Your wedding is the single one day in your life that you can showcase your taste, your choice and your preferences to the wider world. And all of that is a direct reflection of who you are.
Once we finish college or University, most of our lives are lived within relatively small social circles, only regularly meeting and spending time with a few family and friends. Our opinions are discussed and debated within those circles, our likes and dislikes are only shared between them. While social media has given us a wider platform to express ourselves, it is often results in simply going with the flow and agreeing with the majority. Our deepest and most personal preferences remain an intimate subject.
But on one day of your life, you are presented with an opportunity to tell the world about it. Every single decision you make is a reflection of your perspective and world view.
Last week, we photographed our first wedding since mid-March. After a 3 month break, we were genuinely elated to pick up the cameras to photograph a wedding. While we had kept ourselves busy with various personal photography projects, there is a different joy associated with weddings, and it is the little moments that leave us feeling fulfilled. Waiting patiently like a sniper and being able to capture just the right moment; hunting for good light fervently and finding it; photographing the couple laughing in perfect unison; and so on.
“Unprecedented”
I don’t think any of us have ever heard that word being used so often until last month. And there is good enough reason for it. Most situations that we face in life are repetitive and even problems that may appear new to us would have been experienced by the older generation. All in all, rarely do we face circumstances where mankind as a whole is totally out of depth. It is rather surreal to be in the midst of this revolutionary period about which there will be hundreds of books written, yet our only reaction can be to sit at home (apart from essential workers). And the question on everyone’s minds is what next.
Its raining outside. I can smell the petrichor, and feel the breeze through the open windows but I cannot hear the rain. I am wearing my headphones, listening to the ‘Is it New Wave’ playlist on Spotify. I am reading an article about ‘The Art of Waiting’. I can suddenly hear the rain. The music has stopped, and there is a small gap before the next song starts. That microsecond instantly transports me to a different world. But back to reality. I am stuck at home in Hyderabad, India. The government has imposed a 21 day lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid 19. It is day 15 and reports say that this will inevitably be extended for another 2-3 weeks.
2019 was one of our busiest year as wedding photographers!
We covered 40 weddings over the course of the year and delivered more than 1 lakh photographs to clients. We traveled to new locations & revisited old ones, shot new clients & old friends, and made memories that would last a lifetime or more.
Without further ado, here is the best of our 2019 wedding photographs! Shot by our dedicated team of Suri, Karthik, Raaz, Suresh, Sai, and Kishor.
It is hard to believe the kind of perseverance and foolhardiness that you have as a 19 year old. A decade ago, during the final year of my degree, I decided to run for the President of the Students Union at the University of Essex. The circumstances that led to this particular decision are several and there was definitely an element of foolish bravado involved. But looking back, I think it was one of the best decisions that I made in my life. My mentor at that point, Chris Saul, had unsuccessfully run for President the previous year and in some way, his loss pushed us to work fervently towards winning, as an act of retribution.
What runs in your head when you take a photograph? Do you think about the likes that you'll get on social media platforms? Do you think about how many friends and family you can 'wow' with the photograph? Or do you think about the fun moment that is happening and want to make a memory out of it? Most of the time, taking a photograph is a subconscious decision. Whether it is for likes or to preserve a memory, your motivation for taking the photograph is to review it later and derive value from it.There is a large difference between photography for today and photography for tomorrow. With the ubiquitous availability of phone cameras, there has been a rise of taking photographs just for today.
“No Parking” signs are an ubiquitous part of life in India. We see them scattered all across the city, in main roads, in little alleys and on the gates of apartments. There is no escaping them and to me, they are the perfect metaphor for urban life.These signs symbolise the hurried and unplanned growth of India. Often drawn or painted by hand with little prior planning, these signs pop up due to narrow roads, lack of parking infrastructure, combined with an increasing number of car ownership. They are now a common sight on the walls of many localities, houses and buildings across the country. Many companies also take advantage of them as a space for branding. I remember how ICICI started the trend, more than a decade ago, with metal ‘No Parking’ signs that featured the ICICI logo on the board.
A sense of euphoria. A feeling of invincibility. A hit of dopamine.
Those are not aftermaths of a drug binge but rather, the aftermath of taking a great, memorable photograph. Even though it has been more than a decade since I got my first dSLR camera, every single time I pick up the camera, there is the same joy and excitement that I felt when I was a teenager. My camera almost feels like a time machine, transporting my mind back in time to a younger version of me, with fresh ideas and unbridled optimism about the world. Regardless of where I am at the moment, my camera has the power to inject my mind with endless curiosity and creativity.
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