ceci n'est pas une photo...

...it's actually 29 of them, strung together into a panorama. Especially since it's not a particularly good week for image manipulations, I want to make sure I point that out from the outset. I don't own a lens that gives me 270 degrees of coverage, so I use this technique out of necessity. Also 'cuz I think it's kinda cool.

This is a picture of the Kempegowda Tower, on the grounds of the Lalbagh Gardens in Bangalore. It's not a shrine or a temple; it's actually one of four guard towers erected in the 1500s by, well, the ancient chieftain Kempe Gowda himself. It was assumed that the towers would mark the boundaries of the town of Bengaluru.

Half a millennium later, you can still see the center of town in the distance (on the right side of the image), but the tower is definitely in town. Much of Bangalore extends out, from the 300+ acre complex known as Electronics City 10 miles south, to the new international airport 25 miles to the north. Beyond that, the work done in Bangalore crosses the world. I read a brief in the Indian Express this week: apparently Mindtree, the Bangalore-born IT company, is opening a branch in Monterrey. That's in Mexico. The facility won't be alone; Infosys, the mega-cap from Maharashtra, set up a software development center there last year.

Could Kempe Gowda have envisioned this, even in his wildest dreams?

I'm not sure if I'm gonna use this picture, but I'm definitely gonna use the metaphor.

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Anyway, you may have noticed my posting falling off the past couple weeks. Sorry about that. I've been shooting and writing and taking notes, and now that I'm on the way out of the country — this was posted from London and written in the island kingdom of Bahrain — I'll have time to post some more of the stuff I shot. In fact, as long as we're on the topic of these panoramas, here are a couple more.

This one's the Taj from the north bank:


This next one was kind of a disappointment... I was only able to salvage a chunk, and not even all of it. But there's something I like about it:


(ps: yes, these images are — by their nature — an agglomeration of different moments from many different photos. and no, i'm not sure that I like this. My take in the end is that these are not photographs; sound off in the comments if you have any thoughts.)