It was Saturday and we decided to go early morning as chances of encountering birds are more at that time. I left home at around 5:50 and was picked up by Nitesh at Vijayanagar bus stop. Along with Nitesh, Raju, his room mate and Sharma were there. I am meeting Sharma for the first time and its because of him we were going for bird watching. as he is been doing bird watching for a long time now :). Thanks to him for taking us there.
We reached there within 30 mins or so and Sharma straight away jumped into shooting with his Canon 400 mm lens ! but me and Nitesh took some time to get into it. We were shooting some landscape and since we had tripod I was taking some shots for creating HRD image. Once we were all done with that, we went behind Sharma for the actual bird watching. Got lot of tips from Sharma about bird watching and how to approach for taking a picture and how patient one has to be when it comes to bird photography. It was good learning for us. Sharma started bird watching around 2 years back and has gained lot of knowledge about birds. He could identify all the birds we saw on that day with their names and also gave us a brief description about them ! Even if I mug up those names its very hard to remember those names again !. I am poor at remembering those names you see ;)
With all the tips we got from Sharma, we started taking pictures, we waited, we crawled on the ground, we hide ourselves behind bushes .. uff now I know how difficult it is to take bird's pictures and how much patience one requires ! ! . Other difficulty I had was my lens, firstly it was 300 mm which means I have to go further close to birds to get a picture and my Sigma lens is too slow focusing ! it creeps a lot and motor makes lot of noise :(
With whatever I had, these are the few decent pics that I could manage to take.
Also took some pics of Dragon flies and bugs ! which came out well :)
From TG Halli back waters we headed straight to Machinabele Dam, it was not for bird watching but just for view of the dam as we had not seen the dam before. I managed to click some HDR images of the dam landscape !
One more landscape from the place
And finally we headed back to Bangalore via Ramangara, as Machinabele is around 10 Kms from Ramangar. We took a group photo near Ramanagar with the famous sholay rocks as the back drop ( Sholay was shot in Ramanagara ).
It was a nice trip with lot of learning and lot of new things too !
