but surprisingly, it did work and even though it isn’t very powerful and does not have a manual mode, it’s quite useful.

My main bank-breakers were a pair of Creative 2.1 Speakers, which are simply amazing and definitely worth the money. I also got ‘The Orange Box‘, which I can only play after I get home since my laptop cant handle it and I’m eagerly looking forward to playing it, ‘Warioware : Smooth Moves‘, which was recommended by several friends as a good multiplayer game for the Wii, and finally, ‘GTA III‘, because it’s such a classic and remains my favorite GTA Game to date. I was shocked by the amount of money I had spent on the games, but I guess quality entertainment doesn’t come cheap.

My new Hard Disk also arrived today. Its a 500GB Western Digital MyBook and looks quite sleek and compact. Its silent and doesn’t heat up fast. I’m glad that it finally came since I was rapidly running out of space on the laptop. You can see it in today’s photo of the day.

My only concern from these purchases is the huge amount of wires and cables which are currently behind my laptop screen but are visible once I close the laptop, and to be honest, look pretty ugly. I don’t think I can do much about it for now so I’ll have to learn to live with it.

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Today, as usual, I was hunting around on the internet on ways for improving my photography and came across the whole concept of flash diffusers. I was quite happy with bouncing my flash off the ceiling and walls but I thought that I’d probably take a look anyway. I had already read before that hard light i.e direct light from the flash is quite undesirable unless you want that effect.The all time classic solution to this problem is to diffuse the light. And the rule is that ‘the bigger the light source, the softer the light’ which means that we have to use a large diffuser as the size of the flash head is fixed.

Indoors, this is quite simple, as with a swivel-and-tilt flash, you can easily bounce the flash off the ceiling and walls, and effectively making them the source of light. As they are quite large, the usually give a nice and soft light. Then what’s the problem you may ask, and this was my doubt too. The bounce method may not work when working in places with high ceilings like churches, and outdoors too. And also having some diffused flash directly onto the subject enhances the photograph.

The method by which many photographers continue to swear by is to use a simple bounce card, which is basically a 3×5 index card strapped onto the head of the flash, while having the flash pointing upwards. The card will reflect some amount of light directly onto the subject which supposedly enhances the photograph.

There have been several newer alternatives to the bounce card like the Sto-fen Bounce, Flip-It, the Lightsphere, several products by Lumiquest and so on. You could find about a hundred different types of flash diffusers with a quick Google search but I’ve only listed the well known ones here.

All these various diffusers have the common objective of softening the light from a flash. Personally, I have never used these but after a lot of looking around, I found many posts and discussions relating to the same topic. There were several arguments about the most effective diffuser and many never reached a conclusion. I didn’t know whether I even needed a flash diffused so I thought that I might make myself one just to try it out.

I came across ABetterBounceCard.com which has detailed videos on how to make your own better bounce card, which is an enhanced version of the classic bounce card. The instructions are well described and easy to follow. After watching the video, I decided to get some foam sheet since he recommended using it. He also said that you could use a sheet of photo paper but I, being the perfectionist I am, decided to buy some foam paper.

We went to several stores and spent about 2 - 3 hours before finally coming across a craft store which had the foam sheets. I bought 3, just in case I messed up the first one. It didn’t take long to make the better bounce cards, just simple measuring and cutting. I also made a couple of modifications so that it would fit the flash head better.

However, my first impression of the better bounce card wasn’t too good but maybe I just don’t know how to us it properly. After a few attempts to use it, I realized that it isn’t too useful for me and ditched it. I found that having flash directly onto the subject didnt produce a desirable effect. But I only had the chance to try it out on bags, so I’ll give it a go tomorrow with some portraits and see how it works out.

I had a bonus though, since the foam sheets which I bought were great as backgrounds and I used it for today’s photo of the day. I plan on going and getting some additional colors tomorrow.

And in unrelated news, I have started listening to several songs by ‘The Kinks‘ and a song by Peter Sarstedt called ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’ after watching ‘The Darjeeling Limited‘ as they both were featured prominently in the film.

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I went to the local Odeon yesterday with a couple of friends and watched my first movie in a theatre in England, ‘The Darjeeling Limited‘. As the title suggests, a majority of the movie takes place in India, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to watch it. It stars Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, the writer guy from King Kong and Jason Schwartzman, whose face looked very familiar. We went to the theatre expecting a hilarious comedy but it turned to be a drama comedy, with more emphasis on the drama side and having subtle jokes here and there. Personally, I liked the movie since I got to see India but I doubt my friends felt the same.

The story is about three brothers who go to India to have a ’spiritual experience’ but they have a totally different experience, in a plot filled with weird and amusing twists and somewhat achieve what they wanted to. I loved the soundtrack of the movie, it had songs of varying genres but all of them were blended together perfectly.

But should you watch the movie? I dont know many people who would like the movie but if you like subtle humour mixed with drama and a sense of seriousness, and most importantly, if you like India, you’ll enjoy this movie. But this movie will definitely not appeal to the average everyday moviegoer.

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We had a wonderful Thanksgiving Dinner yesterday, thanks to Ashley and a day early because many people had several other commitments today. And I enjoyed the dinner so much that I completely forgot about my Quantitative Economics test today. Although superficially, it only seems like basic statistics, there’s a lot more to it.

The test went on reasonably good considering that I only studied for 3 hours before it. But I cant relax too much since I have another Economics Assignment to hand in by Monday.

And on the occasion of Thanksgiving, I would like say that I’m thankful to god for giving me the perfect life, with nothing to worry about, my family for always supporting every decision I make and being there for me, my friends from school, with whom I spent some of the best years of my life, my friends at University, without whom life would be empty, and every single person who has been part of my life because without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m also thankful to Nintendo, Sony, Canon, and U2 for obvious reasons.

And I would like to end this post with LG’s slogan - Life’s good.

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I watched two excellent movies over the last week. The first one was ‘The Shawshank Redemption‘ which has to be one of the best movies I’ve ever watched. There was never a moment of lull in the movie and had a great storyline. Every single minute of the movie was worth watching and it’s been quite awhile since I’ve watched such an epic movie.

The second one was the Oscar winning movie ‘Crash‘ which was also a mind-blowing movie. The plot twists and turns wildly but does not confuse the viewer. The photography of the movie is near perfect and emotions depicted were very natural and I must appreciate all the actors of the movie. It definitely deserved the Oscar.

With the help of a friend, I managed to make a reflector for my flash, which was basically a sheet of aluminium foil on cardboard. It worked quite well, but I’m yet to test it completely.

I went gliding today, and the first thing I noticed on the airfield that it was very very cold. And the constant wind only made matters worse. The sky was quite gloomy too, and it looked like the conditions couldn’t get any worse. However, this did not deter us and we went ahead with gliding. Today was quite a large leap for me from last week, and I was given complete control of the glider right after take-off and I even landed twice, with a little assistance. It was a great feeling, having complete control over the glider and the freedom to go wherever I wanted to. As a bonus, we got to see an Apache doing some routine checks. We finished our session a little early today, due to the unfavourable weather and had an equally good time playing on classic arcade pinball.

Today is also the birthday of our flatmate, Sam, and I wish him a Happy Birthday!

Update - I have done some updates to the site, the most noticeable being the new widgets on the right side. The first allows you to be updated with the latest photograph of my 365 Day Project and the second displays famous quotes. The other changes are internal bug fixes, etc. Feedback invited.

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Alright, I have to admit there’s nothing related to elephants in this post. Getting to the more serious matters at hand, I’ve finished about half of my 3000 word essay today, fuelled by McVities Chocolate Digestives and a nonstop supply of Prabhu Deva songs from YouTube which when combined together, worked better than coffee and Red Bull. I spent almost the whole day writing the essay, and gained a lot of knowledge in the process of finishing the essay. Life has been pretty good overall, other than the fact that my laptop seems to be getting slower day by day and almost starts crying when I run Photoshop.

Click the image for higher resolution and description.

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