Chef at Large

We started for our uphill destination in the wee hours of the morning. The first 30 minutes were spent locating suitable equipment. Any technophile worth his usb micro drive will know what I speak of - laptop, blue ray disc to watch at various intervals on the way, an array of usb cables for different cables, an inverter so the laptop charges in the car, a few gigs of music, a couple of usb drives, two cell phones with GPRS connections and a couple of other gadgets to stream sound, video and data.

Yeah yeah, it is geeky so far.

Our breakfast this morning consisted of omelettes wrapped around slices of bread with glasses of sweet, hot tea. While this in itself is quite ordinary, the view was quite far from ordinary. We were seated on plastic tables and chairs, on the roof of a little structure built on the mountain side and beyond us was a sheer drop and the vast expanse of mountainside.

Check out the panorama here. Simple fare, an amazing view and biting cold - lovely! Driving further up, we found quite a number of photo opportunities. Did I tell you about this amazing bunch of software I’ve recently discovered - hugin, autopano and enblend. Combined they allow you to make the most amazing panoramas ever - like the ones you’re going to see in this series. hugin is the master software from a hierachical angle, autopano finds control/key points in the images and enblend blends the images together so seamlessly that you just don’t know where one image starts and the other begins.