A Monsoon walk around my village

21 July 2013

After having so much fun on Friday along the majestic Western ghats, I had equally bad day on Saturday. I am not stating the reason, however it was too bad :(. I got up with less enthusiasm on Sunday, savored nice tea made by mother. It was not so much raining too. Some intermittent rains only. However there was greenery all over. Both of our wells were full. I just went down the coconut plantation to see the monsoon streams. They were truly great to see which brought my mood up. I grabbed my camera and sleeping tripod walked all along the stream path. Also paddy fields were occupied by pond herons. The sound of peacock was soothing. The flying bees and butterflies added more glory to the monsoon weather.

Let me start off with landscapes of paddy fields and streams. We have planted paddy saplings on small area for festival purpose. Usually we borrow from other farmers the new paddy every-time for festivals. This time, mother wanted self grown one.

Small Paddy Field

The Monsoon Stream

Monsoon stream passing through canopy

There were lot of butterflies and bugs on flower. How can I miss those shots ;-). Here are few. The images were captured with tele-lens :D in macro mode. Hence not so deep. I want to buy a macro lens however requires permission from mother :-).

I Know humans like this but this is my share!

I am busy here, please move away

Shut off that flash please or else I will fly away!

Don't you have any work?

Later I walked a bit more towards one of the major streams where there was tiny waterfall. I am very much tempted to grab long exposure shots whenever I see gushing water. Lack of ND filter makes it difficult to grab such shots since images get over-exposed. However the overcast weather made some long exposure shots possible with a very high f stop. With f/36 and 1s shutter, I could expose the water properly with surroundings. So here is the milky way. The stability is because of tripod. Even father got excited after seeing it.

MILKY WAY!

Finally one more monsoon video. This time I have clubbed some of train journey videos along beautiful western ghats and clips of my village. Also full HD ;-). Enjoy the great monsoon landscape and glorious train journey through dense rain forest. I have not yet started train journey video editing. It may require a month to fully edit the videos due to old hardware. For sure it will be massive upload as earlier one(around 20-25 mins). Hope you will enjoy the short documentary. Feedback on video quality, perception, improvements or any other aspects are always welcome.

Music: Excerpt from 'A beautiful tomorrow' - A perfect trance music by imperfection. What a marvelous work by imperfection. Absolutely gorgeous melody!

Last Note:

Yesterday my father deliberately called me saying, it has been raining very heavily from past 2 days. Also on Friday, there was continuous rain for 3hours. I really felt jealous and sad :(. It does not rain so much when I am there. I will be travelling again after 2-3 weeks. Hope I will have great time with rain at that time. Beauty of this year's monsoon season is, it has not rested even for a single day. Every day we have atleast 2-3 spells of heavy showers!

Heavy Monsoon Rain [Yenchina Barsa Maarayre] [26-08-2012]

This was the scene on Saturday morning. The same sort of scene could be seen even during afternoon. There was no cloud build up at all till 4PM. It was hot and humid throughout the day and previous day too! [It was sweating like hell]. We had been to temple near Kundapur to attend a function. There was no sign of rain.

SUNNY SATURDAY MORNING

Around 4PM clouds started hovering around Udupi region and at about 6PM stage was set. It did not even start with drizzle. The rains started pouring with full intensity and it did not stop until next day 11AM. The scene was completely opposite to what was observed earlier. From 6:30AM to 9:30AM, it was like a cloudburst with fierceful rain. The speciality was just intense rain, no lightning, no thunder, no gusty wind!

SUNDAY MORNING DELUGE

STREAM AND FARM LAND UNIFIED

OVERFLOWING STREAM

Even though rains receded after 11AM, the floods did not until Monday morning. This was the high intensity rain of the season. Even the upper region like ours were under water for sometime. The stream was overflowing and entire village was under watery gravy.

We had to leave for one more temple on Sunday and here is the video taken during our travel. Watch the scenes of flooding and overflowing stream. There is no Met Observatory in Kaup. The nearest one is Udupi and Mulki which recorded 15 and 19 cms of rain respectively during the deluge day. Most probably Kaup would have recorded more than that.

The video!

Watch the video taken in Canon EOS-550D with 1080 progressive scan and 25fps frame rate. The pictures were taken with Canon SX210IS barring the first one. The video was composed and transformed to MP4 (H.264) format using KDENLIVE. This time I used video bitrate of 18Kbps while still maintaining 384kbps AAC audio

Clubbing all the Monsoon videos, I created small documentary on the Indian Monsoon [even though videos are only from my place :-)]. Nevertheless, you see the same scenes across west coast of India. The video is inspired from one of the videos in youtube (watch it here). Same music used too! Since the videos were shot in Canon SX210IS, there is no 1080p version. I used same encoding as before except for 720p 30fps and 12kbps video bitrate. Please watch and comment for improvements.

Music: Wonderful chillout music Lagoona mana by Christian Rusch

Monsoon Rain in my village

This was on 24-June-2011 when it rained briefly for few minutes. Finally I captured some heavy showers in my camera. It was raining too much a week before which I missed. We have a camera in house however parents are not interested to use it :(. It started to rain around 9:00AM and went on to become heavy shower for about 5 minutes.  However, later in the day sky was clear with few clouds hovering.

The Monsoon has been sluggish this time in India with too much flooding in Assam and less rain in eastern side. Too much pacific typhoons also have monsoon clouds away from India. Ghat areas of Karnataka has not seen much rain too. Even Bangalore had lowest rain in June after 112 years. Hope everything will be alright in mid of July.

No music this time since I wanted to maintain natural sound of rain. Please watch the video and share your thoughts. Hope I will get opportunity to capture torrential rains somewhere around July.

Pray for good monsoon every year throughout India.