Inception
raison d'etre: I love babbling and ranting and spamming, it’s a passion as is photography, bigoted moral lectures are my bread and butter.
Anyways, let’s be honest, Street Photography is fucking hard. You are lucky if you have masters in your locality to learn from, but mostly they are also not much accessible, which may not be because they are having an elitist attitude but either because they are not good at teaching or they know we lack the visual literacy to even learn from them.
Due to this, I perceive a huge gap between the masters’ level and the beginners’ level, a huge divide, the middle level is almost missing in India. There are lots of photographers who are working hard to bridge this gap, I put myself in this gang, working to go from beginner level to the middle level.
I started street photography just 2 years back, all alone even without knowing that there’s a term called street photography, I didn’t even had an instagram account that time. It was all through the desire of getting the candid expression of strangers as I found the expressions boring when they are asked permission, there was no other reason I started doing candid photos. I started learning more about it online from Youtube mostly, the techniques and thought process, you need to be mentally tough to do candid photography, your morality will be questioned, you need self justification.
Before that I used to shoot travel and sometimes birds, Flamingos and Ospreys, and I was part of local groups who liked such photos; I even won a bird photography contest; but were not much impressed by candid photos, they liked it if I made them bnw somehow, but no one wanted to give it a try, sun-stars and birds and star trails are their forte, I respect that. And that’s when I started looking at instagram if there are other people doing such stuff in India and came across the community.
Through these blogs I will like to share what I have learnt from various online and offline sources in my journey, it will of course not be useful to people who are at advanced level but there are many many people like me who do not have a guardian angel and are struggling to get out of all the confusion on social media and the spam of likes making us go randomly like headless chickens.
My journey is ongoing unlike the masters who have reached the pinnacle. It’s exciting and I would love to share it with people who are on their own journey and have a more engaging conversation than social media enables.
Footnote: The image used in this post was shot my me in Mumbai in 2018, right when I was transitioning from travel and bird photography into street.