Navratri - Coloful and funfilled festival

Navratri is an Indian festival which is celebrated across India for 9 days that precede Dussehra. However the way its celebrated in Gujarat/Gujaratis is completely different than rest of India. Gujaratis celebrate this festival by dancing in form of Garba. Garba is a Gujarati traditional dance performed by Men and Woman in an open space like play grounds. This dance requires the dancers to be in traditional outfit. Following is the time-lapse that I have created that gives an idea, and following it are few images that I have captured to show how colorful and visually pleasing Garba is.

Most of the times live music is used for Garba, the band typicaly plays the traditional Gujrati Garba songs. They decide/set up the pace.

Zarwani - Landscape heaven (Only during monsoon)

Zarwani another lovely location within 100 odd km range from Vadodara. Its located in "Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary" Following are the few panoramas created on my first visit to this place this monsoon.

Capturing/recording flight pattern of a bird

Multiplicity/Clonning can be used to capture the various stage of flight of a bird. Following are 2 images showing 2 different stages of flight.

1. Take off of a Greater Flamingo

2. Flight and landing of a Peacock

3. Landing of a Gadwall male

In Love with Xperia ION

Since the firmware update in July the camera of my Xperia ION has reached a totaly different level. I was facing issues with focusing in "Document" mode which I use to take closeup shots of small objects like insects or tabletop things.

Following are the few images that I have captured using the same phone, all of these images are unedited.

Images taken post firmware update:

1. R8 Wireless mouse

2. Tea cups at roadside tea stall

3. A partial McD burger

4. Fries mixed with McD Piri Piri Post firmware upgrade

 1. A spider with bling


2. A Red Dragonfly

3. Unknown plant and its flowers

4. Closeup of a White Rose

5. Flying Bee

6. Perfect bokeh

7. A Teak leaf

8. Perfect Panorama of Pavagadh taken from Pavagarh By-Pass

9. A colorful Beetle

10. Commonly found wild flower

11. Holding onto rainwater unknown blue flower

12. Rainwater on grass blade


13. Clay artwork

14. Another example of bokeh achieved with Xperia ION

15. Field of Grass flowers

16. Dried up piece of log, it give me great depth very shallow

17. Spider friendly

18. A Wild fly

19. Another wildflower

20. A lovely flower in my office lawn

Toranmal - A less known hillstation in Maharashtra

We found out this place for first time while I was searching for new places on Google Maps. It was back in 2011, we planned a visit back then and could not pay a visit due different reasons.
This June along with few colleagues planned to visit Toranmal.
Its a lovely drive specially the Ghat section

After crossing the Rajpipla town

 HDR of sunrise

View from the Govt Guest House

View from the sunset point

At Sita Khaai After crossing