My first birding and a stupid attempt of photography

This was supposed to happen and with our passionate wild life photographer friend Imti, its driving crazy photography sessions. It was on my birthday 26th dec and was a quick trip to Rangantittu bird santuary, which was planned previous night 11pm and for Anji it was kinda unplanned as we picked him up from his house that morning :). We just assembled at Venu's place, myself, imti and Venu got up early and all set at 5 am, but as usual Chandru was late and we had to pick him up from his place and on the way Anji too.

Very quickly we picked up all the guys and were zipping through the mysore road highway in Venu's new found santro car. We were determined to be at rangantittu early morning sun shine. By 9:30 am we reached Rangantittu with a very obvious pitstop on the way at Kamat lokruchi for breakfast!

Located at a distance of 125km from Bangalore, Ranganathittu bird sanctuary is one of the most popular bird sanctuaries in India. Large number of migratory birds arrive here during winter from across the world.

Route: Bangalore -> Ramnagaram -> Bidadi -> Maddur -> Mandya -> Srirangapatta -> Ranganathittu

We hired a personal boat at Rangatittu for 300 bugs and set afloat waters with cameras in hand. Imti with his professional camera and Anji with his almost SLR camera but dont know what to do with it and myself with my basic Olympus camera and know how to use it but dont know photography techniques...Imti used to teach us to shoot the pictures in sunshine only otherwise we can dark and distorted images. With some gyan from Imti and some left our creativity which I last used in engineering exams to write big long answers to get some marks :) did click some photos of birds...yes a stupid attempt I call it.

We bugged the boatman to take us nearer to the birds and did click some snaps of birds, it was here I got attracted to photography, I decided that next time i come here it will be with some SLR camera and some basic knowledge of photography :). We could easily spot open billed stork, river teen, stone plover etc.

From there we headed to balamuri falls where we swam in the river kaveri and had fun under the falls and started off to Kokare bellur which was on the way back, with a 5km deviation but the road was in pathetic condition, which we could manage to drive though. It was off season so there were very few birds there, managed some photo shots and started off to bangalore and by 5 pm we came back.
Here is the work: http://picasaweb.google.co.in/skmanju/BirdsAsSeenByMyLens#

Cheers
Manjunath