Wedding at the Bangalore Palace, Bangalore
Reception at the Race Course, Mysore

Mid-November, 2011

Pramod approached me after attending his friend Tilak‘s wedding – which I covered last August – to have his big day captured. Though he happens to be a scion of the family that owns and operates the popular Bassapa Memorial (B.M.) Hospital in Mysore and has traces of royal blood coursing through him, he never once betrayed his background until a couple of days prior to the wedding when he filled me in on the events. His wife Nikky comes from an illustrious family too, her father being the well-know IAS officer, Mr. Chiranjeevi Singh. His gentle manners, saintly aura and a distinguished career in the civil service commands immediate attention and enduring respect from those around. I recall checking his collection of books while I was at his house to capture the mehndi – apart from the walls being carpeted with sketches from and about the past, his books were historical too. I was thrilled to find a couple by Barbara Tuchman – whoever takes her name these days, a sad irony about one who has herself traced the march of human folly across time. However, Sikhs in general are such lovely people to photograph – with the leonine bearing of their men and the lustrous beauty of their women – dainty or otherwise.

The scale of the wedding was high: the Maharaja of Mysore had a whole section of his palace in Bangalore arranged to accommodate the wedding guests while the reception was held on the open grounds of the race course in Mysore. But the formal affairs did not last more then ten minutes. Inspired by the poet Kuvempu’s rendition of it, the couple exchanged garlands and solicited blessings from their parents while the virtues of the union and the responsibilities that it brings along were being read out. No sooner did this end than the stage was charged upon by attendee after well-know attendee to bless the couple. Anil Kumble was the cynosure of all our eyes until the former prime minister Deve Gowda weighed in on the dias with his regal airs, dismissive of the lines that the mortals stood in to await their turn.

While at Mysore, I stayed at the lovely Windflower Spa that Pramod had very kindly set me in for the night. I’m not sure if they intend to charm visitors with their croaking frogs, hungry mongrels and tame geese that inhabit the campus, but lying down in their beach chairs by the poolside was refreshing indeed. The Metropole Hotel – which is administered by a think veneer of sophistication – was where I was driven to the next morning to cover Nikky having her makeup done. I have always enjoyed such settings – the air is charged with high expectations and you get to see the private side of the family that is otherwise hidden from the glare of society.

Later that day, we proceeded to Pramod’s mansion to witness the bride’s homecoming. While the building had a faithful replica of the Parthenon for it’s porch that took 4 years to erect, the massive granite-coated interiors were milled about by people focused upon delivering a warm welcome to the newlyweds. Relaxing after it all, the men bandied about that oldest of subjects – politics and governance. Only this time, the thoroughbreds were doing the talking. How I wanted to soak in on all of the details streaming in first-hand. But, I had my job to do.

Here are some of my favorites from the wedding.

As 2011 fades away, it’s time to review some of the good times I have had at weddings the past year, which marked a definite shift in the character of my images – I tried to fit in as much context into them as possible. As mentioned in the report I wrote about my approach to wedding photography, the elements that make up a good image are (hat tip to Jeff Ascough):

Too often, wedding photographers survey the field of action with a lens that’s narrower than the normal angle of view in people. With the aperture wide open, they aim to draw a tight depth-of-field boundary around the antics of the main players at a wedding – the smile of the bride, the wistful look of the parents, decorated body-parts and gleeful interactions with friends. It’s a lot of fun to capture them, but to me, they aren’t “moments”. They are devoid of structure and story, only fanciful enough to hold one’s attention due to the simple subjects focused upon against a bokehed background.

All through the year, I have been deliberate enough to include some context surrounding such happenings, i.e. to add more information to the image in the hope of making it into a moment. That has entailed extensive usage of wider focal lengths (24mm to 35mm). And, the more information you hope to get into your image, the more work you need to do to get the exposure, the composition and the texture of light across subjects right to make such images work. The color balance gets whacked due to highly saturated, directional lights that gets used at weddings and receptions, the sharpness does not stay even across the picture and extraneous objects serve to dampen the impact of the image. To get all of these elements to work together requires patience and a deliberate mode of shooting; one cannot show up at a wedding and machine-gun it all – that is, taking thousands of pictures of things around you in the hope of getting a few good ones. You’d need to judge the flow of light, the placements of subjects and anticipate something interesting to happen within that framework to capture a moment.

This weeks image is a case in point. I could have used a telephoto lens to focus on any one of the subjects to get a passable picture, but including all of their reactions and forming a workable composition where the heads form a polygon along which the eye darts across the surface of the picture is what makes this image work. Anyone who has a feel of Marathi weddings knows exactly what’s being captured here – the ukhane of the groom in which he takes the wife’s name in a humorous couplet. The body movements of the bride and the groom convey their state of mind – you know the groom is trying to one-up her and she’s plenty surprised at the attempt. Everyone is cracking up at the joke and it’s fun all around. The light gives it a three-dimensional quality. I could not have taken this photograph had I not stood back to observe the congregations of people and anticipated the coming event.

I currently have six weddings in the post-processing pipeline, and it is possible that I might have a few in there that would better represent this mindset of mine at weddings. But, this picture has satisfied me since the time I took it in June and here it is on my blog now.

I’m excited at the possibilities of such an approach and have some interesting weddings lined up in 2012 to refine it further. We’ll see how things progress.

Have a happy new year.

Wedding and Reception at Mumbai

Mid-October, 2011

Shariq’s father reached out to me a couple of months before the wedding to have me document his son’s union with Sora, a second-generation Korean-American. About three years ago, I covered Shabari’s wedding at the grounds of the homey Dattaguru Housing Society in Mumbai; it was her father who had me referred to Shariq’s family.

Dattaguru is one of those leafy, old-world neighborhoods that wall-in quaint two-storey cottages on either side of leafy promenades that snake all through the society. The crushing bustle of the city leaves no traces within it, built to look like a movie set with street after street of glinting facades, sun-dappled balconies, rustling trees and tweeting birds. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imagine sanguine faces behind each of those windows, only too happy to serve you some iced tea over a warm bed and a good book. Needless to say, I was delighted to be back there on assignment.

Professionally, Shariq applies a steadying hand to cross-continental economic imperialism, making sure ambitious moves at gaining allies through mergers and acquisitions do not turn unwieldy. Sora holds her own with a graduate degree from Columbia. They met in Jaipur for the first time, and their courtship continued around the world with Sora living in New York and Shariq in London, culminating in their Indian celebrations at Mumbai.

Though her parents could not make it to the events due to the care needed by her aged father, Sora was remarkably open to the demands of the social order of Indian marriages, with its heavy emphasis on conformity with tradition. The Siddiqui family – in classy assemblage from around the world – cushioned her tender bearings all through.

I also caught up with Shabari’s dad, Mr. Milind, who had some good words to share about my work. Her mother very kindly invited me in for the night, a tempting offer that I hope to make good of the next time I’m in there.

Here are some of my favorites from the wedding.

Wedding and Reception at Basavanagudi, Bangalore

Early-August, 2011

Karthik reached out to me a couple of months before his wedding to have me document it. The request came from, what is by now typical, a couple based overseas who wanted to be wedded among their extended family and friends in India. They both being Smartha Brahmins, a varna that my wife belongs to, I had a good idea about the main threads of the ceremonies that take place on and around the day of the wedding.

Though Suma was born and raised in Canada by her immigrant parents, I was struck by how Indian she is. She speaks perfect, unaccented Kannada, carries a saree admirably and shows obvious deference to customs with none of the puerile, self-conscious bearing that I’ve known so many in my own social circle, being only recent immigrants to the West, evince. At a meeting with Karthik and her a couple of days before the wedding, she told me about the bevy of opportunities that she had, no doubt with heavy parental influence, to get exposed to the Hindu way in her homeland, and one look at her relatively orthodox mother is enough to see truth in that statement. I only wish more such kids grow up with sides of their character sympathetic to our mores; the mindless commercialization of everything from intellect to soul that the West celebrates cannot run it’s course for too long.

While Suma works through her weekdays as as a Health & Safety Coordinator in California, Karthik, a native of Bangalore who moved out to the U.S. for an advanced technical degree, is a hardware engineer at a well-known firm that manufactures solid-state electronic equipment. Characteristically mild and good-tempered – who also does not cluck at rituals – he played along to the cadence of the priests.

It must have been a poignant day for Suma’s parents, having gotten married at the very hall more than two decades ago, and now having to let go of their daughter at the same venue.

I must here add a word about the wedding planners that Suma chose to orchestrate her big day. Scarcely have I seen young women, barely out of college, work as hard as they did – with one of the three on the job at any time. If you ever want to host an event in Bangalore, you should contact them at 3 Productions. Sowmya and Ritika, who spearhead the firm, surely go the extra mile to accommodate one’s ideas, be it classy staging, streaming the event on the Internet or decorations.

Here are some of my favorites from the wedding.

Wedding and Reception at J. P. Nagar, Bangalore

Early-July, 2011

Karthik’s father, Mr. Nagesh, contacted me about a month ahead of his wedding to have me cover the event. My good friend Raghuram, himself a wedding photographer now based in San Francisco and who was first contacted for the assignment, referred me instead.

The Sankethi subcaste is known to deliver people of formidable intellect into the professions, and Karthik fits that stereotype pretty well. A computer networking engineer, he is now based in Dallas after gathering his Masters degree from the neighboring university. A mild, good-tempered young man, who bears an excellent character among his family and is deeply respectful of the traditions, he handed his obedience over to the tender mercies of the priests across the dense rituals, ceremonies and symbolic gestures that packed the day. Aparna, being homey but effervescent, also fit the stereotype of a genteel Indian bride pretty well.

And, I had a good time chatting with a old grizzly of the wedding photography business, weighing in on the dias with his 20 years of experience. Such conversations seldom venture into the technicals, hovering around selected autobiographical accounts of each other’s time in the industry.

Here are some of my favorites from the wedding.

It was the kind of wedding I enjoy covering: a clean structure to the events, lovely people, an emotive couple, chatty fellow photographers and a carte blanche to shoot what I want. You are treated like family, get plenty of room to think about your compositions, and begin to appreciate the stories of dogsbodies who need to show up at weddings with a camera everyday just to put food on the table.

Sheetal, who’s wedding I documented two years ago in Pune, got in touch early this year about her sister Namrata’s wedding. And, having known her and her cheery husband Anupam to be a lovely, empathetic couple, I jumped at the opportunity. Like her sister, Namrata too is a doctor, as is her husband Nishant and his parents. Coming from a medical family myself, I approach anyone with such an education with innate respect.

Apart from the above factors, what really caused me to ease into the shoot was the expansive dias. Being offset from the guests by distance and height, very few of them busied themselves on it, thus giving me ample opportunities to swing around the seats of action and construct my compositions. The light was soft and diffused, causing my exposure values to remain almost static throughout. The play of light, compositions and the moments are all that I needed to focus on. I thoroughly enjoyed this trip to Thane.

Here are some of my favorites from the wedding.

Wedding and Reception at The Leela, Bangalore

Mid-June 2011

The wedding had all the characteristics of a Shetty wedding: pomp, businessmen and a stunning bride! Though Sneha has called Bangalore home all along and looks appropriately homey, her passport betrays her family’s penchant for travel, crowded with 30-odd visas. You wouldn’t guess for a moment that the lass, young and demure, could be that widely exposed. All the jet-setting has been proudly led by her father, a veteran of the cement business, who could also pass – quite convincingly – for a South Indian actor of yesteryear.

Tilak has a gentle, unhurried manner around him that could serve this stripling heir to his father’s jewelry business at Mysore well. His refined manners and filial warmth makes his company a pleasant one. And, all that doting over his bride, which he gives into easily, is perfectly understandable. I was surprised to discover that a classmate whom I hadn’t meet in 15 years happened to be his first cousin. It was a happy reunion with his father and him at the wedding, but for the unwelcome reminder that his business was the one that printed all the report cards at my school. Mine was invariably blotched in red after it exited the staff-rooms, causing my parents’ stomach to fall to the floor each time they had to stamp their signature.

This was one of the most challenging weddings I have had to cover as far as the lighting was concerned. The ornate mandap, with it’s florid dome, was erected right below the main light source in the hall – an expansive chandelier letting out incandescent light. Such a setting precluded any directional light, that normally lends so much to the mood of the setting, to hit the seat of action. Moreover, such overhead lighting tends to sink the eyes into wells of darkness that form around their sockets, thus dampening the major element of expressiveness. I was hoping to exploit the sungun of the videographer – however evil that might be – to aid my captures, but the filament gave out that morning and he hadn’t a spare one handy. All the resultant while balance correction and noise reduction made the post-processing heavier than normal, but I was satisfied with the results. And, so were the couple.

We met once more after the wedding to exchange ideas about the albums they would like to have created, to which I would now apply myself. I will update this post soon after I have worked the layouts out.

Here are some of my favorites from the wedding.

There are more photographs being taken and more photo books being produced by people than ever before. Here are the most popular items on Blurb, and every one of them relate heavily to photography:

Arts & Photography (31455)
Travel (18847)
Wedding (12430)
Fine Art Photography (10775)

It’s clear that what’s now scarce isn’t equipment, technical knowledge, the ability to make pictures or deliver bookstore quality picture books. All of them are now more affordable (even free) than ever before. What then is scarce, and hence valuable, is the ability to curate one’s passion, inspiration and knowledge into making things that move people, persuade them to see the world as it really is, cause change.

Being just a photographer – the kind who shows up on time, does what he or she is supposed to and delivers what’s expected – isn’t valuable anymore. Being a change agent with a cause to risk a lot for, is. My cause is in my manifesto. Get it here.

And, there’s been some happy feedback for my work:

“The album is excellent!! … Perfect it is !! … I am really happy with the work you have done for us. Outstanding it is :)” – Richa

“This is a small token of my appreciation for all the hard work and effort you have put in to making this event so special for us. The pictures turned out beautifully and will be treasured for the rest of our lives; we can’t thank you enough for these. Your passion and dedication to your work was a refreshing change of pace and also very inspiring. In addition, I must thank you for your courteousness and professionalism throughout the event and after. It was chaotic enough and this was one thing we did not have to worry about. I also appreciate how you never demanded any advance payment – not a lot of people operate this way, but I appreciate you putting your faith and trust in us. I hope this has not inconvenienced you too much.

I admire your work and I will continue to follow it on your blog. I have been getting a lot of requests for your contact information from friends and family who have seen these pictures – I have been directing them to your website with lots of positive feedback.” – Vijit

“I am very very happy with your work and would not have done anything differently … we finally had a chance to look at the sideshow together over the weekend and he loved it just as much as I did! Thanks again for an amazing job! … have sent out the link to our friends and family a few days ago and I have heard extremely positive feedback from a few people so far. Everyone though the pictures were absolutely breathtaking! I am sure I’ll be getting a lot more feedback …” – Natasha

I work for blessings (the ultimate scarcity) more than anything else. I hope I deserve the ones above.

What do you feel when you see the above photograph?

Do you feel yourself being sold onto something? Manipulated into a status-race with your peers? Do you feel it’s trying to nudge you to associate it with a brand, a product? To recalibrate your self-image? Or any of the thousand other covert ways clueless media companies commoditize beauty to get you gnawing at your need to be noticed?

What I see is delight, empathy, love and trust. How often have you seen those being peddled?

This photograph was made at a studio in Lowestoft, the U.K., over 40 years ago. The woman in the picture is “Jackie”, a longtime friend of my father who served under the NHS as a General Surgeon and a Urologist for close to twenty years. Across the top left of the casing is written, “To Rama, with deep affection. Jackie”. I know little else about the woman, but this token of the time they shared is one of my most cherished items among the hundreds of slides, pictures and albums that constitute my father’s archives.

The technology all that time ago cannot compare with those that power the lowliest of cameras today. Yet, how many times have you seen it used to promote warmth and bonding? The images currently in use exclusively target our envious, vain, competitive facet, letting the empathic, cooperative side unstimulated. My approach to wedding photography is predicated upon correcting this anomaly. I want to give credit to couples just for being who they are. I don’t stage manage, arrange them into stiff poses or require them to be camera aware. I like to stand back, observe the lighting and the congregations of people and position myself to captures expressions of emotion to get them to see themselves in ways they’ve never seen before.

40 years from now, I hope their progeny would find such pictures as appealing as I find the one above.

After having received their wedding slideshows, the DVDs containing high-resolution versions of photographs and their coffee-table album, the couple and I then discuss about possible framing choices for photographs they would like to hang around. Some move into new homes, and look forward to have elegant color schemes to house those photographs in.

I help in the selection of the right frame styles and colors, matting and their textures and different mat and frame dimensions by sending across images that correspond to the finished product placed over their wall color under simulated display lighting. This act’s as a guide when placing their order.

There’s no need to play around with mat and frame corners at the workshop, nor do the guesswork of how different color choices would appear against the walls. Three or less concentric mat surfaces – rectangular or oval – could be specified, along with their color, texture, thickness and bevel angles (the angle with which a mat opening meet with the layer below). The color and thickness of the outer frame could be specified as well. After a chosen photograph is inserted at the center, the entire construction could be placed over a given wall color under particular ambient lighting conditions to judge its impact. The following are a few examples.

The below shows a typical photograph that’s framed, with the various components named.

The following images show photographs that are framed variously and displayed against walls of different colors.

And, the following sequence has the same photograph framed identically in 4 different lighting conditions:

Daylight:

Fluorescent:

Halogen:

Mixed (that is, a blend of the above 3 types of light sources):