Another trawl through my archives. This one is from quite a while back, from my last trip to India to be exact. This was shot at the same place and time as the one here. However, in this case, I did not do much post-processing.

As the exif data suggests this is from a little while back. I haven’t shot anything over this weekend so I raided the archives and came up with this! There is something about the way he is looking at something, equal parts melancholia and plain curiosity that caught my eye.

On a slightly technical note I thought of cropping out the leg peeping into the shot on the left but in the end decided to leave it as the resultant crop was looking a bit abrupt.

Love is a warm feeling that makes people feel elevated. By the same token, love can also make people experience the darker side of human emotions like jealousy, anger, pain and trauma. The potential for love to go from good to sour is very real in every relationship. La Femme d’a Cote is a film about two lovers who experience this two-sided nature of love throughout their relation.

Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) lives with his wife and five year old son in a quiet little village. He is a loving husband and a caring father. The happy family life is shattered by the arrival of their new neighbours. Outwardly, everything is ok. The two sets of neighbours do the things expected of them, like invite each other over. But we learn that Bernard and Mathilde are in fact former lovers who separated due to misunderstandings. The passionate feelings they had for each other haven’t quite disappeared, though that they are married to other people. In fact, the proximity serves to reignite passions.

Throughout the film, their relationship displays a constructive and a destructive side. It is as if the ex-lovers, now reunited, are not able to decide whether to love fully or remain bitter about the past. Bernard is particularly affected by Mathilde’s re-entry into his life and shows it outwardly. Mathilde, is also equally affected, but her ardour is tempered by a conflicting feeling of wanting to move on.

The dynamics of the relationship are too much for Mathilde and she suffers a nervous breakdown. In hospital she experiences extreme mood swings and depression. Bernard meanwhile has managed to contain his emotions, barely.

Is the relationship doomed to be trapped in this conflicting mode? The only way out of it seems to be a violent catharsis. Mathilde returns home one night and makes love to Bernard. She then shoots him and then pulls the trigger on herself. At last the lovers are where they would have wanted to be; neither with anybody else, nor with each other.

But is this the only way it could have ended? I don’t believe so. In choosing a violent end for the lovers, the director (Francois Truffaut) seems to be suggesting that such conflicting emotions cannot exist without clashing and will self destruct. I don’t quite agree with this reading.

It was a chilly evening and I was waiting for the bus. When it finally arrived at the bus stop I boarded it. Inside, it was not so crowded that I couldn’t get any breathing space…but crowded enough that when I walked to the rear I brushed against elbows and stepped on some toes. People were cursing me under their breath. One guy was singing a song. He was standing facing the window and holding onto the overhead bar. His body was swaying to his own tune. I stood silently beside him. He finished his song and looked around for applause…there was none. Everyone around him was absorbed in their own thoughts. He caught my eye and saw that I was looking at him with interest…time for another song. ‘Pa, pa, pa, ni, dha, pa’…he sang. He was singing loudly and he was enjoying what he was doing. A few people around us gave a weary look, as though disturbed from some serious contemplation by a madman, shrugged, muttered to their neighbours about ‘public drunkenness’ and went back to staring out the window. ‘Mr Drunk’ didn’t notice. He had already moved on to his next song, an old MGR song that must have been quite a hit in its time. I didn’t understand the words, but did it matter? He rolled his eyes with each note, jerked his head this side and that as if indicating each rasa and gave me a big smile. “Saar, ne ennake marakave mudiyadu,�? (you will never forget me) he told me. I nodded and gave him an encouraging smile. That was what he needed. He launched into his next song. Maybe this was a Shivaji Ganeshan number. He was a single man, all-in-one movie orchestra. In between stanzas he would do the percussion and then the flutes and the veena. The low lighting of the bus lent a surreal-comic tinge to his face. A few people were now looking at us. What did they make of the spectacle? A drunk disturbing the ‘public peace’ and an apparently sober youg man egging him on! I was fascinated with my new found friend. The bond that had formed was only visible to the two of us. He evidently didn’t give two hoots about maintaining the decorum at public places. He was happy doing what he was doing, giving expression to his joy, paying obeisance to his screen idols, maybe living out his childhood fantasy of being a singer. And us sane people were pitying this ‘insane’ man? I looked around me. I saw the sad faces of my fellow travelers. Maybe the one sitting in front of me had financial problems, the one behind me had marital problems and the one on my left couldn’t get an erection. We put the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’ into air tight categories. And woe betide any man who accidently gets locked up in the jail marked ‘insane’. He is instanly judged by the world of the sane. But that night on the bus I couldn’t figure out who was really sane – the half-dead zombies all around me – and who insane – the merry man dancing to his own tune?

The last one, for now, from the macro studies I tried. Proper exposure is something I’ve to learn to do well.

I know that the focus is not spot on in this but I liked the delicate tracery of the veins so I decided to put it up.

The next few shots will be some macro work I tried with some leaves I picked from my garden and the newly acquired macro lens I was talking about yesterday. I’m in love with the wonderful world of macro now!

This image was actually a complete mistake. I was playing around with my newly acquired Minolta 100mm Macro lens when I inadvertently pushed the shutter release. As I was inside my house, in low light conditions the shutter was open for all of 30 seconds! I naturally thought the image would be one hell of a stinker but to my surprise I liked the result. So here it is. In case you are wondering what the blurred object is, it is the inner side of my Minolta 50mm prime lens! (A small corner on the left side of the photo was cropped out).

This was taken at the same place and at the same time as the one put up yesterday and yet this is almost exactly a mirror image of yesterday’s photo. Where yesterday’s image is peaceful, idyllic and beautiful this one is dark, foreboding and ominous. Can’t resist making a cheesy comment here, it is like good and bad, facing off each other. This scene was towards the north while yesterday’s was in the western part of the sky if I remember correctly.

Fell in love with the rich green of the meadow and its contrast to the blue of the sky. It would have been even better if I had been carrying a proper wide angle lens for this.