The first photograph I made was when I was perhaps 5 years old, when "Uncle Ranjan" visited us. He was a world traveler and always carried a camera with him. He sent his film to Singapore for developing. One day he put the camera strap around my neck and invited me to take a picture. My first photograph was of my family and my Montessori teacher "Mari". When the pictures arrived from Singapore, my debut proved to have been shaky. But miraculously I had captured my subject well centered. I still liked it.
I didn't have a camera of my own until I came to US. I bought my first 35 mm film camera and started reading about photography and cinematography. The local camera shop owner Lew quickly became a friend and conversations with him taught me what books didn't. I would pick a subject and shoot a 24 reel every Saturday. Several years later I started covering low risk events, just for the money for my annual travel to the East, and then a handful of weddings a year, now with a growing appeal for the human part of the art. I would rent a medium format Mamiya covered in duct tape, umbrellas, screens, and lights and drive for hours to shoot an event.
Photography has become a different art with the advent of the high definition digital camera. Unlike now, then one had to wait for the prints to return to know if things went alright. Did the flashgun worked in sinc? Did I use the right settings? Was the camera faulty? A day of photography usually ends with a good sized headache, because you looked through one eye all day long, ate nothing, and perhaps got down a little water. Yet, the rewards are many. The caring sort of connection developed with the subject and the adrenaline factor are worth the trouble.
CAMERA
Today, there are hundreds of high quality photos in nearly any smartphone, when combined with endless image editing software that could easily beat an award winner of the day of the film camera. In my view,what wins today are exposures that tell stories, pack emotions, uniquely informative, and those that absolutely needs an artist's eye to see, capture, and post process. I argue, that the digital camera has turned photography into a truer art form that is actually less dependent on gadgets, contrary to what it may first appear. As a film purist I used to argue that endless post-processing does not present a true-to-moment capture of an instance in time. But now I think "Is't it a pretty picture that matters at the end?"
I call this "Women at play" The reflection of three women engaged in post-party chat captured on a glass ceiling
Padlock on a latch door behind a city Church.
In 2016, I covered four events, A wedding, a conference, and two corporate events.
Tree in the morning mist
"CELERY BOG " won the second place in the "Nature" category in 2004. The image was captured on film after hours of scouting, and no image post-processing was performed (A true-to-moment image).
Beaver dam building in progress in the early morning can be seen in this natural crater lake threatened by human habitat.
Below, heavily post processed images to accentuate the silhouetted figures exciting a department store
"The Cesky Girl" received an honorary mention in the 2009 Digest photo competition (shot in Cesky Krumlov - 2009)
"Passage" received an honorary mention in the 2008 in a Lynchburg community photo competition