Shooting @ 10x

I have just bought a cool Nikon Coolpix S10 digicam.

And the two best things about the camera are a whopping 10x Optical zoom and a swivel lens. Alongwith it I am using a SanDisk 2GB SD card which can take 680+ shots at full resolution and minimum compression...
You can read the review of the camera at http://www.dpreview.com/news/0608/06082411nikons10.asp

Some observations till now:

• The Optical zoom is awesome and works like a breeze
• The swivel lens allows to take snaps from creative angles without you needing to bend
• It has an exhaustive list of scene modes
• You can't use optical zoom while capturing a video
• It has a Time lapse mode for movie which allows you to shot movie snippets at regular interval which can be used for making a Time Lapse Movie
• It has a sports composite mode which take 16 composite shots of a sport scene and make a 4x4 collage of that.
• The UI and controllers take some time to get used to
• There is some noise in night landscape images.
• While shooting at 10x, the hands should be extremely steady. Tripod recommended.

Burn Baby Burn

I have moved my blog's default feed to FeedBurner. It will help me in analyzing blog visits and subscription data. The new blog feed URI is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nerd-beta

The old feed URI is no longer available.

The one thing I like about feedburner is that it also integrates my del.icio.us bookmarks in my feeds. Which means, know you can also check which sites I am visiting and bookmarking.

In future, I will also integrate my flickr account so that the feed becomes a one-stop-shop for all the updates from me.

By the River Ganges, I jumped and rafted

After all those boring weekends, It was a good change.

After one week of planning, one day of cancellation and one hour replanning, we finally set off for Rishikesh on Friday Night. It was a tiring journey and we reached the destination saturday morning.

As the camps were not available at that moment, we started playing cricket. Mind you, I was playing cricket after light years and for the next two days I faced the repurcussions in form of a painful shoulder.

Next was a good bath at river Ganges. Earlier, I was aquaphobic, but after this bath, I was not... I still don't know how to swim, but atleast I am no longer scared of water.

Then a trip to Tehri dam. It was huge... and that is an understantement. Thanks to Prakhar, we got permission to visit the powerhouse tunnel and it was mind blowing.. Loved that trip.

And if you think that was enought for the day, the best is yet to follow..

When we came back to Rishikesh from Tehri, it was already 10 PM. Now it was time for some fun at river coast in a moon lit night. The feeling is too good to be described in a blog.

EOD

The next day morning, it was time to go to Neer Garh Water Fall. It was a half an hour trek from our camp and was fun. We had fun in the water for next 1 hour (at the place depicted in the third snap on the aforementioned website). Time to return back to camp and go for the climax... Rafting..

Initially, I was feeling a bit nervous about this whole rafting thing. As I don't know swimming, it adds to the pressure. But leaving my nervousness aside, I sat on raft and we started for the journey which I will never forget in the times to come.

We started slowly, but gained good pace during the course of rafting. We sailed through many rapids some of which has very weird names like Return to Sender, Tee Off, Roller Coaster, Double Trouble etc. That was adventorous..

Next was a jump in the river... As I told earlier, I don't feel very comfortable in water, but having a Life Jacket and five trustworthy friends by my side, I jumped.. and we floated for almost 4-5 kilometers in the river.. It was a wonderful feeling, floating in the water... heads up... watching the sky..... simply too good.

Time for a break, and some adventuruous friends of mine did some diving practice in the river... Back to the raft and another sailing session of 5-6 miles and we are at the end of our journey.

I will not forget those days.