As I have probably mentioned in one of my earlier posts, it was around the time that my son was born – way back in 2003 – that I actually started pursuing photography as a serious hobby.
I used to take photographs prior to that too, mostly with one of those Pentax point-and-shoot cameras that were popular in the 90’s. I moved on to a totally manual Nikon F100 – a 35mm film-based single-lens reflex camera and started reading up on and experimenting with lighting, composition and the various technical aspects of photography. A lot of messed up shots and wasted films later, I started to get a hang of it.
Later, in 2006, before the start of e-com boom, my friend V and I ordered our first DSLRs (Nikon D80) from the online store JJ Mehta. We went around in Mangalore, at various times – at dawn, at dusk, and the times in between – to put our cameras to use. I don’t know if ‘fruit photography’ is a legit genre, but if it were, V would be an expert at that – having spent a lot of time taking close up shots of fruits with water droplets sprinkled on. He then moved on to portraits and landscapes.
Meanwhile, i had started combining my love for travel and photography – lugging my bulky D80 wherever I went. I started shooting daily scenes that I came across in my travels, the people I met and began chronicling them on this blog. In short, I had stumbled on the ‘street photography’ genre and started getting more and more into it.
I am a painfully shy person, and this is one quality that doesn’t work well for street photography. But my love for photography has helped me overcome this aspect to some extent over the years – I now find it easier to strike up conversations with strangers. Here are some photographs from my archives where I had to overcome my natural shyness to get what I wanted:
What about you – do you like street photography too?