testmeat photoblog

goa may be the smallest state in india, but it's not so easy to get around if you don't have your own vehicle. after a few days in the south i travelled north to meet up with a travel friend, it was a journey that would have taken a few hours and an extortionate amount of rupees by taxi. using public transport it would take a longer, and require either 3 or 4 buses, but cost a fraction of the price and i was adamant i wouldn't pay for an overpriced taxi. the first couple of bus journeys were fairly smooth and comfortable, however some kind of mix up meant that bus 3 drove south instead of north and dropped me back at bus spot 2. ultimately the whole journey involved 6 buses over 6 exhausting hours, but at least i made it to my beach hut in time for a sunset swim.

i wasn't staying too far from where i had been before in arambol, however this time i rented a scooter so i was able to explore a lot more of the surrounding area. without doubt my favourite spot was this big banyan tree. i believe it's over 200 years old, and spread out to cover a huge area. there weren't too many other people so there was a beautiful serenity to the place, even more so when i climbed up and along one of the boughs and wrapped myself within her branches in a state of meditative contemplation.

i had forgotten to bring my wide angle lens with me, so instead i took a panorama of 20 photos with my 35mm lens. i thought it stitched together fairly well, but upon closer inspection i realised that it was very difficult to precisely line up the hundreds of shoots and branches that i had captured. what followed was a mammoth task in replacing all of the misaligned joins, warping them to fit and blending them back to the original. the fact i was working with high resolution images only added to the strain, both to me and my laptop. putting in all that effort, in combination with the feelings when i took the photo, means that i can no longer look at this image in an objective way - but subjectively i'm pleased with how it turned out.

i took a few more photos around the banyan tree which you can see on my instagram post, and combined a few into a little video soundtracked by the antlers