Of Hills and Peaks...

This picture was shot somewhere near Munnar. Don't quite remember the name of the place but it was a national park or forest or reserve or some such thing. Turns out the Kurinji flower blooms here once in 12 years. It is scheduled to bloom sometime around September 2008 I think. (Please do check up the information provided here. I'm not too sure if i remember the dates correctly and am too lazy to find out). Some of the pics they had on the buses showed the whole fooking mountain covered in purple!!! The whole fooking Mountain!!! And some Nilgiri Tahr loitering around. The only fauna we managed to see, apart from wheezing and obese homosapiens in garishly coloured dresses 2 sizes too small, was a kite (or a hawk) hovering over the valley in the wind. Pretty impressive sight, though capturing it clearly in the digicam was pretty difficult as the SLR didn't have enough zoom.

The above photograph was shot on a Pentax SLR, sometime in the evening in the panorama mode. Think the peak is Anamalai.... Anybody who actually knows, please confirm. Thought it would look nice in b & w and hence did just that in photoshop.

The Ear

That's the Cochin Harbour (some part of it anyway...) from behind my athimbaer(paternal aunt's husband)'s right ear. It was during this particular boat trip that I realised that he's got one of the most photogenic faces in the family...Did some cropping, and applied some curves to this particular snap. This was shot at around 3 or 3.30 in the afternoon... Wonder why people say that colours look washed out in photos shot when the sun's high in the sky?

The Flying V

This photograph was shot in Kumarakoam (hope the spelling's right) on one of the 5 days i spent touring God's own country, Kerala. This place is basically a huge lake-like, backwatery, sort of place, with a lot of birds and most importantly, WATER. The chaps here use the waterways like roads. Just like how every household has a cycle or bike in landlocked places, here, every house has a boat. Our oarsman (although ours was a motorised boat, i really like that term) actually pointed to a signboard in water that read "COCHIN 48KM"!!

This was shot using my mama(mother's brother if you dont know)'s Pentax SLR. I was sitting on the prow of our boat, to the great consternation of my paatti (paternal grandmother), and looking into the water through the viewfinder wondering how the rippling water would look on film (not too good as it turned out) when my cousin (think its onnu-vitta-thambi in tamil...), Sriram, shouted at me to look up at the birds flying in formation. I did, focussed unto infinity, and released the shutter. This was the result.

The colour cast and artifacts, I think, are because the chaps at the studio screwed up while scanning the negatives. Any of you know a nice place where you can get your negatives scanned without major screwups, do let me know.