Patriot Act does not water down civil liberties.
-George W. Bush Jr.

Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-Benjamin Franklin

(Note-22.05.06: Unfortunately, my laptop crashed yesterday and looks like I’ve to give it in for repair. It might be gone for a few weeks. So I don’t think I’ll able to post quite as regularly as before. I’ll try to post, if possible, from this Mac in my lab. Fortunately, I made a backup of my photos, lab data etc., a few days back so hopefully I haven’t lost anything. Keep your fingers crossed and do keep visiting!)

Here is something from my garden. It comes from a weed which grows everywhere here and has these puffy, very delicate feather-like balls at the tip of their stems. No idea what they are called though. Does anyone know?

I didn’t realize that I had passed the 200 photo mark a few days back. So this is to mark that although it technically isn’t the 200th photo.

This is one of the circus performers from yesterday’s photo in the final stage of a sommersault.

I don’t know how clear it is from the photo but this is not a mirror image. It is actually two different circus performers held up by two different hands! The photo is cropped and flipped horizontally from the original.

Another one from the circus. This guy did some amazing stuff along with a fellow gymnast.

A little over a week ago I went to a circus with some friends, a circus which is apparently one of the best and most well known in Germany. Of course, my camera went with me and I got some photos I’m satisfied with. Here is one of them.

I’ve never really posted any fun shots here so inspite of my misgivings I decided to post this. The woman to the right is my friend Katya whom the regulars among you may recognize from [here](http://www.visual.arthedains.com/index.php?showimage=106). I had gone with her to a Vivienne Westwood retrospective in Dusseldorf, a city close by. After we had seen the show we were walking around near the Rhine when we saw the poster and she asked me to take a photo of her next to it. After the usual ‘I was here’ snap I asked her to do an imitation of Westwood in the poster. This is what she came up with!

Here is the huge Hofburg palace in Vienna, sometimes refered to as the mini-Versailles. This photo has undergone extensive post-processing. There wasn’t much dynamic range in the original image and therefore I increased this by quite a bit. It is now as close as possible to the way I had originally visualized it. It is also cropped and perspective corrected.

This one is dedicated to these five nice people. They are from India and are studying law there. I ran into them in Vienna. We had some great time together.