My recent developments in my office have increased my official work by twice than what I had before. I hardly have time for music or photography now. Because of my tiring schedule, I preferred to sleep like a log on sunday mornings. It was high time since I had done any photography. And so I thought I was going to make this sunday morning, a productive one.

So I woke up early in the morning this sunday, at around 5am, and made my way to Besant Nagar beach. The bike ride was awesome. There was clean fresh air, cool breeze and empy roads. Besant Nagar is about 20kms away from home. It was quite a lengthy and enjoyable ride. When I reached Besant Nagar beach I made my way towards the Broken Bridge. This is the back water area of the Besant Nagar beach. It was a dissappointing sight. The beach was dirty with all the garbage dumped there. The water seemed hardly use-able. More about the back waters and the broken bridge later. First I want to talk about something else.

 

THE CLOSE ENCOUNTER:

So I was shooting pictures of the bridge the birds and the buildings there, and then I saw this buffalo under the bridge. With those huge horns, the buffalo looked majestic. I mustered the courage to walk a bit close to it and take a shot. I placed down my tripod at what seemed like the closest and the safest possible distance from the buffalo. She seems to have noticed me, however, she didn’t look happy about it.

 

 

 

 

I started walking towards my bike. I had to go a round-about way because of the bushes in between. I reached my bike. I placed my back pack on the seat and was putting away my camera and my tripod in their bags. Then, I heard a twig snap. Just the like way you hear in slasher-horror movies. I turned around to see this.

 

 

I turned back to my bike to continue packing my bag and I saw around six buffaloes, standding right there and all of them staring at me. They did not move at all. It creeped the hell out of me. I slowly continued packing when I heard a very loud MOOOO!!!!! There was this huge white male buffalo walking towards me from behind the herd. I could roughly translate that loud moo as a battle cry that meant “FORWARD!!!” because all the buffaloes started walking towards me. They were not charging, but walking, staring right at me.

I was reaching for my bag for my camera to shot again. That’s when I heard the male go “MOOOO!!!!” once again. The next moment I grabbed my bag, camera, tripod and the bike keys, turned away from my bike and started walking briskly. I didn’t run. My instinct told me, that running will just tempt them to chase me. So I walked, fast. I walked towards the beach, towards water. I some how felt that it will work….. And it did. They stopped following. I heaved a sigh of relief.

I was very close to the shore. I turned around to see that I had left my bike in the middle of a herd of buffaloes. I couldn’t do much. I turned back towards the seashore. That’s when I saw this guy fishing there. He didn’t have a fishing net or a fishing rod. He was fishing with a single nylon string tied to a piece of wood at the end.

 

FISHERMAN AT BESANT NAGAR BEACH – RAJENDARNATH SINGH

I walked upto him. To strike a conversation I said “vanakkam” (means hello, in the local language tamil). But this guy replied “Hi, good morning. How are you?”. I was in a shock. Meet fisherman Rajendarnath.

 

 

 

 

 

That was the close encounter I had today. I did a lot of shots of the broken bridge and the buildings around it. I’m not done processing them yet. I’ll be posting them real soon.

 

TECHNICALITIES:

I’ve shot all the images using my Nikon L120. I’ve processed all the black and white shots in Nik Silver Efex. All the colour shots of buffaloes and the cat fish shot have been processed in Nik Colour Efex and in Topaz adjust.

The colour shot of the fisherman holding up his fishing line took the maximum work time. It’s a HDR image which i did using -2, 0, +2 exposure levels. There was no way I could’ve shot that in a single exposure with the harsh morning sun right behind him. The old man was kind enough to wait for me to shoot all the three exposures. Since he was not exactly standing still and the fishing line was swaying in the wind, there were quite a many shadows and ghosts in the resultant HDR image. I had to use layermasking in photoshop to correct the noise. I purposefully added the lens flare in photoshop.