Saturday, September 11, 2010

Signs of (Road) Life

Even along the highways of the not-so-fast Indian road traffic, there can be seen quite a few imaginatively worded signs reminding drivers and riders of the speed limit and some interestingly worded cautions.

As an aside, consider why we even have these signs along the highway? I don't contend with the message of these signs but their placement. The only people who are moving slowly enough to read these signs sure don't need to read them. Not to mention that reading these signs may in fact may cause accidents (wonder why you don't see "Do Not Read Signs While Driving" signs...)
The only guys that these signs are directed at are traveling at close to warp speed anyway. So why even bother?
Perhaps the Highway Authority thinks that, on the off-chance that there is a traffic jam on the highway, these "speeders", who probably have low respect for authority and even lesser respect for anything "the man" might care to put up on a sign, might chance a glance upon them and suddenly and forever be changed?

Maybe these signs were put up so that whoever put these up can say that they tried?

Included below are the signs that I managed to capture on my way from Chennai to Bangalore (or Bengaluru). I humbly apologize for the low quality of these images beforehand. On my defense, I took these photos using a digital camera (Sony DSC HX-1) while traveling on a fast moving car, looking out through tinted windows and on an overcast day. Most of these shots were taken at dawn, dusk and at night.
Finally, after much-ado:





























For the above shots, I used the Manual mode and had to keep the ISO low and jiggle the shutter speed and aperture values so that the shots don't look grainy and, most importantly, avoid motion-blur.

And now for something somewhat different.
In the pitch black of the night, the limitations of the digital camera were becoming quite obvious. The heavy rain pouring down didn't help either. So I gave up with keeping the shutter speed high and dialed it way down low (1 to 5 secs) just for the hell of it. This resulted in quite an unexpected light-show and I was quite impressed with the results: