Unidentified Flying/Crashing Object

Took this picture at 6:39 AM – no idea what it was (meteor?), but it looked pretty spectacular through binoculars. It was visible for a good ten minutes before the Sun got too bright.

Update: I’ve uploaded the original pictures with exif data, including a zoomed-out version for perspective. 23-29 in the series are almost identical shots.

GPS coordinates, if it helps: 12.981133, 80.259994

DSC_0023.JPG

DSC_0024.JPG

DSC_0025.JPG

DSC_0026.JPG

DSC_0027.JPG

DSC_0028.JPG

DSC_0029.JPG

DSC_0030_circled.JPG (Zoomed out)

DSC_0032.JPG

Power is beauty: The White Tiger

This was another trippy trip with the Patels. We headed off one Sunday afternoon to the Vandalur zoo, and for once – all that walking was worth it cause it ended with this White Tiger putting on a great show for us!

Love those greenish-blue eyes!

I didn’t know these buggers liked leaves. Soon they’ll develop longer necks.

Yummy – humans! (I’m sure we’re not as tasty as he thinks we would be)

Now that’s a profile pic – I don’t know how he doesn’t bite that tongue with his own teeth. I can picture myself running for my life and the tiger thinking “relax dude, I was just yawning”.

I so wish we could have thrown a cute little deer in there and watched it be hunted down.

Rest of the pics on Flickr. A much more descriptive post about this trip  (including the battle of the apes) on Anwin’s blog.

Still looking for that perfect HDR

I’ve been trying my hand at High Dynamic Range (HDR) images ever since I saw this slightly over the top one at Flickr. After many, many messed up attempts I’ve finally managed to get a few decent ones at Vellore last weekend:

vellore-fort-b.jpg

houses-at-vellore.jpg

If you aren’t familiar with HDR photography, you probably think these images were run through a hundred photoshop filters. Actually, HDRs are a result of combining three separate photographs of the same scene, but with different exposures. When the three images are combined, you get all the highlights and shadows in great detail. Click here to see the three original exposures of the Vellore fort, followed by the final HDR.

The trick with getting decent results is knowing how far to push the final output HDR. If you go too far, it would end up looking like this. I liked this shot on Flickr, think he/she got it just right. This night shot is nice as well. For some tutorials on taking HDRs, go here, here, here and here.