Here is a lovely term coined by Deepa Mohan Photo-constipation: It is what many ‘serious photographers’ suffer from as they have to edit the images. Its usually when after one trip, it takes three months, sometimes, for just a few images to emerge out! I, for one, have been suffering from it the last few month. What about you ?
Benjamin Lee has a very interesting Job. He works for the Singapore National Parks Board. He is responsible for maintaining the tree cover in town and also the National parks and watersheds. I was introduced to Ben as he was the best person to show me Colugo in the wild in Singapore. He called me last evening and said he has a very special surprise for me. A Colugo had entered one of the buildings next to the park and we had to go pick it up and release it back in the national park. It was dropped off at…
Looks like Times of India is not only good at violating copyrights, its also good at photoshopping images to exaggerate the content. I am all for using photoshop to enhance the photograph, but not in journalism to enhance the news itself. And for those of you who think this is a printing issue, its not. The other photos in the paper including all the Page 3 photos have the right contrasts and saturations.
This is the image that everyone has of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Clear blue waters, white sandy beaches which transform into lush rainforests as you move onto the land. The truth however is quite contrary. There is very little of original, undisturbed, pristine rainforests left. The Andamans were the timber source for mainland India for many decades. In fact till recently, the largest saw-mill in Asia was operated out of there. People in mainland India were given incentives like 10 tons of wood every year to settle down in the Andamans and ‘colonize’ the islands. Burmese people even today…
On Feb 6th, I got up early for my workshop and sat to glance through the Times of India while having breakfast to catch up on the morning news. On the front page, I saw a headline Bhimgarh now wildlife sanctuary (if the link does not work, here is the article without the image) and when I looked down, I was shocked to see my bat photograph of the rare Wroughton’s Free-tailed Bat. Now I had to work real hard to get permits to enter the cave and spend a lot of money to just access it and photograph it….
About two months ago, while I was on a shoot, I suddenly get a call to be on a luxury east Africa safari four days later. I finished the shoot, rushed to Bangalore, got my yellow fever shot and jumped into a plane to Nairobi. Till the day before I got into the plane, I didn’t even know where I was going in east Africa. From Nairobi, we took a charter to Mara over the great Rift Valley. The minute I landed, I got out and kissed the Earth under my feet. In the next 8 days, I saw, experienced,…
In the last two months of the Outlook Traveller magazine, my photographs have appeared on the cover and in the cover stories. Its really nice to see the photos in Outlook magazine and Geo as their layout design is good and the printing quality is excellent. This month’s cover story is about Kalakad-Mundanthural Tiger Reserve. I just saw the preview of it and it looks amazing. The prints of the photos have come out really well. Do go out and pick up your copy from the stores now. Below is the cover of this month’s issue. Outlook Traveller Oct 2009…
One of the frustrations that I go through as a photographer is when people do not think what you do is hard work. I hear comments like “All he has to do and click some snaps with a camera”. Thankfully in wildlife, people cannot complain much, but in India I know how badly photographers are treated. Infact people go out and spend a lot of money in buying paintings. But when you ask the same for a fine art photograph, they say..”Oh he just clicked it in few seconds.. why should we pay so much”. No one puts the cost…
Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to be invited to be part of an expedition team led by Dr AJT Johnsingh. The trek was from Mukurthi National Park in Tamil Nadu to Silent Valley National Park in Kerala and the primary purpose was to evaluate the importance of the two national parks in the conservation planning for large mammals. A delightful and detailed account of the expedition has been written by Dr AJT Johnsingh in the Frontline magazine. While I had no scientific expertise to add to the mission, I did have ulterior motives. This route goes via the famous…
If you have been strolling the ‘magazines sections’ of book stores lately (in India), you might have noticed the new GEO magazine. It has come to become my second favourite science magazine after National Geographic. The articles and photographs are great made more alluring by its high quality printing. Few months ago, T R Shankar Raman wrote a nice little piece about the Brown Palm Civet using my photographs and sent it to Wildlife Conservation magazine. Sadly the magazine shutdown last month, and we had to find a new publisher for our article. We decided to try our luck with…