Dhankar Monastery, Lahaul & Spiti
In July this year, I spent a week travelling through the high Himalayan region of Lahaul & Spiti in Himachal Pradesh. This was my fourth visit to the region and I was leading a small group of photography enthusiasts with me. Being a regular visitor to these places, I had had some definite ideas about the subjects that I wanted to shoot, the moods that I wanted to portray and also had a fairly good idea about the time of the day that would help me make those images.
In Dhankar Monastery, seen in the photograph, I was keen to portray the remoteness of the place and the precarious location where the monastery stood. I had also realized that the evening light from behind the monastery would help differentiate the crag on which the buildings were located and the high mountains that dominated the landscape behind it. Here is the image I created that evening. The dust rising from behind helped enhance the drama in the scene.
There is, in fact, much more drama than what is seen in the photograph. At the valley just below the monastery is the confluences of Spiti and Pin Rivers, and the view is fabulous from the place where I was shooting. Yet, I decided to exclude that from the frame, since having too many elements of interest may have driven away attention from the main story and would work counterproductive in this situation.