Snap Stories is a monthly column I write for a travel magazine. ‘Planned Portrait Shots in Working Environments’ was published in March 2014.
In the past couple of years, I have been slowly trying to photograph people often in a planned setup and keeping them aware of the fact that they are being photographed. The idea of this is to capture the subject in a controlled condition, often in an environment that they belong to. It could be the subject’s place of work, home, outdoors where they usually spend time, with their companions or in any other way in which the images speak a lot about the subject’s way of life. More often than not, it converges into their workplaces. And in a country like ours, workplaces are so diverse that you would never run out of possibilities.
Snap Stories is a monthly column I write for a travel magazine. ‘An evening of chasing and photographing sheep in the mountains’ was published in February 2014.
Photographers keep dreaming of images all the time. Every photographer would have a dozen images conceptualized in their heads, which they would be hoping to make sometime in future. These concepts may have come from multiple sources – pure imagination, photographs or paintings seen in the past or from a place they have visited during their journeys.
One such concept that buzzed in my mind was to photograph a herd of sheep going home in the evening. I was hoping to catch a dramatic moment when the sheep would kick up the dust and scatter the evening sunlight, and their furry translucent coat would glow at the edges as the sunlight bounced through them. It would have a dreamy atmosphere, where the dust would dull the details and also weaken the strength of the sunlight, creating a fog-like effect on a magical evening.
Of course, such encounters can’t be planned completely. One can always make an attempt to be at the right time and place, but it would still take a lot of luck to see that precise thing cooking up in your mind unfolding into a reality.
I had one such moment last week when I was travelling in the highlands of Ladakh, photographing its winter landscapes. One evening, I arrived at a grassland where I was certain to find large herds of sheep and perhaps some yaks and cows as well. Being winter, I was expecting a snowy landscape where sheep would forage on whatever grass available on the surface, not buried under snow. But on arrival, I discovered that there was no snowfall in the season and the ground was still dry and dusty. I could see dust being kicked up by the hooves from a distance and it was almost time for sunset, allowing some anticipation to build up inside me.
When we reached closer, I saw nearly half-a-dozen flocks of sheep slowly being herded home by their owners. As they walked in unison, as sheep always do, the air was filled with thick dust and sun glowed mildly through the blanket of dust from behind. It was precisely that moment I had dreamt of, happening in front of my eyes.
Before I knew it, I was out of the vehicle chasing those sheep and firing away a series of photographs of them glowing in the sunlight and the shepherds trying to organize them to get back home. It was a bitterly cold and windy evening, with temperatures probably down to ten degrees below zero in this region with depleted oxygen. But in the excitement of realizing my imagination, none of these really mattered and I was behind the sheep for the next 15 minutes, trying to keep pace and make as many images as possible. It was only when the sun went behind a mountain and drew a curtain to the magical scene that I realized I had walked nearly a kilometer with the herd in a frenzied pace. The resulting images made it all worthwhile.
Snap Stories is a monthly column I write for a travel magazine. ‘Photographing Yangon’s Circular Railway’ was published in January 2014.
I boarded Yangon’s circular railway with a lot of ideas and anticipations circling in my head. One of my self-imposed assignment in Myanmar, when I bought a ticket to Yangon was to photograph the everyday Burmese life. From preliminary research, I realized that one of the best places to see it unfold was the suburban train that touched through the markets and villages around Yangon. There is usually a bustling economic activity in a system that connects an urban center with its surroundings, and I expected it to manifest in front of me inside the circular train.
At Yangon’s Central station, where the train start’s its loop, the nearly empty train contained commuters heading to nearby stations and vendors hopping in and out selling savouries, fruits and betel leaves. We chugged through relatively unpopulated sections of Yangon that alternated between greenery, industrial areas and semi-urban populations.