What begins as a mere fascination often transforms into one’s passion and further into profession. I feel this powerfully when I meet and interact with photographer friends of mine.One among them is Shivam Bapat, a 20-year-old Mass Media student from Ruia College, Mumbai.
Shivam Bapat
For eight years now, Shivam has been religiously following his passion and one gets to see his brilliantly captured photographs on his Instagram page ‘TheBalconyOfInfinity’.
“Some of my school friends had a DSLR and I was always fascinated with the magic it can do with frames,” he says. “It was during school days that I started capturing moments and frames on my phone camera,” he adds, while describing photography as “endless and abstract”.
Bapat has over a thousand followers on Instagram and his photography-oriented profile recently got him a job with Mumbai’s popular Prithvi theatre. He never received training in photography, he clears, and has purely grasped the art through his experience.
While fascination crept in quite early in Shivam’s life, for a Pune student Prathamesh Rege it was accidental.
Prathamesh Rege
“I guess I never took my photography skills that seriously,” he says. But, yes, he loves capturing moments. Rege is certainly thankful to this stranger he caught up with at the Swargate bus station in Pune, who propelled him to do the photo-stories, he now does.
“Before leaving he thanked me for listening to him for so long and expressed how good he felt sharing it with me,” Rege distinctly recalls. Those words, he says, marked the beginning of his journey and since then Rege, a 20-year-old Engineering student, has been venturing out to hear from people their stories and shares them with his audience on Instagram. “I have been doing this as my hobby,” he avows.
Shashank Mhasawade
Shashank Mhasawade was bit by shutterbug way back in 2004, when he had been to Kerela and had a Sony point-and-shoot digital camera.
“Mother nature initiated me into photography,” he says. Mhasawade, who left the corporate world to found ‘Moments That Matter’, kept on saving money and buying advanced cameras as compared to the model in hand. His association with the camera is only strengthening ever since, he reveals. The best thing about photography, Mhasawade underlines, is to witness, document and freeze a piece of history as it unfolds. It could be an emotion, an event, a relationship or a personal milestone. “Photography makes you a historian in your own, unique way,” he propounds.
Siddharth Samant
Siddharth Samant or THAT_SIDARTGUY, as his followers know him, is a successful photographer today. A passionate Samant grew up with photography when he started using his uncle’s Sony Ericsson to click photos in his garden. “Photography was a self taught hobby and I learnt the other technicalities of it by interacting with my photographer friends,” says Samant, who recently bought himself a Nikon D750. Light catches his attention; he loves light. What is it that he is fond of the most? “Street photography!” he exclaims and adds, “Because it involves maximum thought and immediate reaction to press the shutter”. Samant has recently ventured fashion and food photography and aspires to tap into architectural photography.
Feedback plays an enormous role in reinforcing one’s attitudes, likes and dislikes. And every artist relies on the feedback he/she receives from his audiences. Though Karl Kolah had a liking for photography during his college days, his passion only grew once he started using Instagram and his followers started appreciating his work; it has now become a way to de-stress himself from his hectic work schedule.
Karl Kolah
“I am primarily a phone photographer,” Kolah says. A phone photographer? One might wonder. “Phone photography lets me to capture the moment without going out specifically to shoot,” he elucidates. He has bought a DSLR recently, but he hardly uses it, he says. Kolah, who captures the everyday life things around him, believes that the tool is not as important as the picture. Kolah recently won the OurFutureCity competition held by Shell across Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles and Mumbai, and won a grant of $3,000, which he plans to give to a sustainable startup which will work for the betterment of the city. This, Kolah feels, is a chance to give something to Mumbai, the city he loves the most!
Tags: Karl Kolah Photographers Prathamesh Rege Shashank Mhasawade Shivam Bapat Siddharth Samat
