My romance with a new passion

My coming back to Chandigarh has helped ignite in me a new passion- photography. Till now, it was only an interest. But thanks to my editor Prabhat Singh who keeps on telling me- and all of us- about the finer aspects of this art. And he takes delight and satisfaction in it. He, being an accomplished lensman himself, told one very interesting thing sometime back- that photos are not clicked, they are made.

What he said changes one’s whole perception. Anyone with a camera and a good scene in front of him can click a photograph. No matter who is behind the camera, that scene is going to be captured anyhow. It is very much true, especially for static scenes. And better and expensive the camera better will be the details!

But, if you go with a mindset of making a photograph, it is then that you create a photograph. Many things are lying before you, and the photo you wish to make out of them depends upon your eye and mood. What surroundings you see, what background you are looking for, what it is you wish to focus upon, whether you want to keep the surroundings hazy or not, what mode you are going to choose to make a particular photograph, etc. And yes, the angle and the zoom are important too.

And I know how it feels to shoot with a camera. I have known this since long when I used to just click photos with a simple Fuji camera, which my friend from US had gifted me. It was my first camera, and it was a film camera… and I had a passion of clicking with a black and white film.

Though I love colours and never hesitate to stare at a myriad of colours for a long time, it uses to make me have a nice kind of feeling- a feeling of simplicity- to see things in just two colours. No confusion, no complexity, and simple plain truth! And when I flip the flaps of my albums, I do realize that I made two or three photos accidentally while clicking scores of them.

It was this Fuji camera which I took along with me on my trips to Singapore and Malaysia. The results were as you would have anticipated. Though, in some of the shots, the angles and the backgrounds were good. I used a digital camera when I went to Egypt and UAE. It was a Kodak digital camera, and photography there was far more satisfying.

And now, I have a Canon camera which I am learning to use to make photos. It is not that I am on a shooting spree these days… I am just watching good photos more closely and intently, and occasionally throwing questions born out of curiosity towards Prabhat jee, which he never fails to answer. After meeting him, I have used camera during my trip to Shimla and in the chrysanthemum show. And people have told me that results are appreciable.

I draw more satisfaction from the fact that my camera cannot click continuously like some high-end cameras which can capture a scene more than 24 times in one click. That means, you have a number of photographs of just one scene, each one separated from the next one by a fraction of a second, and you have a choice to choose the best one out of them. But in this process, your own creativity takes a back seat sometimes. So, this fact is relieving for me that whatever I shoot- whether bad or good- is my own creation.