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.

But what happened on the trip was marvelous, We heard from some fellow visitors that T39(A 3 and half year old Tigress) had killed a big male Blue Bull (Nil gai) and seen near it and is expected to be there for next two three days.

Saturday was test on us as we got completely drenched in rain(No photos, cameras were kept safe).

Sunday afternoon we had superb time with T39 sitting just some feet away from us in the water but Monday morning was even better as she was sleeping when we reached the place, as time flies by she woke up, answered nature’s call, slept again, sat for some time, came down to have breakfast and like previous day went again to sit in the water.

It was a complete six hour fiesta between her and us(Photographers).

Here are two snap from the whole fiesta. More to come soon…..

T39 having water post breakfast :

T39 Relaxing in water after breakfast :

Mumbai Monsoon is back…,

Mumbai monsoons is famous because of its beauty, treacherousness and we getting caught unprepared every year. Will it be the same this year too??

p.s : I tried to catch the beautiful aspect of life and stay an optimist, so is the photo.

Photo originally uploaded by Subhodip Biswas.

Then Ranthambore trip happened. I went crazy over what to buy..from a TC for my Powershot to all possible cameras that I can buy at that point of time, finally ended up buying a Canon EOS 1000D and with some good advice, a Sigma 70 300 APO DG MACRO F4 – 5.6.

Ranthambore trip was a great learning experience, my first wildlife shot was of T39 tigress. I got so confused on either to take pic or watch the tiger go just feets away from me. So did not pay attention to details. Rest of the days in Ranthambore were good, learned a lot from wildlife photographers(Sagar Gosavi and Yogesh Rane).

Next trip was after a week from Ranthambore was Jim Corbett National Park and this time I tested my setup as a camera person . Well I found myself starting from scratch here in Corbett.

My few observation in regards the last two trips were :
1) Canon EOS 1000D is an awesome camera but not at all suitable for Wildlife photography.(1.5 fps in RAW is way too slow).
2) OS/IS/VR is somehow a requirement for early morning and late evening shots(Most movements happens in this time though).
3) ISO the more the better. Noise the less the better ( 1000D scores a good point her though).

In the last two trips I narrowed down on my short comings trying to fix them but still I need a basic setup to do wildlife photography(I might be carried away with the crowd though). Here is what I shortlisted and currently in a dilemma.

1. Canon vs Nikon : Being a faithful canon user for last three years I wanted to stick to canon but found in some cases Nikon provides exactly what i want.
2. Lenses (Sigma,Canon,Nikon ) : Sigma cheap and does great job, while Canon/Nikon are better and costs a lot

Finally these are my shortlisted cameras and lens :

Canon EOS 550D : Great camera with great feature but misses on fps.
Used Canon EOS 40D : Again Great Cam but 10MP(low resolution on high crops, ISO to 1600 only).
Nikon D5100 : Pretty much does everything but I have one or two inexpensive canon mount lenses which goes wasted if I chooses this.

I pretty much narrowed down on Sigma 150 500 F5 – 6.3 APO lens which means I need high ISO a lot of times.

Taking all into consideration I am confused like never before

So please help!!!!

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

More details on this later….

Now as a lot of cheap phones has the capability to click pictures in high resolution,make GPS traces,shoot videos and have a internet connection via WIFI/GPRS or mobile broadband connection. I would really love to see a mobile based OSM mapping application that can utilize this facility and able to do photo tag/Video tag with GPS traces,upload to OSM/Flickr/Youtube, create and edit basic maps.

The idea by Zhijie Shen is here. So in case if you are interested in developing such an application do get in touch with the OSM community.

Apart from this you can find a lot of interesting project ideas here.

Student application for GSOC 2011 starts from March 29th.

Evere since I went out of college I started looking to do something creative and something that goes with me rather than something imposed on me. I stayed in Kolkata for a while starting to look at things in a different way.The way which is completely new to me. Since this is the first time I am away from home. I started facing something which I didn’t consider a problem before, Well days past by and I had a surgery in my eyes so had to take a break .Problem is somehow I never got that interest back to go to Kolkata and start looking for what I was looking.

I joined a service MNC. I got posted to Gandhinagar, things were different again. Again lot of things happened to me when least expected. In this phase I really went through a tough time because the learning curve was way over my limit threshold.

By this time my contribution to open source is almost nill and I am almost a dormant person.

Gandhinagar period was over, I got posting in Mumbai. Interestingly this is the only place about which I knew nothing although I should have guessed something as this being such a popular place.

My friends from Gandhinagar helped me a lot. Initial days were tough out here and overall I realized that this city is so big and huge that I could easily get absorbed into it and can never be able get out.

My company has  a office in almost every single neighborhood. So the next thought in our mind after getting into mumbai is where will our office be.

When every single of my friend got a office together, I was left alone to go to a different one. Later after two months I am still where I am posted while all my friends are in different offices far away from where they were staying.

This is also when I started to do experimenting with what I can and how much I can. Because of a idle last year I was how ever a little bit apprehensive  with my confidence level.

I am now a software tester where all my friends are running behind development. However I am still in touch with some or the other opensource technology just as I wanted. So the experiment didn’t go wrong at all. I still in touch with coding just the way I wanted.

But somehow this “Just the way I wanted” makes no sense anymore because priorities as well as aspiration changes. So is the situation.

Mumbai taught me a lot of things in last few months. I saw people homeless in front of some of the mansions out here. I guess anything can happen in this city.

While all my friends have a fixed goal for next few years about their future. I am still in search for it. I don’t know what I will do in next few year to come. I like a lot of things that I want to do but they are completely different from each other and can never be persuade together.

Will I able to pursue any one of them? or will I have to leave them all and make a compromise with something else? Is it that you always need to make your mind understand that somethings you deserve and most of the things you don’t so dont worry be happy kinda things…….well I am completely clueless.

If this blog post didn’t make a single sense to you. well even I can’t make out what I have written.but this is what i am feeling/thinking/sleeping right now.

P.S : Tomorrow is the first time I am going for a outing outside Mumbai with my team. let see how it goes.

P.P.S. I hope to see myself working on a open source project soon with lots of if’s and but’s.

P.P.P.S: Ignore spelling mistakes.

There’s a lot to write about since I joined the company but I dont know how to .

Right now being posted in mumbai and trying to settle down to the new.

Hope things goes well this time.

Having some mixed feelings as this is the first time I will be out of my home town for long, best song suiting the mood now is  Tanha Dil by Shaan

Catch me if you can!,
originally uploaded by Subhodip Biswas.

My catch yesterday

On 16th and 17th we decided  to map  Durgapur and neighboring places. Primarily Kushal wanted to map his village and we decided to help him to map his village Ukhra and also map Durgapur . IOTA resource center at WBSU(Barasat) extended us a  helping hand by lending us three Garmin Etrex Vista H. So with the new gps’s in our hand we now had a total of 5 GPS.

On 16-OCT-2009 :We went to Ukhra on 16th to map the village.Me,Arindam,Kushal and another guy from that village joined the party. Since we had two bikes and the village was small.We completed all major roads and even some narrowest living streets within  an hour.

Here is how Ukhra looks like now as compared a complete blank previously.

On 17th Oct 2009 : A resource person from WBSU was suppose to come during the event but he didn’t make it though .So We started around 1 Pm. I was a little late but Arindam,Harsh,Sonu,Ratnadeep and Bama started.

Ratnadeep and Bama became the local team.They mapped Fuljhore (where they live) along with neighboring areas.While the rest of the team went on cycling covering edges of Bidhanagar area.

I met them in Muchipara and on my way I mapped some of the important point of interest.

I had the etrex H GPS devices, so distributed them and we split into individual teams.

I had a Moped while rest were in cycles.I tried and mapped some far away place like PCBL,Durgapur Bazaar etc. Arindam and rest took charge of mapping the area with details. Sonu knew the place very well and helped us a lot with that.My GPS clocked 34.4 KM after more than an hour of mapping. Our meeting point was BCET gate.

We met and decided to head over for some food as day long traveling was taking toll on us. We accumulated the total distance covered which was something around 100KM’s. Bama requested us to take a GPS to map his city in Bankura so we lent one of ours. So some good  amount of data was accumulated  during the session. Since it was a festival day we decided not to do a editing session and it was dark already. Me and Arindam took care of the edits which will keeping pouring  during the weekends.

Here’s some of what has been done.

Durgapur before edits :

And here is durgapur after basic edits of 17102009 data

Here are some pics of Edit in progress.

Another Edit in Progress screenshot:

There will be a follow up post soon as edits are done.

Sept 17 : Initial plan for Day 1 was a 23.5KM dirt stage with two rounds in it.But since it was raining heavily in Durgapur ,It was until the last moment the stages were cut short by almost half (12KM) with two legs a 5.79KM and 6.22KM run thrice.17th was the pre event day.I was planning to attends the press conference but because of rain I reached late which was good,since most reporters left, I was able to chitchat with some rally drivers including Amitrajit.It was an amazing experience.

Sept 18 : The event was supposed to flag off from Hotel Ginger at around 7AM .I reached there when 4 cars already left.It was my time to hurry to the stage which is almost 50KM even from Durgapur.On reaching the stage , I made an attempt to reach the spectator point 1 but rain and dirt made a good mix and my car got stuck.However was able to reach the start point.The track was dry and hard , very good for pace filled rally ,which which everybody started . It was me first time witnessing a rally of this sort.I walked almost a KM ahead into the first corner and made a spectator point myself.It was hot,sun overhead so after SS1,it was not so easy to make to 6.22KM stage ,so went back home and kept an eye on the live updates. The track took its toll as news came by people were crashing some can’t keep the car in control and unfortunately Vikram crashed due to wrong information from the officals into Arjun Balu’s car .

Sept 19 : The stage on duel was suppose to start on 7:18AM and stage on gram at around 8:16AM ,Easy for rally cars but not for me.so stayed back home and kept an eye on live updates.Day 2 has seen most of the actions and upturns in leader board,including someone hitting a cameramen near FF.Most biggies were out due to mechanical faliures including some Gypsy’s.There was even a holdup somewhere in the middle of the stage.

Sept 20 : Day 2 has already seen Gaurav Gill in comfortable lead of 1 min and 17 sec ahead of Amitrajit Ghosh followed by Sujay in 1600cc Baleno. Spectator Special Stage was held in Jadavpur Stadium in Jadavpur ,Kolkata. The competitors lined up at around 3 PM.But Gaurav got stuck in wet ground  .His front wheel drive cars has enough grunt to make the pit deeper.But with help from his service crew,he set himself free. The SSS was tough on esteems who were already struggling with the 560KM of travel of which more than 460 was just Liason stages. Gypys’s flying and so are baleno’s but both cedia made the SSS really special. Gaurav clocked the 2km stage in 1:25 and Amitrajit in 1:27 . So Gaurav wins as he extends his leads by 2 more secs.

Some points to note :

1. 460Km of transport stages is too tough on cars .it could have been less.

2. Officials could have been a little bit more experienced,On Day 2 the top 4 cars almost got penaltied due to a silly mistake by a marshal .

3.Privateers suffered a lot because of last minute decision changes which sparked anger  in them(as far as current rally.co.in forum posts goes ).I also feels the same.More coverage and attention on privateers would have really helped the event.

4.As most participant are from  South of the country, number of entries were 38 as compared to 60 in K1000 Bangalore.

As an event this was great to watch.Hopefully we will be able to see it next year again. I learn’t a lot about cars,driving styles and met some great drivers  and my trigger happy me was really very happy.

Check http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kolkata_Mini_Mapping_Party_August_2009

So If you are in Kolkata at that time and have interest in OSM, Please do join the party

On the other news :

1 ) openstreetmap.org home is now available in 4 languages : German, French,Icelandic ,Slovanian and some partial spanish .

Thanks to london hack weekend .Many more have started working on their native languages. However  no Indian languages support till now.

2) JOSM has a good amount of foreign language support, Me and Meejan has started to work on the bengali interface and some work has been done.

3) Potlatch and Openstreetmap wiki translation is also ongoing

If you are interested in seeing Indian languages in these tools , We would be happy to accept your help .Visit here for more details.

4) Arun Ganesh and H.S Rai will be representing OpenStreetMap India in upcoming State of the map 2009 to be  held in Amsterdam(Netherlands) from July.

5) Now osm.org routes to openstreetmap.org as well