My first birdwatching trip

Last weekend (Nov 4 -6) was amazing and it was my first bird watching/photographing trip. Before I start with the trip itself, remember I spoke about my confusion on my gears(what to buy and what not to buy). Well, I finally settled with an used Canon EOS 40D and just before the trip I got myself a Sigma 150 500 APO HSM OS lens.This combination is awesome as 40D has some amazing ISO performance even at 1000+.

So, Now the trip.

Rather than a normal travelogue like boarding a bus, getting down there, boarding a car, getting wooed out by the sight and sounds of the jungle and reaching the resort…oops I mentioned all of them. This more of a note that I am writing about my first birding trip.

If you are still guessing, well…I went to Ganeshgudi, a beautiful jungle near the city of Belgaum in Karnataka.

Three days of ultimate awesomeness with some medium weighing gears and 12 hours of continuous walking, looking and photographing birds. I managed to record some 24 species of birds including some rare species like Malabar Trogon, Crested Goshawks and Great Horn bill(this was not recorded, all I could hear was the sound of its wing flaps..gives goose bump). My 40D went b0rked in the middle of the trip with its exposure and metering not working properly. So most of my photos were taken with an exposure compensation of -2.

Still some photos came out good and they are here

The only mammal I was able to spot and photograph was Malabar Giant Squirrel. the photo is here

So, my first birding trip with my new gear and some unexpected challenges that came out with it. I guess I am learning a lot more that I expected.

P.S : Please ignore grammatical errors and other minor mistakes.

Post Ranathambore et.al.

My last post was on my first wildlife trip to Ranathambhore. Well it was an amazing trip, I did so many things that I never imagined to have done before.

Nevertheless I got hooked to wildlife photography, even leaving the photography part aside it is pretty amazing to watch wildlife at their best(in the wild).

I came back from Ranathambhore on 4th of April but I was so hooked to the whole thing going around me,I joined the same group again on a trip to Corbett national park(16th to 21st April 2011).

What I felt, the way I reacted been there remains treasure in my memory and there is no way I can explain that in a blog post. for that you have to be in Corbett.

Took some snaps which goes here :

My current action item is to create my own gear consisting 550D, Sigma 150 – 500 OS and a telephoto mic.

P.S : I manage to get GPS traces of about 700KM (in the jungle plus some rail track) in these two trips. Hope these goes to OSM soon.e

Ranthambore Calling ….

Tomorrow I will be leaving for my first wildlife photography trip ever.
Plans are to keep the ‘trigger happy me’ very happy and to get GPS trail of species spotted and put them in OpenstreetMap (Taking help of a wildlife veteran though).

More details on this later….

who’s the bird

Saw this bird in a lake ..but cant remember the name ..its called Pankouri in bengali afaik ..

freemap.in/2008 kolkata edition

On our way to Kolkata from New Delhi , we got a GPS device to try and map the train route. Though it was uncomfortable to keep the GPS unit adjacent to windows using hand. Eventually succeeded in doing so . the GPS unit recorded 908 km out of 1500 km of journey . that was because of unavailability of signal for long time.
On arrival to freemap.in workshop we discovered that the Card failed to record data and we had only 250km of track thats in being recorded in the units 8MB memory.

Anyways at least we tried.

The Workshop then started ( may be missed some part beacuse we arrived a little late) with people and their GPS unit roaming around saltlake . Again me , Susmit , Arindam recorded some more tracks.

some pics .

Our major advantage was we met Mikel and Schuyler at Delhi. so able to discuss over a lot of possibilities .

more details regarding this can be found here.

Back from FREED.IN

At last I am back from freed.in organized by ilugd . Though I am a little bit late to post regarding this as most posts are already being done.

Being a first timer to travel , I went there as vanilla delegate.

Day 1 I spent mostly talking with people i know only irc . Some of talks are great like sankarshan’s Communities is an oft ‘mis’used word . There were great deal of audience involvement in Samiah’s talk ‘ All work and no play’.

After lunch I was in conclave where discussion was between dissemination of knowledge . I spoke of Bijra High School Project . It actually created some interest in people.

Day 2 : I was mostly with Bong group ( it consist of Pradeepto , Sankarshan , Runa B , Me , Arindam ) . Talks on this day were great but some talks i liked the most are Open street map and tuxmaniac’s( Aanjhan R’s ) ‘FOSS for electronics enthusiasts’ Rene ‘s OpenNet , and Runab’s ‘Setting up a translation community’. Stayed at JNU campus and finally failed to go home ,so stayed back in GNU’s guest House.

Day3 : Sayamindu was finally in delhi so one member in bong group . Out of many talks Pradeepto’s ‘back to School ‘ and Sayamindu’s cute little OLPC related talk are really great .

In the evening after closing ceremony , Mikel Maron came up and gave us a GPS unit to try and map the train route from New Delhi to Kolkata .

So thats from freed.in this year . As I am a first timer its has a great learning process for me .