Let's break some bread...

December 31, 2008... I have actually managed to write a blog, although infrequently, for an entire year! I end this year with some delicious bread! Yep, I made bread... It was a regular olive rosemary focaccia recipe derived from multiple sources (allrecipes.com, cookingbread.com and a book I have!)... This was the 4th time I tried it and it was the best! :-) Yum... Sameer made some spinach and chickpeas soup to go along with it and we had some nice partay going!

I might just share the recipe with you in the new few days when I get more time, but right now I leave you with just some pictures I took!

Diwali - The festival of lights

Coming home to India for Diwali was something I was really looking forward to... Diwali, or Deepawali, is one of our biggest festivals. The name literally means 'a row of lights' and hence the title - festival of lights. For a culture that promotes a way of living represented by the saying 'तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय' (Take me from darkness to light), diwali is a fitting king of festivals - celebration of the victory of good over evil. With the thought of being at home for Diwali brought back fond memories from my childhood. When I think of Diwali, I think of lighting oil lamps, homemade sweets, shopping for new clothes, making the paper akash-kandil, rangoli in the front yard, fire crackers, building a mud castle in the yard and meeting the extended family and lots of friends! Here are a few pictures borrowed from different sources.

Oil lamps (wikipedia)

Homemade sweets - Faral (Happy Burp)

Akash Kandil (Grace's photostream)

Rangoli

Apart from experiencing all of this, I was also looking forward to this being a great photo opportunity... Call me opportunistic, but I was determined to be poised with my camera every step of the way.

However, I have to report with great disappointment that I don't have a lot of pictures to share... I was so busy actually doing all that stuff I mentioned :-), that there was no time to take pictures! There was one evening where I did have my camera in hand while out and about in the city and I saw a big roadside stall setup to sell earthen lights. From simple lights to the most beautiful intricate designs, there were numerous type of lights (diya - small clay pots) one could choose from. Everybody buys lamps that they can afford, simple plain ones to the most expensive designer ones... While I growing up, we had about 2 dozen lamps at home - some to be arranged in the front yard, some to be arranged beautifully around the rangoli, some more on all the window sills, and the rest around the house. These clay or eathern lamps, filled with oil are the most beautiful sight during diwali. Here are a few different ones I saw that day...
No matter which ones we choose, let them bring light into our lives... तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय...

Flowers in Ma's backyard...

I spent a little bit of time yesterday in my parents' garden. Here are a few flowers they have...

Diwali

Man is said to be a social animal. It is said that sorrow is reduced when shared with others, and happiness increases many folds when shared. Hence we visit people on the occasions of sorrow. We expect other people to visit us when we are in sorrow, trouble. We invite people, throw parties and enjoy with others on the occasions of happiness. Sometimes, we purposely create such occasions for meeting people, celebrating and enjoying with them.

Festival is also such an occasion, reason for meeting people, enjoying. Every person, right from an individual from sophisticated world to the most backward jungle tribes loves to celebrate festivals. Of course, depending upon the religion, location and custom of the person, ways of celebration change.

India is the land of festivals. We Indians, especially Hindus celebrate numerous festivals. Ganesha festival, Holi, Dusherra, Durga Puja, Diwali are some of the important festivals. In these, Diwali is supposed to be the King of festivals. It is the festival of lights. There are a number of events connected with this festival. Like, demon Narakasura was killed by Lord Krishna, Demon Bali was killed by Lord Vishnu, Lord Ram returned to his kingdom Ayodhya after an exile of fourteen years and after killing the demon Ravana. At that time people celebrated these occasions by lighting lamps. The same custom is still followed even after thousands of years. Hence, Diwali is called as festival of lights. Here are a few pictures taken during diwali…

----Jayant Joshi

The Odd Picture

Signs convey information. Two principles - brevity and clarity - both being necessary to efficiently communicate the intended message to most number of people; are at the heart of good sign design. In many cases, a symbol (or colors that signify certain ideas) can convey the message much more clearly and briefly than words. Several words would be needed to convey the same information conveyed by the symbol or color or a combination of both. Hence one finds more symbols and less words on street signs. Sometimes the combination of words used in a sign can convey a mildly comical message.

Here is an example which we encountered at a rest area off of I-89 in New Hampshire.


If you are traveling in New Hampshire...
Make sure your cat isn't on fire.

Of ghosts and goblins and ... pumpkins? The story of Halloween!

Of ghosts and goblins and... pumpkins? For the past few years, I've been intrigued by Halloween - of how it is represented in pop culture and what it represents...

For me, the most beautiful part of Halloween is the Fall season! Here are some recent pictures we took on our drive to see some Fall colors. We drove to the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire. Online reports indicated that the Fall color seasons were at their peak and so I was really excited. I've seen Fall colors each year for the past 5 years - Pennsylvania is beautiful that way! But the stories I've heard about the New England Fall colors were inviting... Although most of the drive was done under cloud cover, we did get some nice shots of the colors!Okay, so coming back to Halloween... My first memory of Halloween is of pumpkin carving - the student center (HUB) at Penn State holds lots of different activities for students during Halloween - pumpkin carving being one of them. I wish I had some pictures to share - I remember carving out my pumpkin in some geometrical shapes... couldn't get myself to carve it into a jack'o... One of my friends grew up around upstate New York and the regular thing to do around Halloween time for him was pumpkin carving, apple cider, horror movies and Charlie Brown! The Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown... When I told him I had no idea what this was, he made sure I watched the cartoon with him one Halloween :-) Another year for Halloween he arranged a nice "horror" movie shindig for us and some great hot cider to go along with it! No Charlie Brown and Halloween's craziness for me this time, I'll be away during Halloween this year.

Anyway, while walking down to the T station two days ago I took a few pictures of some typical Halloween decorations around some houses. More pictures of Fall & other Halloween craziness here.

The lighthouse bug!

Somehow, I've caught the lighthouse bug! Since moving to the east coast I've had a lot of chances to visit different lighthouses - mostly on Cape Cod and others along the shoreline in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Whenever I visit a lighthouse I think about what life in a lighthouse for the keepers must have been like a few hundred years ago - undoubtedly lonely ... on most days - I'd presume. Looking out into an empty, dangerous sea... Standing on the brink of humanity on one side and a vast expanse of nothingness on the other...

But think about what a lighthouse would have meant to somebody lost at sea, looking for land... A tiny flicker of light signaling rescue and life. And yet there are innumerable stories of devastation, when ships misjudged the rocks and the location of the lighthouse and directly slammed into them, throwing sailors into ice cold water. So maybe my conjecture is more romanticized than real. But that still does not preclude me from finding these beautiful beasts really really fascinating!

Have you ever seen/visited a lighthouse? I do not know why they are almost always white in color! Makes a good contrast with the sea, the land and a beautiful blue sky when you are taking a picture. That being the purpose of this blog, I want to share a few pictures I've taken this summer. I have another post on lighthouses, so I won't include the same ones again...

Woods End Light in Provincetown on Cape Cod

Portsmouth Harbor Light in New Hampshire

World view through the Portsmouth Light window

Stairs leading up to the top of the Highland Light (inside the lighthouse) on Cape Cod, Massachusetts

In case you are interested in finding out a little bit more about different lighthouses on the New England coastline, please see this website. It is maintained by Jeremy D'Entremont and has lots of historical information, pictures and conservation information. I incidentally met Mr. D'Entremont while visiting the Portsmouth Harbor light and he gave us his visiting card, but I didn't even look at it until after we got home! I admire all the lighthouse pictures he has taken for his website and did not even know I was talking to him!

While I was writing this post, I realized that I knew nothing about lighthouses back home! Never heard of any... India has a long coastline and boasted a strong trade and commerce destination through ages. So there have to be at least some lighthouses around. A quick google search revealed a treasure! Here's a link hosted on the University of North Carolina server by Dr. Russ Rowlett who is a mathematics professor. This website has tons of information about lighthouses in many different countries! If you have a little bit of time, click on a few links - the variety of the structures in different parts of the world is impressive, to say the least... I stand corrected - white seems to be the way for New England lighthouses, but others around the world are much more colorful! Needless to say, I'll be spending some time on this website in the next few days... wonder if anybody is actually taking care of these national treasures back home...

Cooking adventures

I am anything but adventurous in cooking! Adding a few impromptu raspberries in the loopy honey nut cereal (my husband's breakfast this morning), is in my definition, an adventure... If there ever was a rigid eater, I'm it! I try to follow recipes that my mother & grandmother and anyone before them followed. If green chilies are what needs to go in a dish, I will not make that dish with red chili - spoils the taste you see :-) I like to call myself a puritan, has a nice ring to it! On an interesting side note, my mother has, over the past decade or so, begun experimenting and has done well while I am determined to follow the path...

On the same note, I'm not that much of an enthusiastic cook either! So when anyone goes all out and makes awesome dishes - they deserve much admiration... Here's an example - Poonam's Cooking Adventures. Although I've never had a chance to partake in any of these delights, I'm told they taste wonderful! And more than the taste, I visit her blog for the pictures she takes! Way to make food look really really delectable :-)

Will I ever be as good?

Time and again, I am reminded how much there is to learn. Case in point - Taral's flickr page! I generally avoid going to flickr - it only succeeds in bringing my morale down... Yeah, I know - one should look at pictures taken by others and learn from them! But doesn't work with me - it only reminds me how good others are and how there's a lot to do on my part before I can be that good, if at all! Be it Taral's degree in design or his inherent creativity, he succeeds in making regular people pictures look really beautiful - especially b&w pictures, many sepia. Here's a shout out to you Tarya, love your work!

Most of his pictures are people pictures - that brings another thought - should I wait a specific amount of time before declaring myself as one specific photo type of person or another? Its been almost a year since I've been sort of paying attention while clicking pictures. Have mostly taken nature & environment pictures. But even in those, there's a distinct majority of macros - or at least what I call macros. Technically, not all of them are macros, most just close-up pictures. So anyhoo, should I concentrate on macros from now on and generally give up the big picture photos? Should anything macro be fine or flora-macro, fauna-macro be decided? Whaddyathink?

The mighty Atlantic in my backyard...

Well, not literally... But how cool would that be! Over the last year or so, I've had a few chances to go see the Atlantic - in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Florida. Each time, I've been taken aback by its grandeur and beauty. I think the water in Florida has a more beautiful turquoise sort of color and is much warmer (!) than up North, but the view of Atlantic from the viewing towers of the numerous light houses in the North is much more grand!

Here's the view of the Atlantic for you, through my eyes... Pictures of the ocean seashore and all are easily available in many places - I thought I'd give you a different view...
These pictures have been taken @ 1) viewing window of the Highland Lighthouse at Cape Cod 2) viewing windows of the Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse in New Hampshire and 3) viewing window of the Fort Constitution in New Hampshire.

Btw, now that I've stumbled upon the collage feature in picasa, I'm not letting it go! Apart from its own artistic charm, this feature is letting me save space on my blog here... which is great and probably greatly needed too!

Reflections

Mix a little bit of sunshine with a lot of water and you'll have a recipe for beautiful reflections! When I first started taking pictures with our Canon Rebel film camera, my mom told me to think of a theme while taking pictures - e.g. flowers, mushrooms, beaches, smiles, shadows and what not! I've tried to keep that in mind since then and here's a product - Reflections! Thanks aai :-)

I took a picture of the elderly couple enjoying a nice afternoon and later realized that the reflection in the water behind them was interesting! After that my eyes kept looking for such reflections and I soon found another when I saw my husband standing on a rock boulder enjoying the beautiful view of the sea... Click! The third picture is a reflection of a lighthouse in New Hampshire (the Portsmouth Harbor Light) I took that same evening. This was our 'Halibut point in north eastern Massachusetts and Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse in New Hampshire' trip this weekend. More photos here.

Picturesque Nantucket

The island of Nantucket is situated just off of the East coast of the U.S., near the Massachusetts border. We drove down to Harwich port from Boston and then took a ferry ride to the island. Home to beautiful 17th century architecture, picturesque beaches, quaint shops, light houses and the juice guys (!), Nantucket island is a photographer's dream come true.
I've been smitten by anything New England-y/Lighthouse-y since last Summer (that's when I first saw the light houses on Cape Cod) and when I saw an advertisement for a sandcastle festival being held on Nantucket, we just had to go see it! We went to Jetties beach, where the sandcastle festival was being held. Micheal Phelps and the Olympics were a favorite choice of sand sculpture, while we also saw Nantucket based themes, popular literature (Moby 'Brick') , a sea turtle and a Ganesha sand sculpture!!!We rented a couple of bikes and roamed around the island a little bit - went to the Surfside beach which is known for its big waves... While coming back on the ferry, a hailstorm caught up with us! And guess what - in a true amateur fashion, I made use of that opportunity for taking pictures :-) Oh, by the way, I've finally decided to upload my pictures to Flickr. So now you can take a look at the Nantucket photostream here.

The story of 7 letters and a board

Do you Scrabble?

Well, you ought to try... I am slowly getting the hang of it and it is so much fun! I am perpetually stuck with letters such as A, E, L, and R! The scrabble gods hardly ever smile in my favor (and having a geeky opponent who is really really good at this doesn't help my case either!). While these As and Es help me form good words, they hardly ever make a good score because they all count as 1s! So I end up losing most of the time... but its still fun :P I think the competitive spirit in me keeps me going. Apart from a good vocab, I'm also learning that scrabble needs a lot of thought, patience and strategy...

7 letters & a board - think of the possibilities!

This was our board yesterday - WALTZ and QUIZ were both my words! Yay!
A missed opportunity of a good score? Perhaps. But the game was awesome! ... and guess who won this time :D... Yours truly indeed...

P.S.: The red triple word score square with everything else discolored in photo # 3 - thanks to the Color Accent feature in my Canon Powershot A530.

Depth of field

I may have said this before - taking pictures is helping me learn about photography basics more than sitting down with a book! Here's why... I found my crayons while unpacking this morning & decided to indulge in some artsy coloring. It doesn't take much now-a-days for me to decide to take pictures. These pictures were taken on auto mode - I use a canon A530 powershot to take pictures and didn't see the manual aperture adjustment (am I missing something?) on it.

So here's some color in my life! If you will, pay attention to the subject in focus and how many parts of the picture are out of focus due to the low depth of field...
And here's the art... a top view.
Then I decided to try another angle - a very low one. Here the camera has decided to put everything but the middle portion of the picture out of focus. If you look at the next picture, the bottom part is out of focus while the rest of it is in focus.A low depth of field throws most of the stuff, other than what it thinks is your main subject, out of focus - a great way to do portrait/ people photography. But if one wants everything in the picture in focus, a high depth of field would be necessary.

This one would have turned out to be a fine photo if not for the bottom out of focus part. Oh well...

Digital photography for dummies!

Finally I bought a photography book - the obvious choice was Digital Photography for Dummies. I figured it was high time I actually learned a few things about photography than just being a clicking maniac! I did take a quick class about photography basics a few months ago, but I need something more - like a quick guide with comparative examples - what happens when you take a picture at 1 fstop vs. another.
Another beauty I found was this book - Digital Macro Photography by Ross Hoddinott: This dude is apparently a leading nature photographer who is into macro and has won a lot of different competitions. I liked the book because it gives a lot of examples with particulars about how the picture was taken. The language is easy and the book has great tips to improve shots considerably. Now on to actually reading the book...

Some recent photo expeditions

There has been a lull in my photo expeditions lately. I have moved recently and had to take care of a lot of work before moving. Plus I hate packing & unpacking - which means I take more time than necessary to do these things. I do, however, have a few pictures to share - couldn't let nice summer weekends go to waste, could I?

First stop - Black Moshannon State Park in central Pennsylvania. The main attraction here is the bog that gets its name Moshannon from the local Indian name "Moss-Hanne" meaning Moose stream. The 'black' in the name is derived from the color of the water which, although clear, appears black because it flows through moss & other plants and becomes colored because of plant tannins.
I also recently attended the Central Pennsylvania Festival of Arts in State College, PA. Among a lot of other pictures, here's a picture I took of crayons being used by two street painters.A flower I saw walking down the arts fest... a regular automatic shot, but the day was really bright - almost too bright - and that almost gave a flaming quality to the flower which I really liked. Next stop - Flume gorge & Mount Washington in New Hampshire!All in all... not a bad month :-) And guess what? Summer is still not over... who knows where this weekend will take us!

Flower power

I was telling somebody about how I love taking pictures and mainly - macro photography. Then that person asked if I specialized in flower photography and I denied it completely (I didn't think I wanted to be typecasted as a "flower person")... But maybe I do like macro - flower - photography... Flowers are just so beautiful and friendly :-) Here in the U.S. it seems like they are more colorful than their counterparts back home, or maybe its just that I'm paying more attention now...

Anyhoo, while coming back from a meeting this morning, I saw a nice garden and couldn't resist taking some (read 134!) pictures. Here are a select few that I really love...Somebody had recently mentioned to me that they like a little bit of cloud cover while taking pictures. Today I found out why! It is awesomely warm and sunny and bright today and so I thought pictures will come out great. But seems too much brightness was undermining the color of the flowers... I'm going to have to delete a lot of the pictures because they are too bright! Oh well...

More pictures here.

Picking strawberries...

I went to a local strawberry farm (Way Fruit Farm) with some friends yesterday. More than the strawberries, I was looking for some fun time and a chance to take nice pictures :-) Here are a few I have... All taken under considerable cloud cover... After looking at each, I can see how they could have been better... Especially the one with the hat & strawberry baskets. I took a lot of pictures from different angles and this is the only one that came out okay. I keep thinking about getting a book from the library to learn about composition... hm... I should put that on my to-do list - otherwise it'll never get done!

Lets have some ice cream! Yum!

Oh boy! Ice cream - I'm not one of those typical ice cream junkies! BUT I'm down for some Penn State creamery ice cream any time - day or night - especially some Peachy Paterno! Yum! Here's some awesome "peach in a bowl". If you are around these parts of central Pennsylvania - don't miss a trip to the creamery. Here's some history of the creamery...

Books and a cafe...

Will you believe it if I say that I was not in the mood of taking pictures for the past few weeks because my computer was on the brink of crashing due to not having enough memory! I couldn't download the pictures on my camera and so no way to take new pictures! Now that out of the way (I have about 4gb on my drive now which should give me a few more days!), I'm back to taking tons of pictures!

This afternoon I was sitting in Webster's Bookstore and Cafe working and took a few pictures. An awesome cafe and a great used bookstore makes Webster's a beloved local hangout place. Here's what I have...
I didn't want to use flash, so both pictures are a bit shaky... I should get into the habit of carrying the tripod... Oh, well, some other time :-) I really need to work on my composition - I should borrow a few books from the library and see how the pros do it!