Below are few questions, as a Nature Photographer, I ask myself everyday.
I still don’t have a single ‘silver bullet’ answer to each of these questions. Even if I try to, there are lots of overlapping thoughts, tonnes of gray areas in every answer and finally more questions is what I get than the real answers that I am seeking for.
I have tried to stop thinking about them myself, but, it has been extremely hard to get over these thoughts. If not all, I would like to jot down a subset of questions here on my blog. I know these footprints would stay on the world wide web permanently or at least for a long long time. Main intent is, along the journey of photography and nature photography in particular, I can come back here to jot down the answers if at all I manage to find them!
Is photography just another passion trap?
Am I creative ENOUGH?
Creative images actually happen in spurts, how do I keep the creative juices flowing forever?
Are all my previous work a waste?
An image I made today is better than what I ‘shot’ yesterday.
Does it mean I was bad yesterday?If so I will be bad tomorrow! What do I do now ?
I am unable to go out often to make images. Is the integrity of my work at stake?
Is this all worth it in the end? If so, what is THAT end?
Am I yet another ‘commodity crowd’ photographer or do I really shoot different?
I know, the only true barrier in life is myself. How can I get over the barrier?
What’s my value add to the world after having come this far?
These are only subset of questions that are bothering me. At the end of the day, to sum it up, the ultimate questions that is bothering boiling hot are:
What is the very purpose of me doing all this?
Is there a purpose at all ?
If I can’t find a purpose now, will I find it later ?
What if I don’t find it? Is there a way out ?
Finally, should I call it quits?
If you are a photographer and your inner self keeps asking you one of these questions, what does your ‘other self’ reply? If you don’t mind sharing your thoughts here, please feel free to drop in a line or two about them.
For me, at least at this point in time, I absolutely have no answer. #tired
This is going to be a long post. Please bear with me.
When I started off with photography, it was sheer passion with which I walked the wild. It was like meditation – walking the wild with single minded focus and the goal was to make good images. Learning beyond boundaries gave a new high. Mastering the craft was the need of the hour. It was after a while when I realised the artistic aspect of photography. Thanks to my destiny and I could associate good degree of friendship with some of the experienced nature photographers across the globe.
It has been years since my early days of photography, there has been some fantastic learnings not only about photography or art of photography but also on other ‘departments’ that fringes around this form of art. I have been contemplating on lot of things that I have learnt oflate, personally, as well as contextually ever since the resurgence of Internet through web 2.0 and the beginning of so called social media marketing. This topic has been the most talked about by the photography community to a great extent and I prefer not to talk about nitty-gritty of it in this post.
I have been ‘making’ lesser images than I used to ‘click’ during my initial days of photography. Today, as I delve deep into my image archives, I still find some hidden images that I connect with, personally and many that I prefer not to look at them and just do shift + delete. But with those images that I connect, I always recognize patterns that emerge and hidden thoughts to ponder about. Thoughts about personal stories and moments. Compositions that I yearned to make and made it with a big smile on the face and those compositions where I utterly failed. Amidst the failure were great teachings and learnings. And more than the learnings, there was satisfaction and contentment ( ofcourse not complacency!). Glad that it continues to remain so.
So, what is that one thing that has changed since the yester years? Perception. Perception about everything that involves art and photography including the business of photography. Considering the Indian scenario, photography as an art is in its infancy as against elsewhere where it is a saturated market. Yet, I believe the forces involving and revolving around the term competition is the same everywhere barring one element and that is the negative face of competition.
What hasn’t changed a thing since I started photography? Hunger to make more images. Meaningful images. And am still scratching the surface as well as my head to realise the dream.
Below are some of my personal learnings ever since I started photography and my interactions with photographer’s community:
Don’t do what you love, for money
The most important lesson that I have learnt looking around the ecosystem of photography and nature photography is, the problem starts when passion turns into profession. When one earns daily bread through photography, the priority is first to make money for the living than the very purpose of making a composition that you intended. Pure essence of art gets diluted. The composition you wanted to make changes to composition that you make that gets you your daily bread.
Occasional buying request gives a passionate photographer more joy as against the usual day to day order requests since you turned a professional. Freedom of making art like you wanted to, changes. Perception changes. Hunger dies and the yearning inside is bedazzled. Every image you make, everything you speak, every move you do and every step you take will be based on the M factor. The compounding effect is - you disrespect other’s work. ‘I’ precedes everything. You begin to take advantage of every person you come across in one way or other. Value of relationship with your people and most importantly the art itself gets valued against monetary benefits.
Learning without boundaries & vested interests
I believe, when I make images out of pure passion, without any strings attached, the real essence of art pervades all over.
Let me take a small example – a personal story. Considering my own example of visiting one of the most visited Tiger reserve in India, the stakes were high.Why? Because I have travelled a long distance, have spent exhorbitant amount of money on my trip and the “I” expects to get what it wants. And I forgot the fact that I spent because I am passionate about being there.
I have two other friends who are photographers too with me during the trip. All the while there were so much of nature and possibilities around us for making images, yet we were all focussed on making some superb tiger images. We all know we visit national parks where RAW wildlife thrives and not a circus. At the end of 4 safaris, we managed one good sighting of the King of the jungle. When stakes are high as well as when we think about the after effects of hard luck, it can be disappointing. But in the hindsight it was a great learning for all of us. After all it is nature and we have to take it has to offer. Well, at least from a nature photographer’s point of view!
Most important lesson was to have an open mind, not to give up our passion because of hard luck and most imporantly keep making images without strings attached. Humility is an important element for any artist to persist art.
Be Right-handed, first!
Well with the emergence of Internet and social media, marketing has become every creative artists’ “must-do” strategic path. But what is intriguing is whether you are a professional, serious amateur, amateur or an aspiring beginner, marketing first, craft next is what is becoming of second nature for these people!
Never forget that the real good Work speaks for itself. If your work is good, it really gets noticed. Someday. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk about all the hard work you have done. What I intend to argue repeatedly with people around me is – do the work first and then half the work of marketing is done. Ofcourse the remaining 50% should be done with all the pomp and show 
. Latter half of work is as important as that of making the craft itself. Lest you don’t talk about your own work, who else will?
Respecting good work, acknowledging it and sharing it with others is what humans have always done since the origin of art. If you don’t do it for me, someone else will. This is not a yokelish rant by me but the law of social media marketing!
So what is it about right hand, then?? Well, it must and should complete all the tasks that it is assigned to do and that is making good art first before it begins to operate the trumpet. Never the other way round.
Breaking the usual pattern
Passion for photography is ultimate for any photographer. Remember, it shouldn’t blind you from the obvious truths. Truths about [not] breaking the pattern and predictability. At times I am so immersed in my own way of making images that I tend to forget the fact that I am shooting blind. Taking a step back, looking at my own work that I have done in last few visits to the wild would yield me a definite pattern.
As humans, we are always confined to our own comfort levels. Remember the last time you made something new that is totally original? Well I do but I can count them and those moments are truly blissful. Now me getting into unchartered territories makes me extremely uncomfortable and vulnerable. But the challenge of getting to what I envisioned and actually getting there is equally gratifying. Deaf ears to negative criticisms and cynics, I did what I wanted is what drives me to walk the dusty path and get down and dirty the next morning to make the images I want to.
The next morning, I presume I should think about breaking the ‘usual’ pattern.
No one will pay for it.
So what? Asking myself this question every time I go out on a shoot keeps me motivated. Everytime I ask myself – “Did I start this for making money?”, the answer is always – No. I ask my friends and well wishers the same question – Should I ? The answer is a mixed bag, but, never a solid Yes. Partly because, they are either skeptical or never been in the field for long or never. Well, nothing wrong in trying out and reaching out to someone who will pay for my work – not as courtesy but as a mark of respect to my work. Not to ask things for free is what people should realise. It has been some real hard work and I definitely would expect respect for my work. Respecting one’s work need not boil down to money alone. This would make another blog post altogether. For this post, I would say – respect in someway.
As it stands now, no one will pay for it. Some day, someone should. But, there is one thing that really gets paid and it is the hunger and passion. Artists pay for it. The rage inside fuels and sculpts the emotions that brings out the real character through an image. Artists put in their soul to make images though it doesn’t pay for them. They do it because they have to. It is their ‘karma’.
Famous American sculptor and printmaker Stephen DeStaeble once said - “Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.”
Remember, photography is an art. Never say it isn’t! Perception matters.
Hence this turns out to be a photographer’s angle of reflection and resultant are these emerging thoughts.
Being a proud member and co-founder of Landscape Wizards on behalf of the team I am glad to announce star trails & night photography workshop being conducted by my fellow team members.
I am sure it would be awesome fun and some great learning involved here.
To know more about this workshop and if you wish to be part of this click on the below image to get more details about the same.
Venue: Jayamangali Black Buck Reserve, Maidanahalli ( near Tumkur )
You can also drop me a line here if you wish to participate.
I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day. ~Vincent Van Gogh
Here is a small survey that we are doing as part of Landscape Wizards and it will be open till 20th Nov 2010.
I request all the readers/followers of my blog to take the survey.
Thanks in advance for your co-operation!
Digital asset management is a broad area of management for media ‘assets’ that are in digital form and includes ( though not completely! ) the process of ingest, cataloguing, storage and retrieval.
Though storage is just a part of the process, it is definitely not an easy task to be accomplished effectively and in an organized way. For all photographers, backing up of images is extremely vital to protect the assets that were created by them. I have worked writing programs before in DAM domain and I definitely understand how a media company effectively uses computer servers to automate the entire process. Its a multi-million dollar industry. At my level, as a photographer, I prefer to talk in brief on challenge at a much smaller scale that I faced recently w.r.t storage.
How does it feel when you loose another external storage drive just before you go on a long trip? And, how does it feel, as a photographer, when 2 of your backup hard disk drives subsequently fail in the middle of a long trip?
3 hard drive crashes in a span of one month really took me to the heights of not trusting in present day strorage technology. I underwent this trauma very recently. As a computer engineer by degree, I felt really embarassed to accept this fact when we talk so much about technology, its uses and reliability. At the end of the day, I had to just accept the reality as is and move on with life. To add salt to injury, data recovery support is really poor in India be it with Seagate or Western Digital or Maxtor or any other major players in storage technologies. Third party data recovery agents exploit this lack of ‘official support’ from the hard drive manufacturers and charge humongous amounts of money for data recovery that makes the situation even worse. I am sure many of you would have faced a similar issue at some point in your life. With drooping shoulders, we at many times let go of the ‘vital data’ that we all need fearing the high costs charged for data recovery process. Sounds really insane and I hate this.
With this post, if anyone from Seagate by any chance is reading this, I would strongly urge you to provide a data recovery support in major cities of India!!
Glad that I had redundant backup of my so called ‘assets’ but this incidence provoked me to analyse my current disaster in depth and make some corrective actions and better strategies.
Through this post, for all people who wish to go serious on digital photography and asset management, I would like to urge you *not to* procrastinate your backup activity ! If you do not have multiple copies of your images, please do make it now! Make a strategy for backup. Different people follow different backup strategies and methodologies and through this post I would like to throw some light on the most common and easiest strategy that I have come across. This can be efficiently implemented by any amateur/beginner photographer who wishes to go professional ( I hate this word!) way. Many of the photographers might already be following a similar methods already, but for the uninitiated, I feel this post would serve as a pointer in their learning curve.
A Simple Backup process:
Click on the above image to view it larger
1. At the end of each day, review and transfer all your ‘keeper’ images to 2 backup devices ( can be 2 carry-on external hard drives or 2 copies on DVDs or combination of both), on field. Discard what is not needed. Be critical of your keeper images to avoid dumping garbage!
2. At the end of the trip, transfer all the on-field backed up images on to one of your enternal hard drive that is in your studio/home. Do not discard the images from the drives that were copied as a part of step 1 until your next trip happens. This helps in having multiple copies incase of emergencies / surprises! Remember you can never predict when a hard drive fail is bound to happen.
3. Have a secondary backup hard drive and synchronize the images onto this from the primary ( first backup) hard drive.
4. I would also suggest you to have a third copy of backup of images on another external hard drive. Make sure you do not keep this at your home/studio. Keep it in a trustworthy, secret location. This is necessary for ‘disaster recovery’. In case of fire or theft, you still have all your RAW files with you !
5. For the sake of convenience and identifying your drives, you can color code the drives and assign a name to it.
For example:
a. Green – Primary backup
b. Blue - Seconday backup
c. Red – Tertiary back up used as a disaster recovery plan.
6. Back up to primary and secondary drives can happen once you have your new set of images ready for backup. For backing up on tertiary drive you can have sync time of 6 months to 1 year or depending on your need.
Tips for staying ahead of time against disk crashes:
1. Make sure you buy new set of hard drives atleast once every 2-3 years. Storage gets cheaper by day and technology keeps changing. If you rely on DVD, you need to back all your images when a new technology like blue-Ray disc becomes a most commonly used optical media.
2. Do not move your external hard drive when it is switched on.
3. Avoid dropping hard drives. Prevent them from shocks. Always wrap them in anti-static covers to keep them safe.
Remember, if you are a serious photographer, the content you have with you is just not limited to be called as your asset, but all your images are your investments resulted from personal sacrifices!
4. More you spin the disk, less reliable it becomes over time. This doesn’t mean you should completely stop using the disks. Do it at a relatively lesser frequencies than the other two. This is slightly grey area and only the hard drive manufacturers can provide the right answers. Some even say that, not spinning the disks can make it unusable!
Note: This strategy can be further simplified when one chooses to use RAID or NAS, but what I have told here is a simple and cost effect way of backing up images.
Hope I have some useful tips for backing up of digital images.
Do feel free to share your thoughts / suggestions / better strategies if you feel you can improve this post
Kinnaur being one of the smallest districts in India, it enjoys a temperate climate. Conditions conducive for pears and apples!
Spiti valley comprises of a high altitude cold desert region housed in the himalayan mountain ranges in the Himachal Pradesh ( N.E. India ). Predominantly a Buddhist community, the state abuts itself with Tibet. My visit to the Kinnaur, Lahaul and Spiti districts was altogether a different experience as compared to my previous visit to the Ladakh. Lots of learnings and personal experiences accompanied the package this time.
Highlight of the trip was that we got to experience both best and worst of the weather conditions of this season. That apart, we got to experience the harsh living conditions of the people of the region. Being an high altitude area, both mental and physical toughness is what is expected of every human being who either wishes to live here or want to travel. Unless one is extremely motivated and passionate about travel, it is tough to navigate through this tribal triangle. It is the local public works department, border roads organization and national highway authority of India and primarily the people working in these departments are those who made our trip possible. Without them, this barren land just restricts any movement of every human being.
Most of the people who work in tandem with the above mentioned departments are local tribal people making a living mostly out of on daily wages. Their job is to keep the roads and passes open for traffic, tourists and for vehicles that ferry essential commodities!
How does it feel when you are stuck behind a landslide and you simply cannot move? Only the experienced can feel the ‘heat’. For the uninitiated and inexperienced ‘alien’ dweller, this land simply kills. Every single day, when we started off with our outings, my mind kept on thinking about these local tribals who work on these roads. At times, the places are extremely dangerous and unpredictable interms of weather and landslides are fairly common. Life threatening landscape is what this place is all about. I felt a deep sense hurt inside looking at these people and their children being exposed to such harsh living conditions, let alone the region is high altitude cold desert! Responsible eco-tourism is what is the need of this hour that can improve directly of indirectly the living conditions of these people.
Through this post of mine, I just want to convey my deepest sense of regards and respect to the tribals of spiti valley without whom this trip of ours wouldn’t have been possible. Sometimes, the strongest of the emotions are tough to express in words. Just respect prevails and nothing else matters.
Hail Himalayas! Bows to people of Spiti valley.
Place: Yana
It is always interesting to view and enjoy the images or clippings behind the scenes. During my visit to the western ghats, I also visited Yana – a beautiful place that has two massive limestone rock formations that rise from the forest floor. Words fail to express the joy one experiences when we see those rock structures. The monolithic rocks are surrounded by thick evergreen forest and streams.
Some Information about the place:
You can see me bare foot in the behind the scene photo and the reason being, this place is considered holy by the local people and there is a shiva temple adjacent to the cave. The entire rock that houses the cave is named as “Bhairaveshwara Shikara” ( that translate to peak representing shiva in bhairava form) and is considered holy. Association of godly forms with nature is quite common in India and has remained so ever since the very beginning of the existence of Hindu mythology and Hinduism. Relentless references to people’s regard and love towards animals, birds and nature can be found abundantly in Indian mythology. It is the presence of such a close religious association is what has aided in preservation of special places, indirectly!
The formation of a cave underneath one of the monolithic rocks is an excellent place to make some abstract intimate landscape images. Rich moss coupled with monsoon wetness completely consumes any nature lover.
Visualization of composition is key to make some fantastic intimate landscape images. One more blog post on the same topic can be viewed on Landscape Wizards site here.
Image details:
Here is one such image that I made after studying the patterns thoroughly. Just before I was about to look into the view finder ( after finding this suitable composition ) and click, is when my wife made this behind the scene image of mine.
I will also be uploading few selected images from the trip in couple of days. Keep watching this space.
When we talk about nature photography, we see two prominent and common routes taken by the majority of the photographers – one is photographing the wilderness and its elements for the sole purpose of documentation and the other is Nature Photography as an art – the creative side of nature photography.
Few of the like-minded Indian nature photographers spear headed by Ganesh H Shankar, started off with Creative Nature Photography couple of years back. It has been an awesome journey so far for the entire team. Of late, Ganesh was thinking about a platform that can aid in bridging the gap between field biologists and nature photographers. This was an absolute necessity considering the current scenario where everybody with a camera on hand is a photographer! Any nature photographer, lacks in-depth field knowledge.
There can be two distinct possibilities of making of a nature photographer :
1. You were first a naturalist and then your interest in photography stepped in as a necessity for documenting your findings.
2. You are first a photographer, you love nature and you prefer learning and understanding nature better while ‘on the job’ since you do not completely understand the intricacies and behavioral information “hidden” in nature.
In both the scenarios, there is a clear gap of lack of knowledge either in terms of photography or field biology. To portray something in nature at its best, immense knowledge of behavior of flora and fauna is extremely important. As an harbinger of visions in nature photography in India and in identifying this need of bridging the gap, Ganesh put forth his brilliant thought in front of CNP team about Nature Tales. It was an exciting time for all of us hearing the idea and several variants in the form of different forum categories emerged.
Nature tales has gone live yesterday, September 1st 2010. We love to invite you to register to the site if you have nature stories to share with us. We also urge you strongly to read through the terms of use and guidelines before you proceed with registration.
Hoping for a positive response from you all.
Hearty welcome to Nature Tales, nature stories unlimited . . .
Have been thinking about some easy ways to be a better artist. This was during my initial days of photography. What I have learnt over the years are few invaluable lessons. Some of them I would love to share.
Going to next level from the initial days is never easy. Below are six essential qualities that I personally feel that every photographer needs to have to be a better photographer:
1. Being patient and persevere what you intend to do and aspire for.
Patience and perseverence are the most important qualities that every photographer needs to excel the craft. To be specific to Nature Photography genre, without patience one cannot make quality images. If one looks at the portfolio of an experienced photographer who has been in trade since 12-15 years, it’s extremely easy for the uninitiated to think that, making images in nature is extremely easy. This is incorrect. A decade spent in making those images is not a small time. People forget the sacrifices done behind the scenes. There are instances where I have seen people forego personal possessions for art and bigger aspirations.
I have seen people starting off with zest and later falling apart after few months. There can be several reasons for not being able to continue the craft. If one is serious about the process of ‘making images’ rather than ‘taking pictures’, there is no short cut to success except to spend endless hours in the wild patiently, not just photographing but studying and understanding nature and its intricacies better. It would result in a dismal failure if one aims for instant success.
2. Join a community and get feed backs.
Being a part of community gets you an acquintance with lot of aspiring artists and photographers. The joy is always in learning and sharing what you learnt. There are a lot of nature photography forums that you can join, contribute positively and you will reap more returns than from what you put into it.
There are lots of advantages of becoming part of a community. Couple of them includes:
1. You get to know a lot of people, inlcuding the veterans in the community.
2. It would aid people know about upcoming talent in you.
Sharing one’s images in the community and getting feedbacks for improvements is one of the best ways to improve your craft.
3. Stay focussed, do not worry about what others are doing.
This is one common suggestion that I give all the people who constantly write to me asking me one simple question yet the most difficult to answer : “There are lots of photographers out there, how or what difference can I make to make myself known?”.
And my answer to all of them would be to stay focussed on what you are doing and never lose hope. Do not be a photographer just because you want to be famous. There can be serveral other things that you can do to be famous. Why be a photographer?
It is very easy to stray away from the path and get carried away, but, the chances are that, you may end up in a deeper mess. Staying focussed doesn’t mean that you should stop experimenting with your techniques or craft. That would be a grave mistake! By saying ‘stay focussed’ I only only mean that one shouldn’t be too worried about what others are doing. The information propogation these days are fast and abundant. Everyone of us is bombarded with more information than we can process, understand and implement. In such a scenario, it is extremely easy to get carried away by the whims and fancies of your collegue or a friend. What might be a keeper for him/her might not work for you. What might be interesting for him/her might not be interesting for you. What might work for your friend may not work for you. Think that your work is unique and stay focussed on what you intend to do and how you build up rather than changing your strategies frequently.
Filtering of information is the key.
4. Understand the process, create small projects.
As told before, instead of aiming for short term gains, learn to understand the process of photography. Every day is a new day, every experience is a new learning. Make every image unique.
If you have started photography an year back, just open up your archive and start looking at the images right from Shot 01. Evaluate the older shots with the recent ones. Contemplate on basics of composition / exposures and you make a startling discovery that you have improved! This is just an example.
Even your knowledge on the craft and intricacies of behaviour of your subjects would have improved in leaps and bounds. If you have experienced this ever, congratulations! you have a good foundation built. Write them down and start working towards bettering the craft as to how you can take it to the next level. Create small projects for your self and start working towards it. You will soon realise how easy/difficult it is to take it to the completion. It is this very process that would make you a better photographer.
5. Web as a resource.
Who doesn’t use web these days? Its an ocean of information out there. Just a small search on “Nature photography” on google would yield me 40,000,000 results in 0.13 seconds. Such is the power of information. Be it equipment reviews or about the places you intend to visit or basics of exposure and composition, you have some enormous information available for free!
Knowing how to make the most out of these information and information highway effectively is the key to success. Look at the portfolios of hundreds of thousands of photographers and get inspired, write to them if you have questions, network with people and get to know how they make such beautiful images. Learn to appreciate and acknowledge them. There is no stopping if you have passion and drive to do what you want to do.
Learn to tap the power of web.
6. Learn. Not just theory, go out and shoot what you learnt.
As an old adage goes – Knowledge is power. To be a successful photographer, constant learning is the key. Let go off your ego and pride. Be humble and ask questions. It is absolutely OK to ask someone what you don’t know even if you feel it is shameful. It is these barriers that would constrain you from learning. Once you learn something new, don’t just think about the theoretical aspect of it. Go out with your tools and try to execute what you learnt in theory and see if you can attain the results that you expected when you read about it or heard about a particular technique from your friend.
In the process, you might stumble upon something new and may be you discover a better way of doing things. It is these kinds of discoveries that makes you feel accomplished and gets you energy to pursue your quest further. Look for opportunities and challenge yourself with a project. It is absolutely fine even if you fail. You don’t need to care about what the world thinks about you and the failure(s) you encountered. It is better off failing than never trying something new! Be a non-conformist, tread a new path to be unique. It is the experience that counts and not what others think about your failure. It doesn’t matter to them and it doesn’t matter to your either!
Fearing to fail means fearing to succeed!!
As per metrological data, August ( 2nd or 3rd week) is the time when south west mosoon break even happens here in the Indian sub-continent. That’s the best time to make some beautiful images of both landscapes and macros, if one makes a trip to the biodiversity hot spot – the western ghats. Moist deciduous and rain forests of southern western ghats will be teeming with life, Impatiens bloom would supplement the beautifully saturated greens of the forest during this break even time.
Western ghats comprises of a chain of hilly region in the southern part of Indian sub-continent spanning parallel to the western coast for close to 1500 KM.
Fortunately, my dear friendAshwini Kumar Bhat and myself were lucky enough to make a 3 day expedition to western ghats recently. Sahyadris in particular. It was one of the best experiences I have had in my photographic career. Will be sharing couple of blog posts and experiences on this recent expedition, both on Frames from wild as well as on Landscape Wizards soon, along with some images. Till then I would leave you with this image for now.
