What makes you happy?

Few days back, I came across this article that says, “... ordinary experiences become increasingly associated with happiness as people get older...”. Not taking any position on what it said, I anyway asked myself which experiences made me most happy. I immediately recollected something.  Some two years back, I woke up at around 2 - 3 AM with some unexplained noises outside. Probably I woke up from somewhat deeper sleep and brain wasn’t fully functional for few moments - it had not yet made sense of source of sounds and quickly decided to invoke fear - a good amount of it. I walk to the window and glance outside to find out source of sounds and.. state of my mind changed INSTANTLY. It felt like definition of beauty to the eyes and wonderful tranquility and happiness to the mind. brain swings into action in a moment or two later asking - what is that I am looking at? Right under the tree few feet away, those were two beautiful Antelopes. I knew I shouldn't be seeing them if it was not a dream. few more moments and my brain finally caught up with the reality. Antelopes they were, but not of the size I thought a moment ago. They were near infant age twins of largest Asian antelope - Nilgai and they were those four big, innocent eyes that replaced fear and anxiety with peace and happiness in my mind. for the impact it generated, I would anytime argue it was an extra-ordinary experience, but looking at it objectively, sighting of a Nilgai may not be regarded as that extra-ordinary. So, if what the article said was right, I am getting older, or probably I was born older? Wouldn't I have been equally happy seeing them some twenty years ago too?

Anyways, recently I again had a chance to be in beautiful surroundings that had somewhat similar effect. Standing between bright yellow of mustard flowers, looking at water reflecting yellows and greens and mixed flock of birds adding more life.. All these almost as non pre-planned, unexpected as seeing those Nilgai youngs. As I stood there, I wouldn’t have objected if time stopped and didn’t realise if it was flowing or not. Some shots below, I hope they convey some of the beauty out there.

Overlooked and under-appreciated, some weed flowers

Soon after my previous post wild flowers three months back, I again accumulated a post worth of new flowers - mostly weeds this time. as before, I was hopeful of identifying them but waiting for that means the list only grows longer. So, here is the post that simply lists out photographs of weed flowers I found beautiful. Apologies for not much text to accompany these shots here.

They were mixed with lots of other types of grasses / weeds on ground. as with almost all flowers here, when they flowered, they flowered in huge numbers.

I think this are buds of above but now not sure.

Something similar. in fact, I noticed it was a different kind only while uploading.

Along with red ones, below were in bloom in good numbers and even as red ones declined, they increased and increases in numbers.

Much smaller than even above, but still capable of giving a good competition by scattering purple dots on grounds due to their numbers.

These existed in less numbers and saw only once or twice.

These joined the show somewhat late - or at least I noticed them later. Not only bright red flowers here that was adding to the beauty but leaves also appeared beautiful.

These are smaller than most of above, mostly seen just outside home. they are small enough that not easy to notice them elsewhere. I even wondered if they were less interested in spreading pollen and more in catching insects. Not that I really expect to see any such rare plant on my doorstep. So far haven't seen any insect visiting it.

Another white flower, its bigger than all of above. appeared less dramatic compared to previous flower.

Okay, it appeared less dramatic only till I got this shot. Looks like a brave ant trying to see what's inside this grand entrance.

One more white flower. I wish to take a shot with enough magnification where can see details of individual flower here. should be a tough task though.

One more..

and this is the smallest flower yet that I have seen. another doorstep flower.

Okay, I guess world may exist tomorrow too and instead of making this post longer and longer, let me end this here. will cover remaining flowers some other time. Ending with these brightly coloured flowers for which no macro lens is required.

HX300 - End word

Remember HX300? ok, I too thought I wont be coming up with yet another post talking about it.. Well, I had bought that camera on pretext of gift to Mom. I think you see the benefits straight away. I felt less guilty about indulging in expense I wasn’t 100 percent sure was justified, met a long standing demand to have a camera for her and I get a camera for what looks like free. and it seemed to work. She happily used it in fully automatic mode and I experimented with manual mode – results of which you saw earlier. but, just about a month of switching between Auto and Manual and.. Mode dial gave up..

All-Plastic broken and detached dial in my hand left me completely shocked. Can Sony product be like that? With detached mode dial if I put lots of efforts, I can still turn dial a full round in 10-15 minutes, which is as good as not usable. so I have put that in Auto mode which is most useful for Mom - whose camera it is after all. A drastic reduction in total usefulness of the camera and great disappointment for me. I am unable to decide if I was more disappointed to see all my accumulated camera budget go waste or seeing a brand I usually value highly come out with this build quality or was it disappointment with self that I made a wrong choice. either way, it is Very disappointing. and no, I am told that the broken dial is not covered under warranty. They want me to pay nearly 20 per cent of what I paid for the camera to fix a new piece of around one inch of plastic.

I am normally a good customer to have. I talk happily about a product if turns out good and keep quite when I find I selected wrong product. but this time, I have already talked so much about HX300, mostly positive things, that not saying now that it’s a great camera under right conditions but only if it stays usable. would not be fair play on my part just in case someone evaluating the camera takes some inputs from what I had written here.

Consolation prize to whole story is, per se a camera was not a bad gift. It was a wonderful Sunny day after many Sunless cold days and Mom went ahead to find some birds. and, luckily on this day, Auto mode was all that was needed.

A resident. This is a saved frame from video. It gives quite usable size. this is a good crop as well.

Power of 50x. Though Auto mode, 50x and a beginner doesn't make a good combination for most of the time. and beginner or not, not zooming in when you can is a very difficult thing to do.

Two shots I liked a lot. Specially the River Lapwing. It actually was better than my best shot till date.

Telling time by Calendar

When I was writing ‘telling time by flowers’, I remembered something. Even today I am not a traveller and that was the first time I was travelling to outside my state on my own. I had to change train at Mumbai and had nearly whole day in my hand there. I was to utilise that time visiting a relative’s place. So early in the morning, minutes after the Sunrise, I get down from train from where I had to exist on West. Not seeing any signboard, I walk to shoeshiner sitting on the platform and ask, which side is west? He looks at me, looks up in the direction where Sun was rising and points to opposite direction. yes, that was embarrassing but I still loved how instead of just pointing me to west, he chose to teach me to look to Sun to know direction. 

As I was looking at flowers indicating time, thought what if I didn't have watches and calendars available and was to create them myself? Question is already answered by many civilisations independently many times so its unlikely I can think from scratch, but I can look at those answers and try to choose my favourite. Simplest and most useful would be an assembled calendar rather than written and memorized one. Day starting at Sunrise, a larger unit of time based on lunar cycle that causes so many things to oscillates based on itself and a unit of time that covers one full cycle of repeating seasons. Seems fine except that its a system where different levels of time keeping are defined based on different things. Year-Sun, Month-Moon, Day-Sun. ok, join them with self adjusting, self correcting mechanism. stars come handy for this purpose. All good but what about the feeling that its MY calendar? Well, I can choose my year start to coincide with start of any month, preferably one that is kind to human life. Indeed when I look around, there are different lunisolar calendars starting at different month.

I haven’t managed to understand either solar or lunar calendars yet – not even sure if there is much to understand there. Solar looks like talking about a year, a period that is approximately 1/12 of a year and a period that is approximately 1/365 of a year – really wasted opportunities to make sense of both month and day (though, in our far from nature lifestyle, where active hours have lost its relation to daylight, I don’t have much to argue against fixed length day starting at any random minute. OR, probably is it more a reason to argue against it because switching back to real day definition can prove a very useful tool to correct our disconnect from nature?). At some point, (when it didn't even used to occur to me that you can say east/west looking at Sun), I would have thought it was simpler and lunisolar a complex calendar of the two. Today, however I think that what gets defines naturally and is rule based is much more simple than something unvarying for sake of it and requires memory not logic/cycles in nature to describe. Despite being such a inefficient calendar, you do see this blog dated per one anyways. I think calendar we use tell us something about time we live in too.

Some shots around Gaillardia flowers

My first camera was a mobile camera and when I bought it, I was still long way from fully discovering that my happiness varies directly with my closeness to nature. I used that mobile camera as someone having no appreciation of either photography or nature uses but anyways among those initial pictures, flowers turned out one of the main subjects. My interest in flowers have gone through few iterations since then. To start with ANY flower anywhere was interesting - and mostly what I saw were city flowers -those decorative ones. with time, I started preferring those in more natural setting and later developed more appreciation of seasonal flowering of trees but didn't fully lose attraction to decorative, human managed flowers till recently.
Off late though with macro range introducing me to those beautiful weed flowers and thereby making more sensitive to natural flora around me overall, I also started asking - which flower is that? I haven't managed Identifying more than small numbers yet but it kind of signaled start of proper interest in flowers/plants. and then, managed, decorative plants suddenly started looking.. very artificial, unnatural, something that I should ignore completely.

Then my view changed again very recently. credit goes to my time spent around Gaillardia flowers few weeks back. I will come back to reasoning a bit later but let me first share few shots of and in/around the flowers. 

Gaillardia

Common Silverline

Indian common shot silverline

I saw this different looking silverline on the flower other day. its first time I saw it - somewhat bigger than common silverlines (or at least the silverlines commonly seen here). its just fitting in the minimum magnification I get with my reverse macro set-up. it also behaved differently to common silverline - it sat and sat there, had no effect on me taking shots from macro range except that after a while it noticed me, must have thought I was a big flower and tried landing on my head that I politely resisted. looks like Indian common shot silverline.
On one of the sunny day, I was looking for some insects and noticed this very small spider.

Initially, the spider itself appeared very small to me but as my sense of scale got normalised wrt to spider, I noticed lots of movement just under the feet of spider. I feared fate of whatever was moving there but soon suspected I wasn't seeing full picture. a little more time and it looked like those somethings - transparent ants were actually pretty safe. for spider and they existed at almost non overlapping depths.

I had seen these ants before too but I think below are probably best shots I managed so far.

I think you can never be happy too long while working with macro range. Sure enough as I managed to take ant shot, much smaller aphids were around as next challenge. (Aphids: Sap sucking insects - I tried to read wiki page -couldn't understand much but in short they sound like bad things from certain perspective and are one of the successful life forms) I thought they were ant nymph initially. Unlike most ants and aphids I had seen before, ants, either those in above shots or other bigger black ones weren't interacting with these creatures. two in below shots look different kinds.

Did I give impression that aphids were small enough? well, how about below shot? they were nothing more than white dots to unaided eye. an aphid exoskeleton? One flower had large number of them. probably syncronised shedding of exoskeleton.

There were others too enjoying their existence on the flowers. below individual for an example. this pollen bathed hairy thing was doing some slow form of dance. it kept swinging from side to side while keeping its legs firmly attached to surface. also walked around slowly and just as I termed it a slow walking creature, it flew away.. I sure remember it flying away but dont see any wings on him leaving me unsure of its flight ability.

and this tiny spider. It initially reciprocated my interest in him but later got going with his business. Evaluating a jump to upper floor here.

Caterpillars are something I don't usually manage to see and was happy to see this beautifully coloured individual. Colours not only matched that of flower, it also looked so much like one of the fallen leaflets from tree above that were everywhere. see photos below.  

Plus if you recall, there were some shots in and around these flowers in previous post of insect shots.
I found these flowers so interesting that spent nearly two weeks only around them. They again changed my view that non native, human planted decorative flowers are only showpieces. These plants appeared to feel completely at home and well accepted by others too. so like before, I again may find myself clicking all kinds of flowers native or decorative so far as they appear happy with rest of nature around them.