Time for a shower...

Just a few feet away from the Safety Harbor Marina is this small little park in this small little town. I think it's called the Memorial Park. It has a war memorial honoring the veterans of the various wars. I don't have the accurate details so will need to look it up and update this post at a later date.

This park has a small walking trail, a few benches, a couple of shelters and this - a nice little fountain in the center of the park.

I have also heard that Safety Harbor Marina is a vantage point for viewing the space shuttle or rocket launches from Kennedy Space center. Next time they have an evening lauch during a weekend, I might come here with my camera and tripod...just for fun.

A bird in the hand is worth how many in the water?

This one is from the same marina. There were quite a few birds flying around but this one was busy basking in the morning glory - beautiful weather, heavenly sunlight, cool but not cold water....oooh. This is the best time of the year to be in Florida. November through March is so very beautiful around here. This more than makes up for the 4 months of muggy summer and news channels filled with hurricane trackers.

Early morning reflections

Went out on a early morning photo drive this weekend. The plan was to leave before sunrise and get some pics of the rising sun. However, due to the recent DST change, sunrise time was miscalculated and I left the house almost an hour into the day.

I did not take too many pics, may be around 45; out of which around 10 have come out good (yes, relatively good, good on my scale, good compared to the 35 others, good enough for me to post on here). The two posted here made the cut.

I spent a good 2 hours driving around. This was my first stop - the marina in downtown Safety Harbor. This is a small little town among the other small little towns around here. There are around 10 small little towns in this 15 mile radius - Safety Harbor is one of them. They have a nice fireworks display here every July 4th. This place gets so very crowded at that time - cars and people all around you. Last time I was here for the event, it took us 2 hours to get out of downtown Safety Harbor, as opposed to 5 minutes today.

I might post a few more pics of the next couple of photo-stops I made on this trip soon...

Where no man has gone before....

I turn left...
I enter the door...
I find things cleaner...
I find something funky...
I notice something missing....
I see vending machines...
I wonder where I am...
I gasp and look around....
I find no one and breathe a sigh...
I backtrack my steps..
I get out the door....
I turn right...
I enter the door...
I am in familiar territory...
Oooooh....I relieve myself...
Mission accomplished!
I detoured through a place...
Where no man has gone before...
Or choose to admit they have.

When you're happy and you know it...

You breathe more...

You smile more....

You don't need a reason....

You see good around you...

You like watching the gloomy skies...

Your station plays all the good songs on Pandora...

You giggle like a girl when you read something funny...

You drive slower...

You park at the farthest end of the lot and walk...

You see new ponds and plants you want to come back to...

You see the curlew pecking for bugs in the grass...

You leave the blog post open ended....(to be continued....)

These are a few of my favorite things....

A laptop outdated that just keeps on going...
Scratched up Blackberry that's constantly buzzing...
The time shifting magic a Tivo that brings...
These a few of my favorite things.


My Laptop - I have probably gone through around 20 laptops in the last 10 years but am yet to buy one of my own. This is something I have gotten so used to - whether it's a laptop or a desktop. I've had one for over half of my living years. I cannot imagine living without one. I'm not an early adopter when it comes to electronics - The desktop (that I bought) is older than my first-born but it's still going strong. I'll probably have it with me for at least a couple more years.

I've never been that lucky with laptops though. I have had crashed hard disks in at least 5 of my laptops so far. It can probably be attributed to my not-so-gentle handling.


My Blackberry - Two years ago, I did not have one. Two years ago, I did not see the need for one. It will be exactly two years in December since I've had this blackberry. It's like one of those things that you can live without until you start living with.I love carrying it with me. I'm addicted to the crackberry - It is my morning alarm, it is my personal navigator, it's been a lifesaver in boring meetings that I've found a fatal attraction to. IPhone appeals to me but I won't carry one until one lands on my table.

DVR (and the DVR remote) - What can I say about this one. Never had one, never thought I'd find a use for one, never found the value in spending money on one. Last year, I was offered one for free with no monthly fees. I whatthehecked and took them on the offer. Now, I cannot imagine not having one (again one of those things...). I can hardly watch anything live anymore unless it's on those 'no commercial' channels. 99%  of my viewing has been time shifted - starting to watch 10 minutes into the program or watching a day/week/month old episode of Good Eats.

If I was stuck on a deserted island, what are the three things I would like to take with me? Well, now you know - a Laptop without power (Did I mention that my laptop battery lasts 20 minutes when unplugged?), a DVR without a TV and a Blackberry without coverage!

Nice long walk...

(Another pic from the same park, cropped for a better perspective)

Are long walks a thing of the past? I remember going on long walks with my dear buddy during the college days. We used to roam aimlessly for hours, just walking, talking, eating....just walking. It used to be quite peaceful.
These days, I hardly walk without purpose anymore. If I were to chart my walking profile, it would probably look something like this:

I used to bike (motorbike) around a lot. Many times just aimlessly; sucking in the open air and the bugs, suspended particles, unburnt oil fumes and at times water from the rain. Never did I fall ill due to the varieties of exotic alien particles entering my body.
These days, the pollen in Jan/Feb manage to bring me to tears.

I used to xyz a lot too. However, these days, I only abc.

What does this mean? Things have changed for the bad? Have they changed for the good?

Well, neither - things have changed, priorities have changed, there's a stark contrast in what I did then and what I do now. However, the person in me is probably still the same, just evolving over time...

All I know, is that I will be walking down the path...raring to know what's at the next bend...

The Reflecting Tree - part ii

...Today, I had 30 minutes to kill. I usually have these 30 minutes to kill around the same time every Tuesday and Friday. However, today was a bit different from the last time I visited this place....

...Today, I had my 18-55 lens with me (as opposed to the 35mm prime the last time)

...Today, I had a circular polarizer on the lens

...Today, It was 5:30 PM standard time in November (as opposed to 5:30 PM EDT in August or September the last time I was here). It was 20-30 minutes before sunset

...Today, I wish I had a tripod on me

...Today, the sky was overcast - not white, not dark but gray clouds.

...Today, the picture came out much better than the last one. Still room for improvement, but some things are definitely better - a lot less gray, much crisper reflection, a little more saturation

...Today, I felt kinda labored taking this picture. May be it was a one-off event.

...Today, I took this picture so that I can post it here. Most other pics I've posted on here, I have taken because I wanted to take them. (Not sure if it matters...just an observation)

What's wrong with this photo???

Well, firstly, it's not plumb. One might argue that it could be easily fixed post capture. However, there is no room at the top or the bottom for straightening. So either the tree or the reflection or both will get cropped if I try to straighten it.

Secondly, it's very gray and bland. I should've used a better white balance. Again, not something that cannot be tweaked...but why do something later that you could've done while capturing?

Thirdly, I couldn't have picked a worse time of the day or day of the week. It was around 5:30 in the summer. The sky wasn't cloudy and the sun was out casting a white sky in the background.

Fourthly, may be using a telephoto lens might have given it some perspective but all I had is a 35mm which is kinda bland for these kinds of pictures. I'm not sure about this one though.

Fifthly, color saturation is weak. It just looks gloomly - the grass could have been greener, the water could have been bluer, the sky could have been....well...anything but a blanket of grayish white.

Here's what I plan to do. I'll be going back to this same spot in the next couple of weeks, taking at least 5 more with more or less the same composition - A tree and it's reflection. I'll attempt to do it at different times of the day and different days of the week (from a weather standpoint).

After I have my 5-6 pics, I'll post them all together and we can see which one stands out the most.

The Monkey and the waterfall...

These pics were taken at the zoo we went to the other day. Yes, the same one where the pic of the giraffe was taken. There was this monkey (Chimpanzee, orangutan, some other monkey family) who was sitting behind and in between the two water falls. He can clearly be seen in the picture above. However, from that point, he was way far away and I did not carry my 55-200 with me to the zoo.

The picture to the left is of the same waterfall, taken with a smaller aperture/slower shutter but the monkey is not visible from this angle. These photos were taken in the middle of the day. Luckily it was overcast so there wasn't much glare....just nice diffused sunlight. I would like to add a circular polarizer to the mix the next time, it should enrich the color of the water for me...

Happy Halloween!!

We carved a Jack-o-lantern a couple of days back for halloween. It was a pretty simple one but it turned out pretty good at least for a n00b carver like me.It was a fun event with the kiddos all sitting around me while I was busy sucking out the guts of the pumpkin. It did not take very long though. I might go out there after halloween and get a slickdeal on a clearance pumpkin and carve another one. May be, may be not....depends on how enthusiastic I feel on Sunday.

Search the net for pumpkin carvings and you will find a whole slew of really cool and very intricate carvings....from the very creative to the laugh-out-loud funny. There isn't a lack of creativity in this world. There is creativity in everything. A good photographer can probably take a picture of a door knob and make it look like heaven. I remember one pic of a port-a-potty on kenrockwell.com or some other site. It was just a toilet, a cheap one for that matter. However, the way the foreground colors gelled with the background, the composition and the overall scale of the photo made it look like something you wanna own!

Here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to post more often. I'd like to do more than post and run with pics. I'd like to put a context around the pics I post and probably post a bit about abstract me. If it's just posting pics, I don't need a blog, Flickr or Picasa. can do a much better job of hosting my pics for me. Like many other like to dos, this may remain a like to do or it may actually turn into am doing.

Happy Diwali from our family to yours....

Although a little belated, here's wishing a very Happy Diwali to you and yours...

Diwali reminds me of the scheduling, planning and budgeting we used to do during our childhood days. We used to get a fixed amount to burn every Diwali. It used to money well burnt with a bang. These are some fond memories, something I used to look forward to every year, right until the early morning of Diwali day and leading into the grand finale a couple of days later.


Diwali was never a big auspicious day for me nor a big gift giving/exchanging occasion. The grandest part of Diwali was buying, hoarding and lighting of fire crackers. This was in addition to watching a family of business folks have a GRAND Diwali gala on the day of Laxmi puja. This used to happen a day (or two) after our Diwali day and it was always something to look forward to. They used to get all the cool pyrotechnics available at that time - Parachutes being one of them (don't remember what the others were called).......

Giraffe at the zoo

Met this giraffe at the zoo the other day.

They had a platform at a height which made it at the same level as the giraffe's head (which is pretty high off the ground, mind you!)

Folks can purchase a cracker from the lady for $1 a piece and feed it to the giraffe.

What a novel money making scheme..."You pay me so that I can sell you a 10 cent cracker for a dollar so that I can let you feed my own giraffe" Whoa!

Anyways, i did not buy any crackers (although they looked appetizing and I was hungry) but I did get to snap a couple of good pics of the giraffe. I need to remember to turn on the flash the next time I shoot animals. The eyes look lifeless without it.

Random pumpkin....

I don't really know him but he let me take a couple of pics of him while he posed for me!

Life's a rollercoaster....

Nothing to say.... (part deux)

Nothing to say...

....just sit and watch in peace...

Stolen joke #1

(Well aren't they all stolen?)

A photographer goes to his friends house for a party, and decides to bring along his camera. He takes a bunch of photos, and then a few days later he prints them out. His friend’s wife, who hosted the party, calls him up and thanks him for his photos saying, “The photos are so great you must have an amazing camera.”

The photographer’s annoyed, but he doesn’t say anything to her about it.

That next weekend he’s over at his friends house again for dinner. As his friend’s wife is clearing the table he looks at her and says, “Dinner was excellent, you must have some amazing pots and pans!”

I got this one from one of the comments posted on this article

More bananas!

The banana tree seems to be producing bananas non-stop. Every other day I go check it out and there is another bunch of flowers blossoming that would eventually bear fruit. I'm not counting my bananas before they are ripe though.

Random facts about a Banana tree....one tree produces only 1 set of bananas in it lifetime. After bearing fruits, the stem that produced the bananas dies and is replaced by one or more stalks.

I can already see 3 more banana trees coming up from the ground! Makes me wonder whether I should have planted this a bit farther away from the wall....

A more technical explanation can be found here

Expired medicine is not always a bad thing...

One of the piglets has a fever and bodyache. Looking through the medicine cabinet, earlier this afternoon, I found 2 bottles of ibuprofen and 1 strip of acetaminophen that were past their expiry date by a few months.

Bad thing? Need something on a rush, you don't have it (Luckily, had one strip that was just a month away from expiring)

Good thing? Well, might be a waste of money....but not having to use it so much so that it expires? I wouldn't mind spending a few bucks on that anytime instead of having to use all of it!!!

*Touch wood*

(35mm f/1.8, 1/40sec, iso400)

Bananarama Reloaded.....

Retook the pics again this morning. This time with a 55-200 lense to create a background blur without opening the aperture too wide.

Also sprayed some water on the banana tree in an attempt to create a subtle "just after the rain" effect. These pictures have come really sharp, especially because of the iso 100 and the tripod!

(55-200 at 55mm, f/4, 1/20sec at iso100)

(55-200 at 55mm, f/11, 1/15sec at iso200)

Bananarama - Yippee ka ye - The bananas are here!

I planted this banana tree over two years back. We haven't been paying much attention to it lately since it's in the front yard and is out of sight most of the time. Rarely do we water it....the only water it gets is from the rains, although banana trees require a lot of water to grow well. The only sunlight it gets, well, is from the sun. I have fertilized it probably twice in the last two years.

So, it was a a very nice surprise to see bananas on this tree today. Dad told me about it in the morning and I couldn't wait until evening to go check them out. They look so cute and tiny. So many little teeny weeny bananas....awwwww.

I took my camera and tripod out to bananarama this evening to snap some pics. It was only after I uploaded the pics on my PC earlier tonite did I notice the noisiness of the pics. I had set the camera on iso1600 a couple of days back and did not notice until today. I may go out tomorrow and take some better pics of the baby bananas.



(35mm at f/14, 1/13 sec, iso1600)

Have you ever shopped at anazib.com?

How about anazob.com?

Today, I fat fingered (or rather misfingered) Amazon.com and typed anazib.com. Rather than luckily bumping into some porn site, I was taken straight to Amazon.com

Either the developers at Amazon.com are very familiar with fat-fingering and registered these fat-finger domains in order to help fellow fat-fingerers like me.....or...well, they fat-fingered while registering their domain :)

Yeah yeah, I get it, most of them register these kinds of domains to avoid cyber-squatters from taking advantage of them but I was pleasantly amused to see my fat-fingering corrected and sent to where my lean fingers were supposed to take me!

(Is there a record for highest number of references to fat fingering in one blog post??)

(Yeah those are my fingers and my nails and I bite them...so bite me!)

(35mm, f/1.8, 1/400s, ISO 1600)
(I just realized after looking at the hi-res pics that I was shooting at iso1600....no wonder the pic is so noisy!)

I have been taking a lot of pictures...

I have been clicking a lot of pics lately. Over the last weekend, I've probably taken around 200 pics. Out of those, around 25 have come out really good! I think that is a very good strike rate. I have been shooting in full manual mode, with an off-camera flash mounted on a tripod with a shoot-through umbrella.

However, I cannot post any of them here. Almost all of them are photos of people in my life. As a rule, I won't be posting any personal pictures on here (A random guy on the street corner is a different thing....but I have not been shooting outdoors).

I would like to thank the strobist for inspiring me to take the flash off the camera. I really love his website http://www.strobist.com If anyone wants to learn how to light with basic equipment, one must spend some time on his website (that "some" time can very easily change to a big black hole sucking all your time....so just be careful :))

So....what's keeping me busy, really??

Answer's to the right....our twins! May be it should have been a picture with two bottles in the foreground and a couple of boxes of diapers in the background.....but one gets the gist.

And then I check out Ken Rockwell's website. Given, he is a professional photographer and shoots for a living (although I think his website gets in a huge chunk of his overall earning). He has two small kids (yeah, it's mentioned on the bottom of every page on his website - about his growing family). If he can shoot 8 hours or more a day, I should be able to shoot a few minutes.

It's not the time to shoot though. It's the inclination needed to get out of the house and roam around looking for things to shoot. Don't get me wrong, photographs are everywhere. But, the view from my porch is just that - a view from the porch today, a view from the porch tomorrow, a view from the porch a day after. I need to get out! No...it's raining (20%) ....no...I need to cook today (10%) ....no, I need to exercise (0.003%)....no, I need to laze off a bit (69.997%).

(35mm at f/1.8, 1/30 sec, iso800)