Concert in Caesarea

Last night we went to a Israeli-Spanish music and dance show in Caesarea. Our company had booked the roman amphitheater for the occasion and the show was great. It was a fusion of traditional spanish guitar music with a lot of heteroclyte percussions, all in a very "ethnic" style. It's quite hard to describe but we had a great time.



Additionaly to the pictures from yesterday I also (finaly) posted Bangkok and Sri-Lanka pictures on Zenfolio.

Bangkok

I left Bangalore Friday night through the new airport. My flight happened to be only the second leaving from this airport ever. I was kind of anxious things would go bad with the airport opening but I made it only 2 hours late to Bangkok.
The new airport is far north from the city but it took us only 75 minutes to get there ( we had planned for 2 hours). It seemed all cops of Karnataka had decided they wanted to be there, and obviously too many of them can only create traffic jams which they were successful at. Once arrived at the airport it was like a full battalion of 2000 cops with bellies and wooden sticks roaming around a bit lost with that "Idunowhatamdoinherebutamhere" look in the eyes.

The building itself is gigantic, ultra modern, and looking great, nice duty free shops and cafes in the international area so once the workers will be trained it will be fine. Sree even succeeded at getting me interviewed about what I though about the new airport ! ;)

Once in Bangkok, I checked in my hotel by the river, and as I arrived early my room wasn't ready so I got upgraded to the before last floor, with complimentary business lounge, great view unlimited booze etc... Ok I took advantage of the deal quite a bit ! And I love The View:


During the 3 last days, I took a lot the shuttle boats cruising on the river to go sightseeing around the city. The main temples and the royal palace are really very nice and I was pleasantly surprised. The rest of my time I've been walking in markets and narrow streets enjoying the city and its great spicy food.

What Pho Temple

Who said HOT! ?

Obviously I didn't find enough time to sort out all the pictures from Sri Lanka and here, plus the laptop screen is giving artificially warm color tones and I don't like developing the pictures on it so I'll do all this when I am back home (maybe tomorrow :).

Sri Lanka trip

I am back ! Eyes full of beautiful landscapes and very happy, that was a great suggestion from Mrinal to go there for the weekend. I flew to Colombo Friday night after parking the scooter at the airport. After a short flight, I took a cab to my hotel, and I was surprised when getting out of the cab by an instant fog on my glasses: the air was quite hot and over saturated by humidity even in the middle of the night.
I had convinced my driver to drive me around for the weekend (not too hard) for a reasonable price (harder), so he came back early the next morning and from there we drove to Kandy, located in the middle of the Island. The traffic was bad (surprise...) but we managed to sustain a steady 30km/h... for the next 140km. We stopped on the way at an elephant hatchery in Pinawala, we conveniently arrived at bath time, and this will be one of the nicest memories I'll keep from that trip. Herds of elephant playing in the river, being washed, splashing spraying, it was beautiful and fun.


Then we stopped at Kandy's botanical gardens, it was a refreshing taste of the biodiversity in Sri-Lanka's forests and a very quiet and peaceful place, plus it was very large. I got countless pictures of trees, but this giant tree covering an area of 50x50 meters was rather impressive.


Then we stopped at the temple in Kandy after a late lunch from market fruits (rambutans, mangos, bananas, coco water). This is the temple hosting "the tooth" which is considered to be Buddha's remains and is one if not the holiest relic of Buddhism.


After a long way back to the hotel, I had an orgy of delicious curried seafood for a ridiculously cheap price, I just wish I was more hungry then. No pictures I was way too busy with foods all over from the tip of my fingers to my lips.

The next day we went on a tour of the city which was nice but not as exciting as the day before besides that I got booted from every single place for taking pictures. There had been a bombing from the Tamil Tigers next to my hotel the day I arrived with a large number of casualties (10 deaths 75 injured) and an upcoming Buddhist festival had the army on their teeth.

On the way back to the airport we had lunch at the driver's sister place where we were invited for some traditional Sri-Lankan food: "Rice and curry" as my driver was saying. I got a very warm welcome and got away only with the promises to stay in touch and to come back to visit with M.


Once at the airport I succeeded in getting swapped from an indirect flight with a long connection to a direct flight in first class without any fee and having to insist, so it closed the trip very happily.

I am writing all this waiting for the weather to clear up so I can drive back to the hotel without getting soaked. And I know I am slacking, pictures are not yet uploaded on Zenfolio...

Flying for the weekend

As usual when I travel to India for work, I take advantage of a weekend in the middle to visit some place not too far from Bangalore. That way I traveled to Cochi, Delhi, Agra, Madurai, Munnar, Madras and Pondichery during my other trips, via car, bus train and local airlines. This time I decided to fly to Colombo in Sri Lanka, it's realy close and plenty of things to see and picture.

India, Cricket and IPL

It is difficult to talk about Indian culture without talking about food and spirituality (I probably got the order right) but the third, maybe second item on the list is definitely Cricket with a capital C. Cricket is here what Football is to Latin America: almost everything.
I know my interest into sports is usually pretty limited outside of world cup this or that where I'll watch a game or two with friends because it's fun. So during my first trips here I kind of watched this passion for cricket with amusement more than anything else. This time I made the step, thanks to IPL and my colleague Mrinal.

IPL ? This is some kind of Indian championship of Cricket that is brand new from this year. The nice thing about it (for me) is that the games are played in less than 3 hours, instead of 2 to 5 days !!! So following and understanding the game is not as demanding for an ignorant like me. Obviously many are shouting "Sacrilege", the game is loosing its soul, etc, etc... They even have lightly dressed (for some teams) Pom Pom Girls ! Scandalous ! I'll pass the topic but it's of a big interest for tabloids and many in a quite conservative country in regards of legs exhibition (outside of Bollywood).

Why starting a new league of Cricket in a country that has been playing the game for what seems forever ? Well this is my own interpretation, but last year there was the first world championship of that new fast kind of Cricket, and after loosing miserably at the standard world championship India won that one. So I suppose it was the right time to start a league of the same game. The amount of money that is revolving around is probably the second reason.

So what's this game ? I'll assume that, like me you're totally ignorant and know only that cricket and baseball are games where people are slacking on a field with a bat and a ball. Well, that's not this far from the truth, but there is more about it, I actually found myself enjoying watching it for some time on TV and bitching about advertising interruptions (and Indian advertising is quite entertaining to me). So you got 2 teams of 11 guys, 1 bat and 1 ball. Each team will throw the ball 20x6 times the second starting when the first is done (6 balls is an "Over"), while the other tries to slam the ball away with the bat enough to be able to run back and forth as much as they can between the batsman and the ball-thrower position until the other team brings the ball back (where another of your teammates runs to exchange position with you). If you exchange position once, you score 1 point, if you exchange 2,3 times you score 2 or 3 (3 is quite rare). If you throw the ball out of the field before any of your opponent catches it, but it bounced on the ground first you score 4 and if there was no bounce you score 6. If an opponent catches the ball in the field before it hits the ground you're out. and another of your teammates takes your spot. It's fairly simple but there are lots of subtleties and nice things.
The most elegant thing in cricket is the way they throw the ball, it is quite impressive, and there are guys that throw this piece of wood and leather consistently above 140km/h, other that spin it more like a ping pong ball, other that rub it so hard against their pant that they manage to get it asymmetrical and follow weird trajectories, etc... Besides that some guys on the field do pretty impressive dives to catch the ball in flight, and the batsman can show some nice skills, but nothing that me ignorant French would find as athletic as the throw.

There is quite some strategy involved in selecting who is throwing when and who is batting, etc... and it succeeds at making a 3h game quite entertaining. You can also learn the referee gesture which in some case would look like a dance, lurk on the pom pom girls, watch the enthusiasm of your colleagues in front of the TV and enjoy a Kingfisher, the local beer, and so successful that the owner also has an airline and sponsors almost half of the teams of the IPL.

Cricket bat and ball

The 3 standing poles are the point to bring back the ball before the batter completes his run, if you make them fall before he gets back he's out (or if the thrower manages to slam them down with the ball directly).

If you want to know more about the game, and its British roots, that just commonwealth countries are playing it etc... have a look at the wikipedia entry.

And this entry was completed while listening to Linda Lemay singing about the damned French with her delicious accent. Enjoy (no relationship whatsoever with cricket, don't search;).

Digital UV photography

I was answering Jyby's question when I realized it was getting too long and could make an entry by itself.

So UV photography can be done with digital cameras but you need one that has a sensor that records UV radiation, so that does not have a UV-block filter in front of it. Mine is in that case, most other need to go through a workshop to tear apart the filter. For all normal applications not having this filter is actually a burden and many consider it a weakness of the camera (I need to use UV/IR block filters when taking regular pictures).

Then you need a way to block all visible light and IR, which is what the Baader-U filter does (the one I have). It works by having many coating layers that get the visible light and IR to interfere with themselves and cancel themselves (filtering by interference). It does not change the wavelength of light rays that go through just reflects and cancels the ones above 390nm and below 320nm wavelength. You can look up some infos here: Baader U-filter.

On top of that regular lenses have coatings that block the UV, as old film was quite sensitive to UV they needed to prevent pollution by UV radiation (which converge differently than visible light so it makes normal images appear blurry if they are polluted by UV). This is one of the reason most photographers were adding a UV-block filter in front of their lenses in the past, now some still do but it's mostly to avoid scratching the front of the lens accidentally, filters being relatively cheap and expendable. So you can not use modern regular lenses for UV photography, they will usually not let enough UV radiation go through and they also tend to have too many glass element that contribute even further to the filtering of the UV. There are crystal lenses that transmit UV very well but those are usually insanely priced and limited to very specific applications (labs, forensics, military...). Another option is to put a very old lens that doesn't have all these modern coatings, which is what I did (I use a lens from 1951), or to take a lens that has few glass element and re polish its front element to eliminate the coating.

On top of all this, human eye doesn't see UV so if you have a SLR you can not see what you are putting in the picture when the UV-pass filter is on (unless it provides "live-view". With a rangefinder you don't have the problem because you're not looking through the lens (but if you are limited by the quality of the parallax correction of your viewfinder).

Yeah I had a lot of fun gathering all the gear and info to do that, there is an excellent site that explains some of this and contains hundreds of sorted UV pictures of flowers: Naturfotograf

UV Flowers

Last weekend I spent some time on M's balcony taking pictures of flowers. I had bought a while back some UV-pass filter blocking all wavelengths besides UV just for that purpose as some flowers are supposed to show patterns invisible to the naked eye. I ended up spending a good 2 hours going on the balcony before finding some that were showing something different in UV but in the mean time I got quite a few other nice flower pictures in visible light and IR as well.

Petunias (UV) note the black stripes radiating from the center

Petunias (visible) just white

Orchis (visile light)