Finally the weather in Sarasota has become awesome. It reminds me of Bangalore and NorCal .. there is no humidity, nice cool breeze, and lovely sunshine. I went to Siesta Key on Saturday to see the Volley Ball matches and to  my surprise the it became so cold and the waves were gushing in. This is the first time in last 3 months that I really enjoyed being outside. here are some photographs for your viewing:

 
I wish I had asked his name. Met him on my way back to Bangalore just outside Puducherry. He got really excited when I took his photograph and showed it to him. I think I will buy a Polaroid next. And when I meet such sweet people, will give them their photographs...

 
Here are few of my most interesting photographs on Flickr. Some of the pics are already posted in different entries so I just selected a few others. Hope you enjoy them ..

 
You don't always have to be at the beach waiting for the sunset, or at the Rocky Mountains during the early hours to capture the first sunlight , or in Scotland to capture an awesome landscape. At times all you need to do is go to your backyard, open your eyes and look around. yes that's right .. there are a lot of interesting stuff back there.

Instead of getting up at 5 in the morning and driving to a place for an hour to capture the sunrise at 6, you can still be in your bed, enjoy the sweet dream you were having and get up at 6 instead and wear your gown and go out in your back yard and you might see what I saw : -

 

 
Since I travel due to work and live in hotels all the time, it becomes difficult to even have a small studio style lights, and backgrounds and reflectors. Most of all even if you own a small miniature setup its difficult to pack it up and move around with it. So, I try to make the best of what I have.
I use chart papers, gift wrap papers as background, sometimes even different color plastic bags which I get when I go grocery shopping. I also have a lazer torch, a led torch for various lighting effects. I carry an nice sturdy but relatively lite tripod with me. I even sometimes put a chair against the wall and use a lighter to achieve various effects.
What I am trying to say here is that one should have some creativity and rest follows. I do sometimes feel the limitation of all these things and the execution goes for a toss at times. At times you don't have the perfect background, and sometimes have to go over board with post processing. Fortunately I did get some good results from all the experiments I have been trying ..

Here are a few examples ..

 
This was tough week at office. Specially because of the long weekend we lost 1 day, so the pressure was more to get the work done for the week in just 4 days. I was pretty tired last evening and was so happy the weekend was here. I guess I am turning in to a " phorography-holic " if that's even a word. Instead of kicking back and relaxing and having a drink or two  I just packed up my gear and was out.

Last week when I was scouting the city for some nice view points I landed up in Longboat key. There is a nice marina there and it gives you a nice view of the high rises of the city of Sarasota and the long bridge that connects the keys to the land.

Now coming to the topic of this post, I have noticed that in all my night shots of this city, all the buildings look yellow and golden in color. This mostly I realized when I took the shots below. I then looked around and I could only see all yellow/gold colored lights and I was like hmmmm ..

 
The first thing that comes to mind when you say Florida is BEACHES and then the others would be Miami, Bikinis, sunshine .. etc  :-D .  Well there is much more. Florida has the 3rd best National Park called the Everglades. It is a Tropical Wetland which pretty much covers the entire Southern Part of Florida. Human habitation in the southern portion of the Florida peninsula dates to 15,000 years ago.

Here is a Blog of one of the Southern Florida Photographers. If you need more insight about the place you can read about it on his page. As far as my Experience goes with Everglades, I was there 2 days back. It was really a bad day to be there :-) . First of all I was stuck in a thunderstorm just about 10 miles from Shark Valley Visitor Center. Finally when I made it to the place there was not guided tour for the next 2.5 hours. Which I can't blame the team there because it was raining pretty bad, and with the lightening it wasn't really a great idea to be out there. But the rangers were very supportive and enthusiastic, they organized a 3pm tour and took us around.

So Far I have seen alligators only in the Zoos but seeing them in the swamp in their actual habitat was quite exciting. Also finally I got to learn the difference between an Alligator and a Crocodile. For example, Crocs have 120 teeth and Alligators have 80. Crocs are Olive Green in Color and Alligators are black. Crocs are mostly found in Salt water and the latter in fresh water and few more differences.