Underground Music Movement

It was a feeble attempt of mine, to capture the essence of a rock performance in my college. I shot this with my 18_105 kit-lens. earlier i was mostly shooting at the wide angle of the lens, i just love the perspective the 18mm gives me, maybe this was the very first time i felt the need to zoom with the lens, i kind of like the creative control it gives me. But i would have loved to have a 50mm 1.8 in this case, since i was almost up on the dais to

shoot.

These guys are really fresh and talented, it was surely a delight to have watched them and shot their performance, would surly love to shoot them again

Street Photography (19th september)

Down to the streets

Street photography remains incomplete till you get down and dirty on the streets.

A few photographs from the Shivajinagar Market

Street food near the mosque.
The busy commercial street in the evening

Bangalore Auto Expo

Lately I was thinking that I shall use my blogger for displaying my street photography and keep flickr for my strobist stuff, nothing major though. Actually I get a lot of space in blogger to write a story that goes with the street photographs and I plan to keep flickr to direct my prospective clients till I am rich enough to have my own domain name on internet. :-p This also helps me be genre specific while displaying my photographs. So here I am.

It had been a long time since I had done any serious street photography and my friends on flickr had started to complain. For me street photography has always been a learning experience as it lets one get close to the subjects and any photographer worth his salt knows that. If you are a people's photographer, getting intimate with the subject is as essential as having a correct exposure. Henceforth I plan to apply this photo-journalistic approach to everything that I shoot.

Finally I decided not to bum around in my room and on Friday and get up and go spend some time in the Auto Expo but little did I expect half the Bangalore to be up in front of ticket counter :-(

I went inside and suddenly I was taken a decade back in time, where we used to have a few variants of Maruti Udyog but since last 5 years there has been a phase shift as more and more European and Japanese manufacturers are collaborating with India to bring out cars in the budget segment.

But what is the budget segment anyway? Nano (1.5 lac) or Jazz (7 lac)

Onlookers gape at the BMW and Mercs

The next family car.

Children pouring into the names of all the big bikes

Lo and behold our very own environment friendly REVA!

And a few our favorite classics

Chapter 1, The revelation

My journey didn't start a long back, it was the summer of 2003 and i was in my 10th grade. Library was a usual place for me to hang out in the mornings during my summer vacation, picking up notes and clues for my social science assignment. Pretty mundane, huh! it was during that time i had first come in contact with a National Geographic magazine, I didn't realize but instantaneously drawn towards it like a fly towards a honey pot. I flipped through the issues like a 3yr old flips through a picture book. I was amazed to see full pages of life sized images of insects, tigers, birds, whales, continents and lives of people in far fetched countries, first time in my life i had this realization that photography was not just a medium of documentation of an event, but at the same time it was a celebration of life, a beautiful art form, a means to connect with people you've never seen. I spend the whole day sitting there and flipping through all the issues they had with them, the same day i came across the Afghan Girl by Steve Mc. Curry, she was a girl with the most wonderful eyes, and had become the image of Afghanistan for the western world.

I won't say that it was the day in my life that i decided to become a photographer, but yes sure i realized that i promised myself that i will someday pickup a slr camera and shoot something.

Four years later, i find myself in the cosmopolitan city of Bangalore, studying engineering, more like a dream come true for a small town boy. But this cosmopolitan religion of this town was the thing that reignited the fire of photography in me, I soon came in contact with various photography groups in the city, Bangalore Photography Club was one of them where i found various such self motivated enthusiasts who found time for photography even while working under high pressure IT jobs, they spoke in a language that inspired me to take up a camera.

It was though a painful time, with all the expectation of parents, to see me do well, take up a job in the IT, work 9 to 5 in front of a computer screen and selling the Americans some stupid software. Somewhere within me i felt i had a wild horse, that wouldn't let me live this life. So what did i do? I started saving up my pocket allowance to buy any cheapest camera available in the market big brands surely weren't an option for me. A year later I settled for a Olympus E500, a great camera that was to serve me for next two years of my photography infancy.

During these two years i learned a lot from various photographers, whether Indian or international. I was inspired by the simplistic, humane patriotic style of Raghu Rai's street life, the passion, artistry thought provoking portraits of Steve McCurry, the devotion and insight in Reza's style, or whether it be Ansel Adams who provoked a nation towards fragile ecosystem of yellow stone. I am also inspired by the new generation photographers like Joe Mc Nally, Chase Jarvis, Zach Arias, Ryan Lobo, Indian Fashion photographers like Atul Kasbekar, Daboo Ratnani, Jatin Kampani, Anirban Brahma.

I have always tried to pick a thing or two from them and i am developing a style that revolve around these people, sometimes i feel that there is a sense of guilt inside me that i don't have an original style, what ever i do is borrowed from someone.

I hope to move on the path of self discovery, and hope i figure out uniqueness in myself sometime soon.

Prologue

For a long time I have been thinking of writing a bolg, the reason being that most of my friends write one, and when you are writing one you kind of get into the so called elite group of literary people who have this ability to write creative stuff. But what should I write about, i am no literature student. When it comes to me to write something creative or poetic i might just have this retarded look on my face, and after a few hours of slogging i might be able come up with a couple of lines of rhyming sentences, sounding lame and blue.

Well so i am not a literature student i just made it clear, so let me introduce myself. I am Saumya Pratik, Final year student of Mechanical Engg. So the only thing creative i can do is find solutions to Newtonian Mechanics problem or turn a workpiece on lathe. I am also a serious amateur photographer, i am into this for about 3yrs now, and i hope someday I will take it up as a professional.

My Hobbies involve painting, cooking, trekking/ traveling, and listening to various kind of music, whether it be soft rock, classical, inidan, jazz, or rock and roll.

Basically in my blog I wish to write about photography, whatever I can or whatever I know, and whatever I am learning, because photography is something so close to my heart and that just a glimpse of a great photograph intrigues all my sense to the core.

Hope i succeed in this endeavor of mine and at the same time teach and learn a lot of new stuff to all.