When her little hands held the
camera for the first time under Dad’s solemn guidance and she made her first
attempt to click “within the corners”, little did she know that that was the
beginning of an affair from behind the lens (rather than in front of it).
That alleged affair with the camera has continued in spite of the good
old Canon giving way, the Sony DigiCam never quite being a good enough
replacement and yours truly still figuring out whether to DSLR or not to DSLR!
In the interim nevertheless, mobile phones with them relatively decent-ish
cameras seem to have some of the spotlight; the endless photo apps available turning
everyone around the block into a surrealist or postmodernist or whathaveyou albeit
at the choice of a filter. None of that has been a grouse as much as the itch
to not go click-click.
Yeah. That’s what I said.
For someone through whose veins gush the ardent need to travel once
ever so often, the itch to not go click-click is somewhat of a perennial
dilemma. It’s a dilemma because I’m a slow traveller. I prefer soaking my environment
in the here and now. Travel, it would seem then, brings out the dormant Zen
within me to the fore; a Zen who couldn’t be bothered to take her phone out and
capture an image or two while moving from place to place.
So out of my element it makes me feel that neither selfies nor group
selfies for that matter ever become part of my modestly small album. Friends
flipping through my photos on Facebook and Instagram (yes, I do instagram) have
always thrown this one back question to me: ‘Why aren’t you in these
photographs?’ or ‘Why aren’t there people in this album?’
Quite frankly I think those questions are much better than the ones I’d
get asked earlier: ‘Wait, you’ve come back from a holiday and you haven’t clicked
any photographs?’ to strict instructions being doled out to me prior to
embarking on another journey like this one: ‘Please click some photographs...
will look forward to your blogposts too… after all we live vicariously through
you.’
Making vicariously living through me possible...to some extent.
Ladakh (top left), Coorg (top centre), Bhutan (bottom left), Kutch (top right, bottom centre and bottom right)
Somehow that got stuck and stayed with me. It’s followed me whether in
Ladakh, Coorg, Kutch or Bhutan. Yet I seem to have drawn the line when it comes
to the number of photographs; they’re still a modest number (and they’ll still
seldom feature people). It’s because I prefer using my photographs as visual
aids for anyone reading my blog-posts; which again are an attempt to recreate those
moments that have continue to linger long after I’d experienced them for the
first time.
Something I haven’t (seemingly obvious) done just yet is instagram-ming
or tweeting while on the go. I seem to prefer a complete download of thoughts and
visuals once I’ve returned to my city of origin. Hmm…
I recently found myself concurring with Lisa Haydon where she said (in an
article): “…I’ve
realised that the process of capturing and saving is not crucial enough to me.
I do occasionally take photos but only when the camera is not too far away and
I don’t have to break the flow to capture it.”
That sums it for me.
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