Prithvi Mandava

ICICG Badminton Tournament - Men's

ICICG
Calgary Telangana Association Group
Calgary Marathi Association
Gujarati Mandal of Calgary
Rajasthan Association of North America - RANA Canada
Malayalee Cultural Association Calgary

ICICG Badminton Tournament - Women's

ICICG
Calgary Telangana Association Group
Calgary Marathi Association
Gujarati Mandal of Calgary
Rajasthan Association of North America - RANA Canada
Malayalee Cultural Association Calgary

ICICG Badminton Tournament - U16 Girls

ICICG
Calgary Telangana Association Group
Calgary Marathi Association
Gujarati Mandal of Calgary
Rajasthan Association of North America - RANA Canada
Malayalee Cultural Association Calgary

ICICG Badminton Tournament - U16 Boys

ICICG
Calgary Telangana Association
Calgary Marathi Association
Gujarati Mandal of Calgary
Rajasthan Association of North America - RANA Canada
Malayalee Cultural Association Calgary

ICICG Badminton Tournament

ICICG
Calgary Telangana Association Group
Calgary Marathi Association
Gujarati Mandal of Calgary
Rajasthan Association of North America - RANA Canada
Malayalee Cultural Association Calgary

Patience rewarded 🪷

Fun fact: Dragonflies are the most efficient hunters on the planet—with a success rate of around 95%. For comparison, lions succeed about 25% of the time, and great white sharks around 50%. These ancient predators don’t chase their prey; they calculate an interception point and arrive there at the exact moment their target does. Basically, they’re running attack algorithms that military engineers still study today.

300 million years of evolution will do that.

Sony A550 | Sony 70-400mm G
1/2000 sec, f/8, ISO 800

Caught this robin mid-hunt with a fresh catch 🐛

Here’s something most people get wrong: when you see a robin tilting its head on your lawn, it’s not listening for worms—it’s actually looking for them. Their eyes are positioned on the sides of their head, so they have to tilt to get a good look at the ground with one eye. That classic head-cock is pure visual hunting, not audio surveillance.

June 2025
📷 Nikon Z6iii | Nikon Z 600mm PF
1/1250 sec, f/6.3, ISO 5000

House Wren.

Small bird, big attitude. These guys are loud, territorial, and will absolutely chase off birds twice their size without hesitation. What they lack in stature they make up for in sheer audacity.

This one’s banded—you can just see the metal ring on its leg. Somewhere there’s a researcher with a spreadsheet tracking where this bird has been and how long it’s lived. That data adds up over thousands of sightings to paint a picture of migration routes, survival rates, and population health.

Shot early morning in Calgary. The Z6 III handles high ISO well, which you need when small birds won’t sit still in low light.

📍 Calgary, Alberta
Taken June 2025

📷 Nikon Z6 III | NIKKOR Z 600mm f/6.3 VR S | f/6.3 | 1/1250s | ISO 4000

Alpenglow on Mount Rundle

October sunrise at Two Jack Lake. There’s about a 10-minute window where the light transforms from cold blue to this warm glow washing over the peaks—blink and you miss it.

Getting here means leaving Calgary while it’s still dark, making the hour-long drive on quiet highways, and setting up by the lakeshore before you can even see the mountains. You wait, watch the sky shift, and hope the clouds do something interesting. This morning, everything came together—the colour, the stillness on the water, that little spruce island perfectly placed in the frame.

I shot three exposures to capture the full dynamic range from the bright sky to the dark treeline, then blended them in Lightroom. The D850’s low ISO capability really shines in these conditions—clean files with room to push the shadows without things falling apart.

Four years later, this is still one of my favorite captures from the Rockies. Sometimes you just get lucky.

What’s your go-to sunrise spot around here?

📍 Two Jack Lake, Banff National Park

📷 Nikon D850 | Nikon 16-35mm f/4 | f/8 | 1/30s | ISO 31

Northern Mockingbird at Rotary Park yesterday—not something you see every day in a Calgary winter ❄️

Known for their incredible ability to mimic other birds (and car alarms, and squeaky gates…), mockingbirds are more common in the southern US. Seeing one tough out an Alberta winter is always a treat.

This one was fluffed up against the cold and gave me enough time to grab a few frames low to the ground.

📷 Nikon Z9 + Z 600mm f/6.3 PF

Caught this beauty at Rotary Park today ❄️
Black-billed Magpies are so common around Calgary that it’s easy to overlook them—but when you catch that iridescent blue-green shimmer in the right light, you remember just how stunning they really are.
These clever corvids are year-round Albertans, thriving in our winters while most sensible birds head south. Gotta respect the hustle.

📷 Nikon Z9 + Z 600mm f/6.3 PF

Northern House Wren
Calgary, Alberta

Nikon Z9
Nikkor Z 600mm F6.3 with Z TC 1.4x
840mm, 1/1600, f/9, ISO 12800