She 🌎 loved getting “all dressed up” and he was madly in love with her. So he ☀️ himself became her make-up and gave all the hues, to colour-up her mornings, evenings and brighten up the days.It was only when they parted for a while they came even closer … Boundaries couldn’t keep him away from her, he simply spread his wings and flew over to catch her glimpse.Friends forever !!!She painted his world silver, made things look just a little more perfect and alive more than ever….
Photography is the beauty of life captured – Tara Chisholm
Photography is an art and like any other art form it teaches so many things. The practice of photography has taught me just to pay closer attention to what I see around me every day. Some of the most satisfying pictures I have taken have been of things in the immediate vicinity of where I live and work. I am sharing my reflections from the moments spent with my camera. I am sure that these five are not the only learnings and of-course there are many more, please feel free to add your learnings….
Live in the moment – Photography has taught me to be in the moment. When I go out with my camera, it’s only when I am completely in the moment, I get to recognize the surroundings and hence compose an image. There are lots of times when we get swayed by the circumstances and therefore don’t acknowledge the beauty of the moment.
Accept first in order to be accepted – I have learnt this while doing nature photography. Shooting birds/butterflies is really a difficult job; the moment you enter a location or even spot a bird it flies away, as they consider you to be a potential threat. However, if you stay at the location for some time, you also become a part of the ecosystem and no more considered an outsider and hence no threat to those birds around or any other creatures like grasshopper, butterflies, dragon flies etc. One stays at a place only when it has accepted the place “as it is” and therefore the entire location including all the living creatures accept you and then you can take pictures comfortably.
Once you decide your focus, rest of the things blur on their own – Photography is all about deciding what you focus on and that focus itself differentiates from the background and comes out shining. If we can apply the same philosophy to our lives, lot of things can change significantly. Wherever we go there’s lot of beauty around, we just need to have the right focus to identify it. Even the mundane things like shoe-rack, windows outside the building can appear to be attractive, if presented the right way and to present it that way one has to first decide what needs to be focused and what not.
Contrast makes things beautiful – Pictures appear beautiful when the foreground has contrasting colours to the background. If the subject and the background are of same colour, picture doesn’t appear interesting. If the subject is really bright, then the background should be relatively darker, otherwise, the subject will not stand-out and consequently it will look boring and would not catch viewer’s attention. We all strive for happiness in life and try to avoid gloom, however, cheerfulness will have no importance without melancholy. Only when we overcome the challenges, we get the sense of achievement. We feel proud of ourselves when we have accomplished a difficult task or have created something new.
Photography is just like meditation – Taking photographs and practising meditation might seem at first glance to be completely unrelated activities. In fact, both of them are in search of light, Photography looks outwards at the visual world through the medium of a camera, meditation focuses inwards. And whereas photography is concerned with producing images of reality, meditation is about seeing reality as it is. As practices, both meditation and photography demand commitment, discipline and technical skill. To go beyond mere expertise in either domain requires a capacity to see the world in a new way. The pursuit of meditation and photography leads away from fascination with the extraordinary and back to a rediscovery of the ordinary. Both photography and meditation require an ability to focus steadily on what is happening in order to see more clearly. Seeing things this way involves “shifting” to a frame of mind in which the habitual view of a familiar world is replaced by a keen sense of the unprecedented and unrepeatable configuration of each moment. Both meditation and photography are concerned with light. Meditators speak of “enlightenment”: an experience in which “light” metaphorically dispels the “darkness” of the mind and on the other hand photography also chases light in order to create pleasing images.
It’s been exactly one year since my last family holiday. We had travelled to Ooty (Tamil Nadu, India) and stayed there for about 5 days and believe me those 5 days were so much full of fun, laughter and enjoyment.
View of Nilgiris with “Toy Train”
It’s such a beautiful hill station and rightly named as “the queen of hills”. We all had so much fun that even after a year its memories are absolutely fresh and vivid. I clearly remember the excitement we all had, right from the time when we were shopping for our vacation to the rainy morning of 1st Sep 2019, when we finally commenced our journey. There are so many memories from that holiday that we as a family keep going back to; from going for a walk in the rains, to visiting the tribal village, to shooting birds (with a camera 😊) and many more.
Our flight was scheduled to reach Coimbatore at 11:20 am, but owing to a late start from Mumbai, we touched-down at 11:50. Since Coimbatore is a smaller airport and therefore cabs were not readily available. After waiting for half-hour, the cab arrived and we made ourselves comfortable in the car and excitedly started our second leg of the journey. We took a break at around 2pm for lunch and enjoyed “authentic” South Indian food, served on banana leaves.
It took us close to 4.5 hours to reach Ooty from Coimbatore. We all were really tired as we were travelling since morning; nonetheless, the moment we stepped out of the car, we were greeted by the cool breeze of the mountains which brought a pleasant smile to our faces. We were welcomed at the resort with a warm and refreshing lemon tea. Within a minute’s time we all felt completely recharged, I don’t know whether it was the “Tea” or the “beautiful weather” of Ooty, which took our tiredness away so quickly.
We were very clear with our holiday plans. Even though we had about 5 nights and 6 days with us, we intended to be in Ooty only, for the next five days and therefore we hadn’t planned to cover any other nearby location like Coorg, Mysore, etc., as our idea was simply to unwind and spend next couple of days there only, exploring just the nearby spots or maybe lazying around in the resort itself. We came across a lot of surprised faces when we told them about our idea of staying at one place for 5 days, as if we were committing a big mistake by staying at one location for these many days. I think Rain-Gods were also listening to our thoughts and they took us quite seriously as it continuously kept raining throughout our stay 😊, because of which we anyway couldn’t have gone to any other location.
Beautiful flowers in the resort
Fortunately, the property was really amazing and flora inside the resort itself was no less than a botanical garden. Our favourite place in the resort was the holiday activity centre, which each one of us enjoyed fully. My daughter loved playing carrom or air-hockey with her grandmother while two of us sharpened our Table-Tennis skills.
Adyar Ananda Bhawan
Despite non-stop rains, we managed to explore a couple of nearby spots. Although all the locations in Ooty were so very beautiful, however it is not possible to move ahead without mentioning a few of them, like the vibrant botanical garden whose roots go back to 1848, mesmerising “Dolphin’s nose”, serene Tea-gardens of Coonoor and the slow and romantic “Toy -Train”, which gives you the view of “Divine Nilgiris”. Apart from the majestic locations of Ooty, one more thing that I and my wife very fondly remember is the amazing dessert, “Kesari Bath” that we had at Adyar Ananda Bhawan. Every time we crossed the restaurant, we made sure to stop-by and have it, we convinced ourselves by repeating this statement to us” Holiday calories doesn’t count”. It was so really delicious that even while writing also I could feel its taste in my mouth.
Now, about a little over 4 months being home-bound, we as a family have got a chance to spend some quality time with each other, since a lot of time is being saved that I used to spend commuting to and from office. Although an important aspect of a holiday is spending some quality time with family, but that’s not all, I believe the beautiful surroundings contribute a lot to it. I feel I am quite fortunate to have travelled with my family to a lot of beautiful locations like Shimla, Nainital, Mussoorie, Goa, Tehri Garhwal, Mahabaleshwar, Ooty and many more. I believe every holiday gives us lot of memories to be cherished forever and further strengthens our bond. I reckon, similar to getting our cars serviced at constant intervals, it is quite important to take a break from our regular routine and give each other a quality time at a “beautiful location”.
