SoFoBoMo Day-7

Spent a couple of hours at Smita's studio, talking about her new paintings while she was working on a few consecutive canvases with acrylic paint. The most interesting, was how she works some of her paintings up-side-down and gets all the background effects she wants... then flip them over right-side-up and work the details....
Apparently, working with the painting «backward» she looks at her compositions completely differently, and sees things unlike me as a bystander did. Only when she started to point out what was going to happen next, and what the smaller details were did I see it «her way». 
I need to do one more session with Smita and get some of the images I had in my mind but was unable to make today....

More later!

A pair of Bulbuls [Red-Vented. Pycnonotus cafer bengalensis] had made a nest in a Ficus shrub, 3 chicks hatched just over a week ago and today for the first time they were hopping on the branches of the big Mahogany tree and in a short while had learned to fly! The mother had brought something in her beak, but would not go to the nest to feed the chicks. She sat on a branch about 15 feet away and keep chirping loudly, encouraging the chicks to come get their breakfast. First one then the second were brave enough to attempt the jump out of the nest and into the high branches. I've been watching out for the third, but there is no sign of it. Wonder what happened?

Mother Bulbul gets very agitated as she spotted me on the balcony [even though I did my best to hide behind some shrubs] and was screeching and hopping around trying to get the chicks to go back quickly to the safety of their nest. The chicks followed her a bit, but finally stayed put on the branch. Then one of them made a great big attempt, flapped its tiny wings and managed a short flight. The 2 chicks were later back on the branch, huddled together and content sunning themselves!

Because she had spotted me, I had to abandon the stability of the tripod I'd setup and my only option was to try steady myself against the wall of the balcony and shoot hand-held [300mm f/4 EDIF lens]. Not the best shots, therefore. But it was great to see the chicks finally up and about out of their nest.

SoFoBoMo day 6 - a bit of expansion.

I'd started out the SoFoBoMo project creating a profile of just 2 Bangladeshi artists - Zeba & Juise.  I'm now expanding it to include a few other artists as well. Rokeya Sultana, a Bangladeshi artist; and 2 an Indian artists living in Bangladesh: Ujwala Prabhu and  Smita Srivastava, all just said yes they would be happy to be featured. GREAT! I am waiting confirmation from a couple of other artists..... hopefully they too will consent. With the addition and expansion, time required to complete this SoFoBoMo is shrinking! I have only until May 20th to get it all done. The actual shooting is the easy part, the final editing and selecting of images; the post-processing and then the formatting of the Scribus book etc takes up a lot of time.