Dandeli – Paradise for Bird Watchers!!!!

It was a good year in terms of travelling for me.  The year had started with a trip to Coorg, two trips to Waynad , visit to Orissa and now to Dandeli. This trip was planned just 2 days before.

Giant Wood Spider

3-days long weekend was ahead and so few of us got tempted to go on a short trip. Finally 4 of us decided to go to Dandeli – Vaibhav, Sushil, Sushmita and Myself.  The train ticket was booked in Tatkal from Bangalore till Alnawar by Rani Chennamma Express.  From Alanwar you need to take a jeep till Haliyal and then board a bus to Dandeli.

Reaching our hotel in the morning we found nice greenery around and the chirping of birds. When you have a camera and you are interested in photography, this view is a paradise for you. Leaving our luggage, we all took out our weapons(read Camera) to shoot the birds and the greenery around.

Malabar Grey Hornbill

Dandeli is a nice place for wildlife photography, bird photography, bird watching and nature walk. Apart from all this we did mountain rappelling from not a very great height(just 67ft) and few rope activities. If you are lucky enough you can do Rafting which in our case couldn’t happen because of  less water flow.  But not very much disappointed as we had the option of roaming around in the jungle and spotting different types of birds,  spiders, animals.

We could spot and capture few birds – Malabar Pied Hornbill, Malabar Grey Hornbill, Green Bea Eater, Crocodile’s dentist, Adjustable Neck White Stork, Kingfisher, Woodpecker and many more of which I don’t know the names. On the jungle Safari we could find lots of spiders – mainly Giant Wood Spider. This Spider is a female Spider which eats the male spiders after mating. It weaves its web in between the two trees.

We could also spot the Giant Malabar Squirrel – a beautiful animal which jumps from trees to trees. You have to run behind them for capturing them into your camera. Also on the banks of Kali river, there is a crocodile track where you would find lots of crocodiles resting lazily in the river or on the banks.

 

Giant Malabar Squirrel in Action

For capturing the birds and animals in Dandeli, you don’t have to go to a jungle.  Just go for a walk or sit around where there are more trees and that you will find anywhere in Dandeli. Dandeli seems to be a house for different varieties of birds.

This trip was more of photographs, birds and wildlife. It was real fun to run and find a better place to capture the birds sitting somewhere behind the leaves and changing their position. Overall a nice trip !!!!

Clicks in Hebbal Lake

Another weekend early morning and I was off to Hebbal Lake, around 30kms from my house with two other friend photographers. After getting the camera atleast I am able to experience the early morning beauty, the fresh cool breeze and the silent roads. Moving through the Lalbagh, K R market, VidhanSoudha we reached the Hebbal lake and there was an awesome greenery there. Around the lake there is a park which is open for visitors for free till 9:30 am.

There we enter the park and could see the birds flying over the lake. That was a scenic beauty to be captured. The water, the sky, the forest around, the birds, the overcast clouds and all this makes a perfect scenic picture in the light of the early dawn. Tried capturing all this into one shot with different exposures to finally get a perfect shot.

Spending some time around the lake capturing the clouds and the water moved towards the park around. The park had beautiful flowers, trees and insects. As soon as I see flowers, I feel like taking the macro shots of them. If you are not into photography,  Macro shot is the shot where you take the closeup picture focusing sharply on a small area. Took macro shots of the different flowers. While capturing the flowers, found some beautiful insects on the leaves. Its because of the camera that I am bound to say they were beautiful insects. Seems my perception has changed because of photography.

There were beautiful sounds of birds chirping. Tried to search the birds. Caught hold of few parakeets, pelicans but they were so far that the lens I had was not able to capture the image. Need those telephoto lens for capturing them. Yeah photographers are never satisfied of their camera lens. They need more and different types of lens once they get bitten by this photography addiction.  Will be back to this place after getting the appropriate lens to capture the glimpse of those birds.

Finally after capturing the beauty we were moving out when a spider-like insect inside a web caught our attention. It was half- hidden and somehow we all struggled to capture it. Suddenly it came out and posed for the shutter bugs for few seconds and went back. And we managed to get few clicks.

Enjoy few pics of Hebbal Lake here . Its a lovely place to spend in the early morning even if you don’t want to capture the beauty in your camera.

First Clicks!!!

Got this DSLR for myself that night(Refer the last post). And couldn’t just wait to try out all the amazing features of my DSLR. But in the secluded room of mine I could just take pics of the fans, table, chair etc. So thought of learning the technicalities of the DSLR before I go to some photogenic places and try my hand at shooting some beautiful pictures. So started experimenting with the physics behind it.

Started with the “Shutter speed”. Tried capturing the pics of moving fan at different shutter speeds and concluded that if I want to capture the freezed fan,the photo should be clicked at a fast shutter speed and if you want a motion click at a slower speed. So, shutter speed is inversely proportional to the duration of light exposure. Mathematics!!!!!!! Yeah we had this chapter on the “how camera works” in physics when we were in school. Now finally after 12 years I understood this. I was so elated on this achievement of mine that I also tried the slowest shutter speed which is denoted as “BULB”. But what is this I can’t hold my camera statically for such a long duration, the camera shakes and the whole pic captured is blur. 😦

Too much of experiment done and feels I have learned something and sleeps off to wake up early morning and capture the sunrise and the flowers at LalBagh. LalBagh seems to be a heavenly place for the photographers. I have visited this place twice before and both the times have accompanied people with the motive of clicking pictures with their DSLR. And now this time it was my turn to disturb their sleep early morning on a Sunday. Reached Lalbagh but to the utter disappointment it was a cloudy day and no sunrise pics. No issues , Lalbagh has so many other beautiful things to be captured.

Walking through the grassy path, the eyes captured the beautiful drops on the green grasses. With the aim of capturing them through the camera, tried few clicks with Macro settings then manual mode and finally could capture one decent photo. Phew, photography is not so easy even after having a nice camera!!! Now was the time to capture the black clouds and the sun peeping from behind the clouds. Tried few clicks for that but not much success.

Finally walked towards the Rose Garden clicking some pics here and there. And in the whole Rose Garden there were just 3 roses. Very much inclined to the “Macro” effect, tried the same here also. Some clicks of the Sunflower and few more flowers I thought that I have clicked lots of pics and that lots of was around 180. But finally when I actually saw the pics there were only 10 which I could say was clicked properly.  Thats only 5% success rate.

Enjoy those 5% pics here and let the amateur photographer here know your comments.