Krishnan Photography

A back-breaking five hours from Pench , we drove into Tuli resorts at Kanha. The rooms were splendid and we got lucky with meeting Karan Modi, who was mentioned to us by the “Bandra Boys” whilst at Pench. Immediately on reaching, I called up our safari driver and tied up the details. Our guide was Jai Singh, an amazing guy and very highly recommended. The three safari rides over two days threw up two tigers and a few others. It is indeed a very pretty forest. My first tiger in the wild, was a collared male five minutes into the morning ride on the Indri trail. The light was way too low and and I was pretty much zero prepared. This huge guy was lazing by the track, yawned , looked at us and, yep got a coupla superbly blurred shots in the excitement. And immediately after this tiger sighting, I heard this comment from the back of our jeep ” They must not be allowed to die !”. At that instant,  I too murmured a silent prayer for “The Oh Magnificent One”.

03 November 2008, 0612H AM ( wish I had a D3 here) : D200, 70-200mm VR @ 200mm ISO 1000 , F3.5, 1/40th cropped from horizontal.

The morning mist in the forest.

With the D200 as a backup, I realised the difference the  between the files of the D2X and D200. Basically a lot. I am only now learning to massage the D200 RAW files and they need a lot more massaging than the files from the D2X.

We got back and Karan told us about a male he saw at Sarhi. We changed our evening route to Sarhi and went looking for “Barasinghas”. See them we did but, they were pretty far away. On the way back Jai Singh brought us to the place where the morning tiger was sighted going into the undergrowth. Sure enough we saw fresh pugmarks.  About a hundred meters ahead, we saw a glorious uncollared male walking up the track. Just as I started to shoot, another vehicle from “Wild Chalet Resorts” came up from behind. We gave them space to view the tiger from ahead and I stopped shooting till they would  allow me again. But, that was not to be, the kept ahead and finally sped away and the scared tiger, scampered into the undergrowth. So much for being the gentleman I told myself. Surprisingly it was the “Wild Chalet resorts naturalist with the Aussie bush hat,  (I’ll call him “Robinson Crusoe”  since he was on crutches who is to blame for this) . An uncouth and obnoxious guy and, I made a mental note to give him my mind later.

The Sarhi tiger.

The next morning safari we hit the meadows directly. The elephants were out searching for the cats and, I did get to make a few nice moody elephant-scapes.

And a lovely peacock

Waited  as much as we could , this lovely Barasingha didn’t turn its head towards us  and, this is the best I could manage.

And finally Manju’s masterpiece, I love this one

We did get a few birds but nothing spectacular and, I wont bore you with those pics

Hoopoe @ ISO800

We then grabbed a early lunch and started for Bandhavgarh .

Kanha does need a full four to five full days to do it a little justice. Three safaris was, way too short …..

For all the Kanha pics >>>Click Here

We had planned a trip to Kanha - Bandhavgarh to do some tiger watching in the wild. As luck would have it, we did not get the first day booking at Kanha . Hence we decided to stay one night at Pench. Pench is about a two and a half hour drive from Nagpur. That gave us two safari rides at Pench. We did the Pyorthadi (pronounced Pyor-th’di I think) route in the evening and the morning looking for leopards but, no luck. We did spot jackals and birds though.  Jammed into a resort safari jeep with six total passengers….tough on getting any half decent pictures. But, we did meet a few “Bandra Boys” who were pretty… cool . Of course we missed a tigress and her cubs on the track by five minutes.  Here is this Jackalscape pic from Pench.

In the pic on the right above, the Jackal turned to look for a second but, I missed the focus by a mile. Usual things that happen while photographing wildlife ….

A Crested Serpent Eagle silhouette.

We stayed at Tuli Resort. Pretty good Id say, from a stay point of view, but for the safari,  quite a mess. Felt real strange trying do some photography with a bawling six month old also in the jeep…. sigh . Bandra Boys..you missed this one

I also met up Sandeep Desai , a numero uno wildlife photographer and exchanged notes. He highly recommended Mogli’s Resort. Besides they had a jeep which was tripod friendly as well.

For all the Pench pics, Click Here

 A few months back, I had gone over to a friends place in Delhi.  He is a photography buff as well and, he asked me to get a few images on a USB stick. I had just got back from Tadoba. So  I promptly dumped a bunch of straight out of the camera jpegs into a flash drive and, went over to his place.

He plugged in the flash drive to his Sony 40 inch TV and ran a slideshow.  My jaw just dropped at what I saw. The big screen makes such a huge difference that, you have to see it, to believe it.

The pictures, pretty much jumped out of the screen and,  it seemed to me that I was back in the “transparency days” ! The Sony “X” series can also be colour calibrated and used as an external monitor as well. I am not saying that this is like an Eizo graphics monitor  but,  it is a 10 bit panel and the TV runs a customised embedded linux operating system.

You could try it out at any of the Sony showrooms I would think.  So go on try it, I would interested to hear if it impressed you !

Comin up ……Some initial pics posted. (09 Nov 08)

For the pics …ClickHere

Continuing from Bagsutra Part - 2

I got fed up of looking at bags for my 600mm VR with hood + body + TC + a few odd ends like a flash etc so I decided to design one of my own and get it made locally. Its a backpack design and, the few odd ends can be slipped into the pockets. The bag can pack flat when the padding is removed.

I got a 25 inch length bag to fit the 600mm VR with hood fitted in shooting position + TC+ Body . The padding is flat, removable and, can be rolled to wrap around the lens and fitted into the bag. You can thus use this bag with or without padding. The bag material is water repellent . It is light padding and, usual care is expected while using this bag.

Works well for me

Some quick pics with a point and shoot, below:-

Bagsutra Part 2 ; Bagsutra Part 1