A prologue to my camera stories :D

Some of you unlucky ones may have heard about my camera stories. For the lucky ones who missed them it’s the story that culminated in me purchasing 4 reasonably expensive prosumer (Thankfully not DSLRs ;) cameras of the same brand and make :( 

But as with all my stories I will take some time coming to the point. And while I eventually come to the point let me take you to the earliest days of my photography. My father works for the Govt of India and he had a foreign assignment way back in 1984. One of his prized purchases was a Cannon auto-focus camera that survived my family for a little more than 2 decades.

In those days the cameras needed expensive film rolls and further expenses in processing the prints. So way back in 1995 it used to cost about Rs 10 per print (Including processing and film charges). The cost was a huge factor that inhibited my photography. In fact for the first decade of the camera with us I hardly got any chance to click the button for the reasons of cost :(

In those days my parents had a rather low opinion of the artistic side of photography. In fact they would force some people into the shots to put some life into what they saw as lifeless postcard photos. And as usual I had an opposite view and wanted the pictures to capture the beauty of the place without having to accommodate horizontally gifted creatures like myself into the frame.

Finally I got my chance and on a family holiday to Kerala we also visited Kanyakumari. This was sometime in 1994 and among other reasons I remember it as my first visit to a proper beach in Kovalam. Later we also went to Kanyakumari we were at a point where we could clearly see the Vivekananda rock. With the sun setting it was an incredible sight and after many family memories captured I was allowed to take my one postcard shot. The results scarred me to such an extent that I didn’t attempt another postcard shot till the arrival of the digital age almost a decade later ;)

No one else in my family quite had an interest in photography and because of that one reason I eventually usurped the family camera till it was in my bag almost all the time. The limited pocket money meant that I had to be really stingy with my clicks. And thanks to the scar of the Kanyakumari postcard I developed this habit of fitting in people into my pictures. This and the cost of clicks somehow helped my composition. When I look back at the prints from those days, they were special J

All through this time I stuck on with my film camera. I wasn’t impressed by the digital cameras of those days. I felt that the results were never close to the clarity I got with the film prints. But the switch to digital was inevitable and that happened when I went to Bangalore. Our campus was beautiful and I loved the place. On top of that some of my dear batch mates bought for themselves huge lumix prosumers (I used Arjun and Gurjar’s camera more than they did themselves ;). At that point of time those were the largest cameras that I had put my hands on and the 15X zoom was like wow. The device truly opened my eyes to things I never saw before I had those zooms ;)

Unshackled by the restriction of the film roll I started taking a lot of pictures. And I guess problem of plenty showed its effect. My initial digital pics weren’t as good as my analog ones. Perhaps one explanation was that the new found digital freedom meant that I no longer put in as much effort as I used to in the analogue days. But nevertheless I started enjoying the process. There are many on my Facebook timeline who take absolutely incredible shots. None of my clicks come close the quality of those shots. But the one thing that I do very well is to capture the moments of my own life. And the one reason why I did a great job of capturing those moments is that I took so many of them ;)

Most of the time I clicked without a purpose. It was one of those directionless stuff that you do just because you enjoy it. And it was then that I came to Singapore. And the photos became my way of talking to Anjali, who was in India. Whenever something interesting happened I would click and upload on picasa. The photos made the long distance relationship work. They gave us so many things to talk about. We used to talk almost on a daily basis and now that I think of it, without those pictures shared on Picasa I don’t know if we would have enough to talk about :)

And then she came to Singapore and my motivation to upload pictures went away and my photography again entered a directionless phase. I used to click and then do nothing about it. And my clicking sorta stagnated. There wasn’t anything amazing about what I did. It was around this time that I chanced upon Stefano Cocco’s pictures. I was impressed by discipline and sheer beauty of something so ordinary as daily life.

I was inspired by his organization and for a long time I sat on the thought of doing something similar. Eventually, one day a friend’s wife Surabhi suggested that I put my pics into periodic folders. She felt that it would make the process of going through the pictures a lot simpler. I had been thinking about Stefano’s pics for so long and wanted to do something like that but it was Surabhi’s suggestion that made me start the Q folders in Facebook.

The first impact was that sharing these pics with the people I cared about became a lot simpler. Some of the reactions was quite motivating (Esp Nisha and Aruna's). But what was interesting was the how the user comments added interesting new contexts to the pictures I had shared. Without some of Shucha, Nisha et al's comments the pictures wouldn’t be half as interesting. And in fact its this context that is the USP of my photography. In hindsight it actually helped me update my friends about my whereabouts and finally when we caught up we had so much more to talk about.

Sharing on Facebook also meant that I got to see the clicks of some phenomenal guys like Nike, Sangeet and a few others who were immensely more talented than I was. Their clicks gave me an idea that beneath my passion for photography lay a very shallow technical understanding of the subject. An immediate consequence was that I started exploring my own camera and almost overnight the technical side of my pictures improved. And I had my eyes opened to the things that you could do with a DSLR.

Beyond the humility of getting to know where you stand I got an appreciation the things that I did really well. My collection on FB had become reasonably well organized. All the shots in one place and sheer numbers meant that I started becoming very choosy about the clicks that I retained. And that meant that the discipline of my film roll days was back :)

Unfortunately my offline collection was in a mess. And I felt this huge need to fix that, though the enormity of the effort (I have more than 13000 pics in my collection) required meant that I never got myself to do anything about it. The thing is that when a need becomes very strong in your mind you eventually do find a solution for it. And I found mine when I got my Macbook Pro. The photo management capability of this device is way beyond anything I had experienced on windows. Today I can retrieve almost any pic that I clicked in the last two years in almost no time. (No mean task considering that I have uploaded close to 3000 pics on FB alone). One day hopefully I will fix the earlier pics of my collection :)

Finally what I would say is that I am so fortunate to have something that I am passionate about. I do know that my current knowledge is dwarfed by the sheer enormity of what I don’t know. But I know that I will learn and become better at capturing the beautiful moments of my life.

So now that I have told you a bit about my photography (Indeed!), next time I will share the specifics about my 4 Sony Prosumer cameras ;)