Spotlight #22 - Lost

It's almost been a year since I took that incredible trip to Ladakh. 

I remember prior to setting off, having butterflies flutter around like a whirlwind in my tummy. It was my first real road trip in ages, and I hadn't prepared myself nearly as much as I wanted to. 

Eventually once I got on the road, time seemed to fly back, and out of nowhere what was supposed to be a 14 day trip seemed like a weekend. 

This picture was taken sometime into the trip - the day after an 18 hour drive day.

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We had spent the night at a tiny little village set in between two extremely nauseating mountains. When we got in, the temperature had dropped perilously close to freezing (it was mid summer, by the way), and the altitude (over 5000m) had started to take it's toll on a couple of us. 

Needless to say, the night turned out to be a restless one - me, with a migraine so painful it felt as if my brain was imploding. 

We were quick to get up and leave the next day, just after sunrise. This picture was taken a kilometer or two outside of the village where after one of the most traumatic nights, the surreal landscape blew us away. 

Spotlight #16 - The Cold Desert

The picture here is honestly one of my favourites ever taken. I took this picture during a transitional phase in my photography. 

I had always set myself the boundary of shooting 'real subjects' and not landscapes because I believed that the beauty of landscapes are very hard to capture, and never accurately capture the feeling of actually being there. 

During my trip to Ladakh, I found myself shooting landscapes, but as an experiment to prove to myself that my theory was correct. 

And then I got this shot

This was taken on our way to Lake Tsomiriri, a small little isolated lake in Eastern Ladakh that (for now) is away from the public eye. 

As we were driving we passed by this smaller little pond, and it seemed like the stars had aligned perfectly because we had reached at the time when the lighting was gorgeous, the music was pumping us up, and our sleep deprivation and the high altitude were driving us up the wall. 

This picture is always going to remind me of that experience - one that almost felt like an out of body one because of days of being on the road, and hours and hours in the jeep. 

This picture, apart from simply being aesthetically pleasing is always going to take me back to those memories.

Shooting landscapes

I remember as a kid (don't you love it when articles start like that?), a 'good' photograph was one that captured the landscape really well. 

And so, no matter what my camera was, I always pushed for capturing a good landscape. 

Recently, however, my pictures have been of a more documentary style. It comes from the belief that I have about pictures capturing reality and freezing it forever. Manipulating the picture to make it seem like something else is manipulating reality, and so I was dead set against it. 

Just yesterday though, while I was editing my pictures from Ladakh, I happened on a technique that truly opened my eyes to something new. I've been following this Instagram accounts for a while now - accounts that edit their pictures so well, the pictures seem other worldly. 

A part of me has always been skeptical of it because of that very belief i talked about above, but a part of me was both envious and in awe of it all because it's truly beautiful. 

And while I was editing, I chanced upon the technique on how to do it. 

Suddenly, my perspective on it all has changed. I still believe landscapes cannot truly ever be captured on camera because of their raw beauty, but from an artistic perspective, landscapes provide the most room for experimentation. 

Now, my recent trip was a mixture of many different kinds of pictures - landscapes, people, street, animals etc. and I never imagined I would have gained such a new outlook on photography as a whole. 

It's an exciting time for me where I can experiment around with a new style of photography and see where it takes me. 

Cheers