Photography
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.
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.
“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.
Almost exactly 6 years ago, I shot my first paid wedding assignment. At that point, I did it to help out some friends who were getting married, for an extra bit of pocket money and to keep my creative juices flowing. Never did I foresee a full time career in it. Yet here I am today, 6 years later, working as a professional photographer, having shot around 200 weddings, published 8 printed Zines and made several documentary photo stories in this span of time. And how has the journey been so far? Read on.
Indian weddings are chaotic by nature. They are larger (in terms of number of guests), longer (usually 3 days or more), and more complicated (endless traditions & rituals) when compared to a typical western wedding. All these factors contribute towards creating an unavoidable situation of clutter and chaos. Of course, I definitely don’t mean to paint all Indian weddings with the same brush – we have a vast number of religions in the country, each with their own style of ceremonies, many of which are rather simple. In this context, I am talking primarily about Hindu weddings and in particular, South Indian Hindu weddings.
DBR Mills came across my purview more than a decade ago. I heard about it in passing and was curious to learn more about it. Old news articles told me that DBR (Dewan Bahadur Ramgopal) Mills shut down in 1992 temporarily but was never opened after that. Today, two and a half decades after its closure, the buildings line in complete ruin.
Over the past year or so, we have been surprising our clients with a little present on their wedding anniversaries. We wanted to give them something physical, a keepsake of sorts, unlike the usual greeting card on their first anniversary. I put myself in the feet of a newly married couple and tried to think from their perspective. Given that I was also recently married, I realized that we often think of printing photos but rarely get to the act of doing it. So I decided to make some beautiful prints of the best moments of their wedding and compile them in a folio box. These 12 prints look great on the wall, on a desk and can be framed for extra effect.
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