This is one rare picture that really really made me happy, and to some extent proud. Rare are the occasions I come across one like this from my own basket. Never mind the fact that the digital copy is poor in quality, completely spoiled and lacks the features in the original picture(pity I can't share the physical picture here). And never mind the horryfying contrast in the digital pic which could not be effectively corrected after many many retouches. The original pic is a gem. A picture that has great combinations of light and shade in such small frame and lot of contrast provided from the backlighting, A picture so beautiful that it looked real, and when you put the slide opposing to light, you could feel the third dimension in the pic. I was psyched, and felt very very good - about the picture itself, and my calculated over-exposure to realize the right brighness in the picture. If I would decalre my mood in 'livejournal' format, it will be 'pleased'. And Thank You, Fuji for the great Sensias!
It's so funny! I look up on Google for some info on a restaurant in the city, and I end up having to see one of my pages(written over a year ago) in the results!
The movie is out here next week and am waiting to see that. The first movie may be total crap, but I somehow think it is cool and liked it. But then, I did not very much like the casting in the movie. I dislike Cameron Diaz and I don't see where Lucy Liu can fit in the movie. My Charlies Angels dream team would comprise
Drew Barrymore - They got this one right
Alicia SilverStone - I think she is perfectly crafted for a movie like this
Uma Thurman
It would have been lot more cool with these three...
Update: Uma Thurman is out and Angelina Jolie is in. Trishna played 'idea fairy' here.
Some bad things come with good things attached to them. I was travelling in a jeep and the road was crawling alongside the beautiful river for a long time. We were already cribbing about some delays in the journey, and just then a flat tyre had to be addressed. When they were changing the tyre, I managed to click a few pictures.
I felt quite good when I made this composition but the quality of the resulting picture did not quite meet my expectation.
Pronounced as Choka, this is a small Tibetian settlement at a height of around 10,000ft.
Here is an extract from my trip report, still being written:
"After resting for a while and regaining the strength in the evening, we started chatting with people around and the time went past. It was mostly foggy and cloudy in the evening and hence, we could not see much around Tsoka and were mostly confined..."
"....around 7am, we heard loud noises and wake up call from the Bengali guy. As I opened my eyes, he rushed into the room and shouted at us to wake up and take a look at the amazing views of Pandim and hurried back with his Minolta. I slowly got out of my sleeping bag cursing the guy for waking me up from a good sleep. After taking my own time, I slowly walked out and saw some people gathered looking at the west. And so I look around - and what a great view had I woke up to! Standing there, tall and snow-claude was majestic Mt.Pandim and surrounding peeks shining in the sun..."
Yaks are one of the very common animals of Sikkim. Although they are domestic, I am not sure if the ones I saw in the mountains are domesticated. That is because I saw them grazing mostly un-escorted by people. They were present everywhere as we went higher. While the first couple of Yaks were seen as high as 13,000+ feet, we kept seeing them in good numbers as we went higher. They were there even at around 16,000 feet high where all the vegetation you see are some small grass that grow hardly a centimeter long. And everywhere, they seemed to be very busy grazing and doing little else. Although they look very strong, these animals are pretty timid.
One of the great attractions of Sikkim is the wild flowers at high altitude. After climbing heights above 10,000 feet where coniferous vegetation is not very prominent, you get to see forests full of rhododendron trees loaded with colourful flowers. They vary from plain white, yellow to deep pink. In some places, there are only rhododendrons for miles and miles where-ever you look around. The forest is filled with the color of the flowers - a memorable treat for the eyes.
A mail from Sulekha says they have now joined the bandwagon of websites providing weblogging tools. That makes it the second website focussed on Indian community, after rediff. But with the focus on creativity that Sulekha has, this should do some jumpstarting of blogs by Indians, especially people living abroad.
I was in Sikkim around 2 weeks back and spent some time in the mountains and wilderness. This picture was taken around 5-30AM at a small place called Dzongri, which is around 13,000ft+ above sea level. This place has a small plateau where you can see a few houeses. People here make a living by looking after Yaks, which graze in the high grasslands.
The picture was shot using slides - something I am trying for the first time.
A friend of mine happened to be in Alaska last month and sent me some beautiful pictures from the place. The beauty of the place never ceases to amaze me. I dug out some of my favourite pictures I had taken in Alaska in the summer of 2002, probably recycled here in my blog for second or third time.
These are low resolution pictures that were available handy with me. Would have needed a lot of time to dig out the originals...
It is amazing to know how much spam fills in my hotmail account. I had long back given up my hotmail account owing to too much of spam but had kept the account alive so it could be of some use. It was quite a while I had logged into the account and today, tried logging in only figure out that it was de-activated due to inactivity, and my mail box was completely cleared and emptied out. So I go and re-activate it and forgot about it while I was doing something else for next 10 minutes. And guess what! In this ten minutes two junk mails had made their way into my account! I guess it can't get any faster than this. So there I am, now not bothering to look at my hotmail account in near future. May be I'll come back again after 2-3 months for yet another re-activation and see if things have changed over the days.
Back from a well spent holiday - mostly away from civilization, newspapers, computers et al... And I come back to the news of Anna tying knot to Enrique. If only she had waited for a few days for me to return... ;)
