Country side - Spring, TX

Went out to see a pumpkin patch but ended our journey with a country side dive. We stopped by a hay bale and here is me and Rishab.

Memories of Volleyball

From last 1 year we have been playing volleyball. Cypress lake's indoor game center was very handy specially during winter season. On summer days it was even more fun to play on the sand. It was always more challenging to play outside as we need enough people to play and need to close the game on time to avoid mosquito bites and darkness.

In the picture from left to right Leslie, Deepak, Udai, Me, Anshul & hari. Anuj was taking picture :).
Another picture of our old volleyball team (this picture was missing many regular member).

from left to right Chaitanya, Prasanna, Leslie, Manoj, Sharad, Vibhor, Shashank and me.
Also posing are Venila & Abdulla.

I and Leslie always looked forward to play volleyball as often as possible. 

My first painting - New orleans, Louisiana

As part of official celebration of a project go live, we painted New Orleans logo at Corks n Canvas, Mandeville, LA

The picture i was drawing is a logo of New Orleans city, which is also used by many other such as New Orleans Saints.  

It was my very first paint. With instructor and wine along side, my first painting was a great memento of the project, people and #Louisiana.

Sanjay explores Painting

Chevron made our team lunch much more interesting by organizing it  in Corks N Canvas at Mandeville, LA. Part from 

Cooking

This skill has been one that had never paid attention to and often sounded as one of the important one. Some of my friends here in Mandeville are real good cooks.
After getting inspired by Praveen, I started cooking one sunday evening.
Tried preparing Onion Pakoda - a snack. It was a rainy day and Pakoda's were really tasty, they were all over in no time.

Next week i tried preparing Biriyani. Although this was not easy one to prepare as it had lot of things to be done very accurately, i ended up cooking it quite good.

 I would keep exploring to cook and hope to claim to be a good enough cook.

Light & Photograhly - Focusing

I havent been able to spend time to learn all the tricks of professional photography, but definitely learnt a few basics. I would like to share the simplest trick of all Focusing....

Tip 1:Focusing
Where you focus while clicking your picture matters most if your camera is on manual setting. This is specially true on DSLR (I do not know if any one of you still use SLRs, I guess they are obsolete) camera's.

If you focus on light source(the brighter part of the picture), your camera captures more light but will not capture the finer details as in this Photo.

On the other hand If you focus on darker parts of your frame(In this case i focused on the darker bulb holder) you get to capture fine details along with nice colors.

On the other hand if the camera is on auto mode, based on camera model, it uses some algorithms to find the best possible focus/setting (But these pictures generally do not turnout to be as good as they can be).

Conclusion : Learning these tricks will help you captures some great pictres even in the very ordinary setup.

Want to learn more?