This Blog is no longer active and has moved to its new home here : Kalyan Varma Journal.
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1:08pm: Revisiting Nilgiris’ Peaks and Passes
Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to be invited to be part of an expedition team led by Dr AJT Johnsingh. The trek was from Mukurthi National Park in Tamil Nadu to Silent Valley National Park in Kerala and the primary purpose was to evaluate the importance of the two national parks in the conservation planning for large mammals.

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9:43am: Leopard next door
Mandanna came running and said he just saw a leopard next to him, relaxing on a wall with its legs on either side of it. He had gone to pick up something from my Scorpio which was right next to this wall. We all rushed out and went back to see the leopard get up and jump into the tea bushes next to it. We got excited but got back to our work and Mandanna went to drop off our friends at a home stay. When he got back again after an hour, he came in and said that he saw the leopard again, this time sitting in the tea bushes.

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12:39am: Following the Rains of Life
If you are from India, you know that the monsoons are the lifeline of the country. It brings joy and celebration to the land, the people and most of all the wildlife. Over ten meters of rain falls in the Western Ghats in this season transforming the land completely [...]

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8:26pm: Great Hornbill Scape
I have always wanted to photograph hornbills with the rainforest canopy in which they live in. I am in general a fan of animal in its habitat kinda photography and yesterday I was lucky enough to photograph this in Anamalais tiger reserve.



There were two of them and they kept on hopping from one tree to another. Because of the rains and the clouds, the light was very low and this is one of the sharpest photograph that I could actually manage. Frankly did not expect to see too many Great Hornbills during the monsoons, but wildlife always throws those surprises at you.

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5:05am: Bye bye LJ
Finally moved out of LJ for good to a wordpress install on my site. I resisted for few years, but finally it was about time. When I started using LJ back in 2002, LJ was my social network, my rssaggregator, my friends page, and my twitter andfacebook. Most of all, it was run by an amazing team who really cared about LJ.

But things have changed now. LJ gives a damn about its users. All my social network happens on twitter+orkut+facebook and all my LJ friends are already there.. My rssaggregatoris Bloglines and LJ does not have any meaning for me now.

So kindly update your RSS feeds guys as my new blog is here : http://kalyanvarma.net/journal

Anush and Gowtham helped me move the posts and customize the WP theme. Thanks a ton guys. The new blog still has some rough edges, but will fix all them soon and I will cross-post for few weeks till I move fully.

12:20am: National Geographic Photography Workshop
If you are in Bangalore this weekend, then do swing by for a 2 hour free workshop on Photography which I'm doing with National Geographic. More details here.

The exhibit of the winners of the Nat Geo Moment Awards will be displayed for rest of the day at the British Council after the workshop.

12:23am: Trip to MP
Starting tomorrow, I'm on a 10-day trip to Central India visiting Bandhavgadh and Kanha. Being summer, I hope to see quite a few tigers and hopefully get some decent photographs. I'm also excited about staying at Taj Safaries and doing the Tiger Photography Safari.

Since LJ is no longer most convenient blogging tool, I try my best to post live updated on my twitter feed.

On that note, once I get back, I hope to move my blog from here to Wordpress on my site. Has anyone figured out how to export all your LJ archives to Wordpress along with threaded-comments ?

11:39am: New website
Sometime after my 2007 end Namdapha trip, I stopped updating my website. The old system was not scalable, was too dependent on linux-gimp-php-apache-mysql-imagemagick workflow. So after keeping it stagnant for more than a year, I finally got down to re-writing the website.

The new system is not platform specific and the whole thing works more of less on exif information. I have also moved to Adobe Lightroom on my machine to tag/manage my photographs though I still do most of my post-process in combination of Capture NX, Photoshop and Gimp. In the process, I managed to clean up my 5 years worth of wildlife photographs. It took more than 2 months, but was worth the hard work as now I feel I have control of my photographs again.

I have updated my new website with photos till end of 2007. But in the next few days and weeks, I will upload few hundreds of photographs from 2008 and all the fresh ones from this year.

So do go check it out and do let me know if you encounter any bugs or have any feedback.

1:11pm: Leopard and Cub
I had one of the most amazing leopard encounters last week. Here's what happened :

We were driving on the Bandipur-Mudhumalai highway at around 5:30 in the evening and as usual I was scanning around on either side of the road for any interesting wildlife. As we passed by a stationary car full of family, I wondered if they were looking at anything. So I slowed down and scanned on the right side of the road and Bingo.. I suddenly see something move parallel to the road and it was a leopard. I pulled my camera out and started clicking away.



The first glimpse of the leopard

It walked away and we thought we had lost it. We drove ahead just in case and then in the bushes we found not one, but two leopards. Then we realised it was a mother and a cub. They were both sitting in the understory and there were a lot of vehicles moving around without realising there were these leopards sitting by the road.



Mother and cub hiding in the understory

As I was photographing them, I suddenly witnessed something that I have never seen in the Indian forests. The leopard got up in a jiffy, kicked up a lot of dust and ran straight towards us. Since I was shooting, it just disappeared out of my view and I had to put the camera down to see what was happening. The mother came about less than 5 meters off my vehicle and then stopped. While this was happening, I could hear a Bonnet Macaque call onto the left. Then I realised that all along, the leopard was trying to ambush a macaque. I had seen this macaque earlier but had not paid attention to it and the macaque was next to my vehicle in the hope to get some junk food from us.

The macaque ran up a tree and started giving out the alarm calls. The leopard gave up the hunt at this point (assuming since the macaque already alerted the whole area)



Leopard looking at the macaque

This is when the mother suddenly realised we were actually there. I do not know if she realised it earlier or not, but she looked at us very surprised, growled and then relaxed.



Leopard realised we were parked there

Somehow the leopard decided to give it a second try and bolted towards the macaque again. At this point it crossed the road in front of me and since I was in the driver's seat, I could not shoot anymore. The leopard disappeared in the understory and I thought the leopard would try to climb up the tree to catch the macaque.



Leopard dashing again to catch the macaque

While all this was happening, the cub was still sitting at the same place looking at its mother. I guess the cub knows then the mother has gone out hunting and knows it must not move. After a minute or so, we saw the leopard again on the left side. It did not get the macaque and was now sitting and calling out. We realised it was calling its cub and we also heard the cub respond back to the mother.

Thankfully when the leopard crossed the road, there were no vehicles. But soon a lot of cars that were passing-by saw the leopard sitting on the left side of the road and were slowing down. Luckily none of them stopped. They looked at it for a few seconds and drove away.



Mother waiting for the cub to cross the road

Then the worry started. The mother I assume was calling the cub to come over. So the cub slowly came out of the understory and was slowly walking towards the road with great caution. By this time we had driven a bit ahead as we didnt want to give away the leopards if any cars went by. Just when the cub reached the edge of the road, a huge truck came on the road and another car which was trying to overtake it honked.

The poor cub panicked and ran for its life back into the forest.



Cub running back into the forest

The mother continued to call and the terrified cub just sat down far away in the understory. After a few minutes, the mother walked inside the forest and we lost track of the cub too. We got really anxious as we didnt want any leopard road accidents, but we also realised, maybe the mother and cub were hesitant because of our presence. So we kept our fingers crossed and drove away

I really hope the mother and the cub got to re-unite later in the day. I actually wonder how many wild animals are suffering because of this busy highway through the forests.

11:22pm: Wildscreen Bangalore
Just a clarification

Wildscreen and the master-classes are open for ALL and anyone can drop in tomorrow and the dayafter for any of the master classes. Check out the schedule

12:44pm: Yahoo! Briefcase and CAPTCHA
Yahoo! has announced that it will discontinue Y! Briefcase service. Well it was about time as really never knew anyone who actually used this service.

What Y! Briefcase did contribute to was a series of innovative abuse-prevention measures. When the service was launched, storage of any kind was very expensive and Yahoo Briefcase offered 30MB of free storage online. (Remember these were the days when your email capacity was few MB's). It was frustrating when you had more than 30MB to store online and one had to buy a premium user accounts to store more.

Some intelligent hackers decided to write a small application, which would go to Yahoo Briefcase, create few thousand accounts and then take large amounts of data, split them into chunks of 30MB, and spread them across these accounts. So you had free, almost unlimited storage online and this application was using Yahoo Briefcase in the background. These applications were suddenly using up more than 60% of the system resources alloted for Y! Briefcase. How would one stop this ?

I was privileged to be part of the team that had to solve this problem. Udi Manber who was the Chief scientist at Yahoo! at that time decided to step in and help with these problems. We had just heard about a small research project named 'CAPTCHA' which was being tested in Carnegie Mellon University. We looked at it, played with it and finally decided to roll it out to remove automated creation of accounts. We had few hiccups, and over time learnt to build a bulletproof CAPTCHA product. This as far as I know was the first large scale deployment of CAPTCHA which of course today is used in almost all web applications. Of course some people got around the CAPTCHA problem by using real human.

A lot of other anti-abuse and rate-limiting measures were first introduced thanks to Yahoo! Briefcase which are used across Yahoo as well as across many web applications today. This was also the only project which I ever had to write entirely in C++ (I'm still a big fanboy of procedural programming languages). Though the service is dead, it did help fuel a lot of webapp security tools which everyone uses today.

2:00am: Keyspan presentation remote
If you find yourself giving presentations often (or even doing photo slideshows), I strongly suggest you get one of these. I used an earlier version of this for the foss.in keynote and totally fell in love with it. Later the foss.in team gifted me this new model and I have been addicted to it since then.



It has a nice toggle button to move through your slides, dedicated buttons to change the volume, a Thinkpad style trackpoint which can be used to control the mouse and of course a very useful laser pointer. Best of all, the USB fits right behind the device, so you do not have to carry them separately. This device totally changed my lazy movie watching experience too.

10:27am: Office Space
Sometimes I actually miss going to an office. Waking up and getting ready to head out. Having colleagues to chat with. Of course I only feel this when I am in Bangalore.

But only sometimes.

9:52am: Wildscreen India 2009
The famous Wildscreen film festival is being held in India in second week of Feb. There are lot of exciting wildlife films, master classes by some of the worlds best film makers and ofcourse its a great chance to meet and interact with people in wildlife film making community.

Don't forget to Register

10:24am: Mountains of the Monsoon
The film that I worked on most of 2007 aired on BBC1 in UK on 16th Jan. If you are in UK, you can still watch it on the BBC iPlayer. More than 2.1 million viewers tuned in to the show it seems.

The documentary will be aired during the Wildscreen India festival here in Bangalore. Stay tuned.

2:23pm: 2008
Once every few years, I think everyone needs to reboot their lives. The last time it happened to me was in 1998 when I was still in college and looks like the next one was in 2008.

Last year has been one big roller-coaster ride on all fronts : Career, work, finances, friends, family and most of all people who are really close to you. This was the year when I had to step back and re-look at everything. Everything that I did, everything that I was doing and most of all, all the things that I want to do, have to do in the future as well as the consequences that will have on me and people around me. Is this what they call mid-life/quarter-life crisis ?

Anyway I have come out of it and I am very sure 2009 will be a great year to look forward to. And as for the recession, well, I'm actually looking forward to it.

10:55am: New Band.. new Music
The music that noelladsa and her friends have been working on the last few months is finally out . Check it out here and also notice the Kickass band lineup. Waiting for the band to take off... and also you can have a chance to name the band.

9:11am: Keynote at foss.in/2008
I'm doing the biggest talk of my life tomorrow at foss.in, that too on a completely new topic. Do come by if you are in Bangalore.

9:35am: Mumbai Terror Attack
I guess this is being equated to Indian version of 9/11. My heart goes to all the people in those hotels right now. I hope they can all come out safe.

Meanwhile, move along people Stay strong and do-not-over-react. Kindly do not react to this the way US reacted to 9/11.

Do not think you are unsafe anymore ? More people in India die because of faulty TV sets than terror attacks.
Have the terrorists won ? They will if we react the way US has and give up our freedoms and our normal way of life.

In tough economic and global times like this, we will win only if we move on with our lives and keep this behind. This is how we fight terror, not overreacting to this, not invading countries and giving up our freedom. Bad enough the security guards check my car and bags each time I enter a mall or hotel here in Bangalore, I do not want to give up any more of my freedom.

and someone please shut up Barkha Dutt of NDTV. She is causing more damage to the country by FUD than the terrorists themselves.

11:47am: foss.in/2008 Kicks-off


Atul Chitnis doing the intro for the 5-day foss.in






The event kicks-off with the usual candle lighting

10:38pm: Live-tweeting
Thanks to the Nokia E71 + GPRS + Twitter, I'm Live-tweeting from Gir as there is good mobile coverage throughout the park.

Next todo : Make the Nikon wifi transmitter to work with the E71 to transmit high-res pics as I shoot. Also does anyone know, if there is a symbian app that can send my GPS coordinates out every few min automatically that I could use to show live position on gmaps ?

5:50pm: In and Out
I got back to Bangalore over the weekend, but after a quick pit-stop, I'm off to Gir in Gujarat, the only home to Asiatic lion in the world. We have our annual India Nature Watch get together over there and looking forward to meeting some fellow photographs as well as photographing the lions.

Btw, there are few places opened up in the Wildlife and Conservation Photography Expedition as well as the next Digital Photography workshop which is scheduled for the first weekend of December. The expedition should be fun as there are a lot of new hotspots that have opened up and have some really cool gear to put to the test. (Remember that if you are self-employed, you actually get 125% tax deduction on the fee)

3:59pm: Extension of the Exhibition




By popular demand, Goodenough is extending the exhibition for few more days. Mostly till the Friday. I might not be in all the time, but will be in and out rest of the week. Do buzz me on 07876085594 if you are planning to come.

1:56am: Exhibition Updates




The exhibition has been going on really well. The turnout on the opening evening was not as big as I had hoped, but later I found out it was because of the bad weather and a conflicting Rugby match. I think my talk went ok as there were enough questions at the end.

People have been coming in large numbers since 10am today and even at 6pm, people were still coming in for the exhibit. If you are in London, do come for the exhibit soon as it closes tomorrow evening (tuesday)

A BIG thank you again for the sponsors : Geodesic and Goodenough College for making this such a wonderful and world-class exhibit

10:50pm: The best F1 race ever ?
I hope all the Formula 1 fans watched the race today. My heart stopped during the last 2 laps. Could this be the best and the closest race in the history of racing ? I'm go glad Lewis Hamilton won and more importantly McLaren won after all these years.

I have seen this only in India with cricket matches, but today I saw crackers go up all over Bristol.