More on the road, Indian style

There are annoying reflections from the car windows but I still like this glimpse of village life seen from the highway: getting water.

Color or black and white?

¿Por qué no los dos?

Some pictures just work better in black and white, even in India, like the roadside stand in Jaipur on the right. Black and white makes the detail pop in a way it didn't in the color version.

But most of India can only be captured in color, like the picture on the left, which I took from the car on the way back from Keoladeo National Park. I love those lavender and turquoise bricks.

Life in the time of coronavirus

Restaurants are still limited to outdoor dining, so even places that were always indoor only are setting up areas like this so they can open up again.

Astronomy Tuesday

The Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of my favorites -- because it's beautiful, but also because it actually looks like a butterfly!

I've posted Hubble images of it before, but I think this one, released last month, is my favorite so far: a filmy blue creature in a garden of stars.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Kastner (RIT)

Monday elephant blogging

And here is Sampa, the beautiful rescue elephant I got to spend an afternoon with in Jaipur.

She looks a lot smaller when she's in a picture by herself, but standing next to her, I only came up to the top of her trunk. I hope she's still enjoying her retirement, and grabbing all the extra alfalfa she can get.

Sunday bird blogging

I posted a similar picture of these painted storks in Keoladeo National Park back in 2017, but can't resist another one. They somehow manage to look both vaguely sinister and hysterically funny at the same time, and that's a hard combination to pull off.

I will never get used to those knees.

Saturday reflections

I played around with the saturation and added lens effects, and this extremely ordinary reflection of a building in Hell's Kitchen on a summer afternoon turned into something I rather like. A lot.

You know it's July when emptying the dishwasher at ten o'clock in the morning makes you break a sweat.

Random Amber Fort

Two last pictures from the Amber Fort -- I like the symmetry of the stairs and the domes in the picture on the left, and I am always a sucker for scaffolding.

You see bamboo scaffolding all over Asia, and though it looks dangerously flimsy, it's apparently quite strong -- I was once startled by window washers taking a cigarette break outside my 13th floor office window in Hong Kong, completely oblivious to the fact that only a few spindly stalks of bamboo lay between them and a grisly death on the sidewalk far below.

I couldn't do it, but then I can't think of any scaffolding I'd be willing to climb, no matter how strong it looked.

Urban poetry

The temple in the corner is a clue that we're still in Jaipur.

The detail that I love in this view from the Amber Fort is that clothesline towards the center of the picture, and the brightly colored laundry in green, red, and white.

Flashback: the Amber Fort

The picture on the right is cropped from a larger panorama -- I just love the detail of those walls and towers snaking over the mountains.

I don't think I ever actually walked through that garden; there was too much to see in the few hours that I had there. At least I have pictures.

Astronomy Tuesday

A beautiful look at Comet Neowise, which is gracing our evening skies at the moment.

I'm not going to get to see it, unfortunately. It's been beastly hot, and while there might be an unobstructed sightline over the Hudson, that feels like a very long way to walk with a mask in this weather. And the light pollution would still make it hard to see. But I am enjoying all the pictures!

Image Credit and Copyright: Miloslav Druckmuller (Brno University of Technology)

Monday flashback

These arches at the Amber Fort in Jaipur were marble, so there was none of the typical Indian bright color to distract from the design, but the image still works so much better in black and white.