Photo Album - Rohan and Rajiv in India

Cliccando su "Read more" piu' in basso potrete vedere le pagine di un libro ricordo del nostro recente viaggio in India. Per ingrandire ogni pagina basta cliccarci sopra, pero' purtroppo per caricare le immagini sul blog ho dovuto ridurre la qualita', quindi le foto non sono nitidissime. Sono graditi commenti! E chissa' se riuscite a scovare nel muchio le foto scattate da Rajiv?

Maybe you have been wondering when I was going to start posting some photos from our recent stay in India. And probably you kind of expected me to start my usual 37 part series of "Pics you have missed" posts. I admit such a thing was on my mind, but then it occurred to me that I could save myself some work (this somehow ended up being a wrong estimate..) and you some pain by showing you the book I have made for Rajiv to share with his friends here in Canada.

Below the fold you will find all the pages of the book in individual jpg files. You can click on the picture to make it bigger. The book was made using iPhoto with one of the standard templates. Even so, it did take a long time to make; and converting each page to jpg format and uploading them on blogger was another epic enterprise. Just to say, I hope you appreciate my efforts :)

Some final notes and disclaimers (see how professional I'm getting?):

Please consider the target audience for the book are Rajiv's teachers, friends and some of my friends here in Canada. If you are a family member you will find some of the captions unnecessary and if you are Indian you might find that I have oversimplified some things or maybe made some plain mistakes - in that case please forgive me and then let me know..

I really like some of the photos. Some other ones are of poor quality, but the purpose was to collect some nice memories and to give a more or less full coverage of the whole trip, so quality was not a very important factor. I have also included a couple of photos taken by Rajiv: I wonder if you can spot them? Let me know in the comments and the winner will get a hard copy of the book or a signed hand print from Rajiv, you choose :)

Through Rajiv's eyes

Or lens.. :)

Una foto originale di Rajiv: mamma prepara la cena e Rohan guarda con ammirazione il suo fratellone.

We have been back for more than a week

But it feels more like a month. Time flies when you are having fun - and when you are coping with two little people and monstrous jet-lag.

Anyway, I still owe you a lot of pictures and stories from our trip to India, but for now let me share some photos that were taken last week while we traveled back to Canada.

Un po' di foto del nostro ritorno in Canada. Le prime tre sono state scattate da Rajiv mentre ci imbarcavamo a Bruxelles. Le altre foto sono state scattate da me durante il percorso in macchina dall'aeroporto a casa. Come si puo' notare, un paio di giorni prima una poderosa tempesta di neve aveva colpito la zona. Adesso il paesaggio e' molto meno invernale, ma la neve cade ancora di tanto in tanto.

The first three photos were taken by Rajiv, with his own little red camera, at the time of boarding the second plane in Brussels.

All the remaining photos instead were taken by me, on our way home from the airport. Just in case you are wondering, no, this is not our car. We haven't fully embraced the suburban lifestyle cum SUV yet..

A couple of snaps of the outside as well, just so you can see the snow left from the recent massive snowstorm. This is the Waterloo exit on the highway. Can you read? As Appu pointed out, we were going "very very fast"... :)

Almost home. This is a view of the new part of the place were I work, to be inaugurated soon-ish. We are a couple of minutes away from our little house.

Click!

One of the best gifts I received as a kid was a Kodak/Fisher-Price camera. It used film, of course (which reminds me that I'm not that young anymore..) and a flip-flash: you inserted a stick with ten bulbs on top of the camera and they would burn one by one with each snap. I took my first photos at the Holidays On Ice show with my aunt and my grandmother and then I proceed to immortalize family, friends and teachers. A lot of my early work shows people without a head. Some pictures where good though and I still have them collected in an album. 

Here it is, pure eighties nostalgia material:

 

I think I must have been around six or seven when I got my first camera, but obviously I couldn't wait that long to give my son his own, especially if you consider how much easier - and don't forget cheaper - it is to have fun with a digital camera. I am surprised I managed to hold on until now, but I waited for Appu to spontaneously show some interest, which of course he did soon enough. I wanted to get him the modern version of what I had, a digital kids camera, but after a little thought I realized that I didn't really like the options there. Plus, they tend to always include videogames in children cameras, as I recently discovered, and that seems quite beside the point. In conclusion, I started reading reviews of basic point-and-shoot cameras, looking for the cheapest one that would meet all my requirements.

I found it right away and I showed Rajiv a picture of his new camera from a website. I told him we would order it online and t would arrive in a box in a few days. The next day we came back from work to find that he had made this picture:

Meaghan helped him with the word, but he made the drawing himself. He didn't quite get the part about the camera arriving in a few days, because he immediately asked where was the box. 
Let me skip the part where we learned that I had of course selected a model that was being discontinued and therefore impossible to get - so the box would not come at all. After a frantic search and much frustration, we settled on a different model and went to pick it up ourselves together with our little Appu.

And here is the happy photographer.

By the way, you will not be surprised to know that Rohan wasn't happy to be denied access to the new toy. We allowed him to hold papa's camera for a little bit and here he is, in a photo taken by his brother. Unfortunately papa's camera didn't live to tell the tale, but that's another story.





As you might have already noticed, a new link has appeared on the sidebar. It points to a slideshow of Rajiv's best work. I will try to keep it updated. I think his photos are a great way to document our family life and for a change mamma is in there too.