The 80/20 rule

Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink
The monsoons are a terrible time to be sitting on the metaphorical bench

This was never going to happen to me, no, I was too clever for that. Or was I?

I'm no professional photographer. My main income isn't from photography. And yet, all things tend to this state of affairs. Unfortunately my other professional life and my photography have both gone and done it at the same time. And it is deeply unsatisfying and cuss-word inducing....This my 80 % penalty catching up with me.

To echo Benvie, one day I’ll get out to take photos again, I’m sure.

Editing

And how blogs are places to put the sharp cuts.

There are far too many images crammed into the 224 pages of my book. I am cutting a few out. And I am attempting to be ruthless about it. The hardest to remove are those that are interesting for some reason (the story of how they were shot, the behaviour depicted, etc), but not really upto the mark visually. I'm going to use the blog to make the thing a bit easier to do....

Here's one that is out. (For now. (Commitment-phobe!))

A gruesome little drama plays out on the football field.
A Tawny coaster butterfly remains attached to its mate even
after it has been partially eaten.

In another skin

I've been a bit neglectful of the blog haven't I? I've been really busy, sorry. To make it up to you, here's something I've only ever tried once. I reserve that status for mistakes usually, so let's hope writing and 'publishing' my own fiction does not become one of mine.

In another skin

He climbed out of bed, squinted at the noonday sun with milky eyes, tried to stretch his tense body and failed. Time was unkind to him, he thought, as he slid into the seat in his air-car, jostling with others on the highway on their way to work. His driver’s cheery smile had annoyed him and he’d hissed a ‘good morning’ that he now wished to retract. There was nothing good about a morning that you could barely see.

He tried hard to snap out of it, and to concentrate on the meeting he had ahead of him. It was important that he should get this contract, well, somewhat important. His brain was too small to comprehend his vast assets; his cunning at the negotiating table was legendary, almost biblical. The returns had become irrelevant to him; he had merely enjoyed the twists and turns, the tortuousity and the wiliness. He wished he could forget it, let it go, but it wasn’t in him, the tenacity of his type was something of a curse. He looked at his driver again and thought how far his people had come. Their little speedy bullet of a vehicle was run by thought alone and even his incompetent driver made small work of it.

They hit a little air pocket, the Trime-X7 bucked and his skin seemed to pull a little tighter around him as he was dislodged from his comfortable position. He almost bit the head off his driver but restrained his quick and violent nature; he still had to get to office. He did not fancy driving, any amount of excess thought, however negligible, would clutter up his precious brain. Things went smoothly after that and in a little while, the long silver bullet pulled up to a door in an impressive granite façade. As he rose at giddy speed up to his office up among the clouds, he remembered how so many of his kind would be happier on the ground. Years of success had made him accustomed to many things that others hadn’t even dreamt of. The doors responded to his presence and parted to reveal a marvelously furnished cabin. Warm humid air circulated through the room and the tropical plants that he so loved glowed with health and almost beamed at his return. He perched on his armchair and appreciatively let out a stream of air through pursed lips. As he settled in, his sinuous secretary gracefully slid in through the door and briefed him about his day. Most of the things were routine and he was relieved at the thought that he would be able to reserve his energies for his meeting with the AnE corporation executives.

The day wore on, his skin seemed to crawl and pull and tug at him with a life of it’s own. His muscles ached from the effort of its confinement. His vision ebbed and flowed; he accepted it as calmly as his nature would allow, which meant not at all. He snapped at his employees repeatedly and then exhausted, retreated into immovability, growing angrier still at having wasted energy on those he considered trivial little belly-crawlers, snapping harder the next time around, extending himself further despite the pain, unsheathing his teeth and dispensing his venom. That day the office trembled and everyone’s defenses were up. No one ventured his way if they could avoid it. Finally the time came and his secretary called on the intercom rather risk being in his presence and announced the AnE executives. ‘Ask them to wait’ came the furious reply and she seated them in the lounge.

And then he felt it, he knew it was coming.

He quietly slipped off his seat to prepare for it. He forgot about the people who waited for him in room outside, they were now irrelevant. He looked around at his cabin, at his friendly plants and waited.

He quietly disappeared between the branches of his favourite Arbutus. He nuzzled its rough bark tenderly, almost as if he sought the tenderness his kind were reputed never to feel or seek. The roughness felt good, he had waited for it a long time and as his skin split at the lip, he almost purred. He wished he had eyelids to keep his eyes shut to savor the last moments of haze and darkness. When his skin had peeled past his eyes the sun like brightness of the room suddenly burst into his retina, a stream of photons clamoring for his attention. He took his time now, chuckling to himself, thinking of the people who waited for him, knowing full well that they would wait as long as he wished them to.

Benagaluru Pride parade '08

Looking for simple stuff

The spectrum

Solidarity

Sight gags: Tathastu

Sight gags: Suffer the children to come unto me?

The khaki people

The colourful people

Eyecandy

Or something like it. I haven't much to post right now. So here you have an image I made in a pub in London. Why? Who knows? It was a beautiful moment.

My exercise in an unusual lens bag didn't always work. I am a reluctant photographer outside my comfort zone. And I've grown much too used to my shooting habits here. I need to move on.

Water skater

Water skater

Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

- Joni Mitchell

WPY 2008 Semi-finals

That is as far as I got. The original entry is here. It's a high hit rate, but why oh why am I not getting past the semi's. Any insights anyone?

Stones and open spaces

Stone from Widemouth bay: what are those lines? Geologists?

I criss-crossed Cornwall and Devon over the last long weekend. Geology written large across the landscape, Tors in Dartmoor, old seabeds and strata exposed on Cornish seasides. I wish I knew more, I wish I remembered all I read clearly.

Pony in Dartmoor National park

Crockern Tor in Dartmoor

A hare at Lizard point
Seaweed at Widemouth bay
A seagull at Tintagel
The same bird

Bristol's other urban wildlife

I've seen foxes on three or four occassion already. There are birds, insects and flowers, spring is truly here. Yet these intrigued me the most so far...

A trilobite painted onto steps near Bristol's science museum

A wooden woodpecker that brightens up my walk to work everyday

Eye-candy

Andean goose in Slimbridge

Sorry for the lack of updates, this may continue for a while.

Help me pick a cover

Cover 1Cover 2

Cover 3

So my focus group so far has picked the following three as possible images for the cover. On the basis of appropriateness and appeal. Pick your favourite. In the poll in the sidebar. This ones for those folks who've never hit the comment button. Heres your chance to contribute!


PS: I had an email today from someone called Rashmi and unfortunately it went to my spam folder and I noticed it just as the page was refreshing after I hit the delete button. I appreciate mails that I get from folks who read the blog and really enjoy getting them and I usually reply quite soon. So if I've done this before, I'm awfully sorry!

PPS: I think we have a winner in number 1!

In the thick of it

A firefly takes off

Have I been away too long? Have you missed me? My work schedule here has been quite hectic. And here I am in the middle of it, the BBC wildlife magazine office is in the city (I should go drop off a portfolio, right?). The brilliant Tim Flach has an exhibition here soon. Ben Osborne is going to speak at the uni soon talking about filming for Planet earth. Can I move to Bristol, you think?

In other non-news I put my Wildlife photographer of the year 2008 entry together. I am a lousy photo editor. S who has been helping me with the book will attest to that. I make the classic rookie mistake of getting attached to images that I really like or worked for. I forget about the viewer sometimes. So doing it in isolation, without third person perspective, this year made it quite hard. But I did use what folks on the blog, on Flickr and in person have responded to most. I leaned hard on S's judgments from when we put the book together. I did take some 'risks' though, this is still about personal vision.

For all those folks who hung around through the long silence, here's my entry, with that one image that I have been holding onto for so long. It'll be out in the book, so I guess I'll let the world see my baby. You've seen most of the other images at some point or the other.

PS: A wallpaper (image of your choice) for the first person to reconstruct how the never seen before firefly image was taken. People who've had explanations directly from me, don' t spoil it!

Going away

Evening at the gymkhana grounds

I'm going away for a while. If all goes well, I will be in Bristol tomorrow. I'll try and be good and regular on the blog, but we'll see how it goes. I've packed a very unusual camera bag by my standards, so let's see where this takes me.

I'll be away from IISc longer than I have been in nearly nine years! And I expect a lot to have changed when I return. The landscape has slowly been changing anyway, and occasionally walks in IISc feel almost lunar. But even the people I know and have spent so much time with may not be around. It feels a little disconcerting.

Babies

Ladybird larvae hatching

"Any organism has only a finite amount of time, energy and resources that it can acquire and expend during its lifetime. Its own life, like that of its babies, is also fraught with uncertainties and risks. It must when reproducing decide how best to distribute its efforts with these in mind. Several decisions have to be made. At what age must the organism begin reproduction? How many young would be ideal to produce at each reproductive event, how many reproductive events should it have in its lifetime? What is the ideal size for the young? Even deciding the sexes of the young can form part of the optimisation process."

From the Babies chapter.

Short nosed fruit bat approaching figs

Short nosed fruit bat approaching figs

For all those folks who've been wondering what I was doing standing under the fig tree late into the night. Who were wondering what those bright white flashes of light were about.

About beautiful men (or the lack thereof)

A male blue headed rock thrush

I look up around me at mess and there's no one there that catches my eye anymore. I find I'm surrounded by all the drab greys, browns, blues and khakis that constitute Indian academic camouflage. I ask myself every once in a while, what happened to the human species?

One of the things that often gave Darwin pause was the sheer flamboyance of some male animals. Many male birds are spectacularly coloured, much more so than their female counterparts. Take the male blue-headed rock thrush, all bright blues and oranges, flashy white wing patches. The female on the other hand is this beautiful mottled muted brown, disappearing in the undergrowth.

A female blue headed rock thrush

Now being drab, muted and camouflaged is obviously a good thing in the wild world. Less attention is good when one negotiates a world fraught with constant predator threat. So why all the male flashiness? Whose attention are they seeking? Ok, I know, its the females, that much is obvious.

But why would a sensible female be interested in a flashy flamboyant male? Why are these traits at all desirable for her offspring? Why would a female want to raise predator bait? You can see the problem there, can't you? The exaggerated and beautiful traits of males cannot be explained under the standard framework of standard adaptive natural selection. If you suspect that maladaptiveness, even complete uselessness of these traits, take a look at Wallace's birds of paradise, 1, 2 you will be convinced. What do birds want with all those bells and whistles, streamers and bright colours, other than to impress females? Not much. But what do the females want with them?

A male paradise flycatcher in breeding plumage

There are at least two theoretical frameworks that might explain the appearance of such traits through the process of sexual selection, R A Fisher's runaway selection hypothesis and Amotz Zahavi's handicap principle. Both of them suggest different mechanisms for the same process.

Fisher suggested that if preferred even slightly more exuberant displays than those of most males (which they might for either some quirky in their genetics or due to correlation (not necessarily causal links) with good genes), they would mate with males with these kinds of displays. And competition among males for these females would give rise to more and more exaggerated traits until standard natural selection stopped the process from escalating. The idea is roughly the preference would set up a positive feedback loop feedback which would make the selection in a sense run away with itself, hence runaway selection.

A female paradise flycatcher

The other idea, which I love, because it's so seemingly audacious and because its proposer is, is the handicap principle. I have blogged about Zahavi's idea before. Put shortly the idea is that males with exuberant displays are like people who give themselves a handicap in a race, go ahead says the man I will begin 5 minutes after you and I will still beat you! The animal signals the 'goodness' of his genes by surviving despite his handicap and hence a female must want those genes. The crucial thing about the handicap principle is that the signal needs to be honest, it should not fake-able. To have the long tail must be a real cost and a weak male with the tail should suffer or, well, die! The Fisherian view does not have this requirement. And this is a good thing, because we have a criteria then that might allow us to ask with clever experiments which of two possible mechanisms are at play in a particular system.

Is human male flamboyance easily fake-able (anyone can buy flashy clothes) hence useless? Or are human females just less choosy about appearance and do we prefer exaggeration elsewhere?

Now, now, I was thinking bank balances....

Aside: Since my last post was a 'say hello' post, this one is going to be a 'thank you'. Thanks to the many folks who've linked to my blog and said so many nice things! Abi, Rahul, Brian, and Stephen. I don't know everyone who's ever linked but you know who you are, thank you.

They're back

At almost exactly the same time as last year, it's uncanny!

Ok, on an entirely different note, I haven't done this in a while, so it might be time to do it again. Use this post to just say hello, tell me what you'd like more of, less of and if you think I'm getting worse/better at this. I've always been curious about who my readers are and what they might get from this blog. (Apart from the ones I already know off course).