Originally published on medium.com
I bought my first camera nearly 15 years ago. It was pretty much a flimsy box with a plasticky ultra-wide lens designed for widest possible angle of view and also put everything in focus. It was one of those one-time use cameras with pre-loaded film, something that pre-digital photographers might remember. I upgraded fast. My next purchase was an entry level film SLR. A professional then would have called it an ‘entry level’ toy, but it was all glass and glitter for a newbie like me. Those days, any SLR camera would turn heads and make a lot of people pause and look at you with starry eyes. Some would approach me with an evident admiration and ask if I was a professional. I wasn’t, then.
My equipment kept changing. I quickly moved to an entry-level digital SLR. In a few years when I evolved to call myself a professional photographer, I had a big clunky black box that helped me make images in most challenging situations.
Upgrade in photography equipment came easy. The more money I made, the better equipment I bought and used them to make technically superior images. But the search for images that said something new, images that spoke about something extraordinary, remained relentless.
Originally posted in medium.com
Kyrgyzstan is a nation defined by its natural beauty. Joyously unspoilt mountainscapes, stark craggy ridges and rolling jailoos (summer pastures) are brought to life by semi-nomadic, yurt-dwelling shepherds— Lonely Planet Central Asia
An Eagle-Hunter in Kyrgyzstan
I was always fascinated about remote and unknown regions of Central Asia’s highlands. Even when there is not so much a thing called ‘unknown’ in today’s world of air travel and internet, the mountainous regions far north of the Himalayas seemed to be away from everywhere. The region always sounded exotic, with its fables of Silk-Route and of marching armies of Chengiz Khan and Timur Leng. Their nomadic settlements in the mountains and fascinating eagle-hunters on their Central-Asian horses were stuff that made for exotic stories.
The year is almost coming to an end. Here is that customary post with a bunch of images as I look back into the year.
I did not travel much in the first half of the year, but became slightly more active from August onwards. In August, I went on a trek in Uttarakhand Himalayas where the landscapes were just out of the world. In September, I visited Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, driving through its highlands and spending days with the semi-nomadic shepherds. My tryst with shepherds continued in October, this time at the highlands of Ladakh. My next rendezvous was in Andaman islands in November, leaving December for some quiet time at home. Here is a collection of images from these journeys.
Sunrise from Dochu La Pass, Bhutan.
A few more images from Bhutan that I enjoyed making.
