Fine Art Photography | Nature | Creative & Artistic

I have been doing nature photography for more than a decade now and my focus mostly has been on portraying nature in creative and artistic ways. Interestingly the concept of what is art to me has changed over time. Here is an account on how it changed over a decade.

In Search of Art in Nature Photography

Your thoughts are welcome – what you consider work of art in nature photography ?

Ranganathittu bird sanctuary is bubbling with activities now. Below is the link to a few glimpses from my trip last week.

Glimses from Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary

Spent 10 days touring Western Ghats regions during last week of Dec. Here are some images from the trip.

Western Ghats – Glimpses from Winter Visit

Just returned from a week long vacation to Western Ghats regions. Cold beautiful winter morning offered some interesting photo opportunities. Here are a series of images of a dragonfly trying to escape out of a spider web.

Dragonfly and Spider

A close relative of mine died last night. He was 82 and was suffering from heart ailment for more than a decade. I think his sheer confidence helped him live that long in spite of severity of the problems he had.

I was born and brought up in their house and spent good amount of my childhood days at their house. When I heard the news of his death I was able to keep my cool without really feeling sad. Frames of good old days and his personality rolled in front of my closed eyes.

By birth comes the death. Of late I have been thinking about what I would like to call “emotional debts”. The debts that are not related to money but related to human relations and emotions. When a near and dear one dies, beyond difficult days ahead due dependency issues for some, the amount of sadness that we will have is proportional to the relational or emotional debts that we have with the person who died. By emotional or relational debts I mean debts of nature “I should not done like that” or “I should have behaved better” or things of those nature. I think conscious effort in keeping the balance sheet clean will help us lead normal days without guilty feeling for years to come. One thing I think will help is to close our eyes and assume the scenario of the void created by demise of a near and dear one including ourselves and then think of the “debts” we have with them. The death as such may not scare us much (yes we will have some unfinished agendas which we would have liked to complete) but thinking of the void that we will leave and the relational debt is worrisome. Having entered operation theatre couple of times in life (fortunately with not life threating disease) so far all strange thoughts come to mind during that instant. It vividly showed my emotional or relational debts that I have with my wife, son,parents and so on. We will never see them in normal day-to-day scenario.

While some may say this is a solved problem and the solution is to leave everything and going to forest for meditation personally I don’t subscribe to that philosophy and would like to abide by the laws of the mother nature.

I spent a week at a remote village in foot hills of Western Ghats and tried to make a few creative perspectives of dracos (Draco Dussumieri), bats and moths in flight. You may visit this link below to see some of those images.

Moths, Bats and Dracos in Flight – Creative Visions from Foot hills of Western Ghats

I still have lots of images to process. I will be away for next couple of weeks and will add more images after my return. Hope you will enjoy some of them..

Couple of weeks back I visited Kaas – The Plateau of Flowers. It is an amazing place to say the least. Kaas is about 135Km from Pune in India, near Satara town. Thanks to Adesh Shivkar, Dr Sandeep Shrotri and Vivek Kale we had a wonderful time at Kaas. Below is the link to some of the images I made at Kaas and surrounding places.

Kaas – The Plateau of Flowers

Hope you will enjoy some of these images and some tips that I shared for nature photography at Kaas in this above page.

PS : Lots of images in this above page. Download may take some time…

I found Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol very interesting –

Open Graph Protocol
http://opengraphprotocol.org/

Spent sometime today to make tweaks to my own website software (C code) to turn my website pages into (facebook) graph objects and integrate the site better with Facebook.

New look (with some cosmetic changes) – www.naturelyrics.com

Having full control over each page in the site helps make quick changes to website…

We (NTN Team) have been working on a non-commercial forum exclusively dedicated for telling stories of nature. We are glad to let you know that we have just launched it !!

Visit – Nature Stories Forum (NTN)

For last few weeks I have been experimenting with “macro landscapes” or “micro landscapes” – essentially macro photography with an attempt to show the context around the main macro subject (often we forget that in macro photography). I have experimented with combination of extension tubes, close up filters, flashes, graduated ND filters etc to achieve some of these perspectievs. The traditional challenge of working distance gets amplified here with infinity measuring an inch or two and extreme narrow dept-of-field. Here are some of the perspectives from these experiments.

A few more here (click of these these above and below  images to see them larger, better)

Have you ever seen reaction of artistists (who paint) towards a beautiful image of a landscape or a bird or an animal ? a nature photograph in general ?

Often, at best it is a nice yawn ! (BTW, I write this from my own experience seeking a feed back from an artist). As medium of expression these two can’t be compared. Art revolves a lot around individual’s creativity, expression and visions while nature photography often revolves (unfortunately) around technology, right time in right place and faithful reproduction etc. I guess this latter attribute of “nature as is” makes it un-interesting for artists who want to see some uniqueness, creation and individuality which is a real challenge in nature photography thanks to the very medium of expression.

Have you ever seen reaction of biologists or naturalists towards a beautiful portrait of bird or an animal ?

Often it is “so what” kind of expressions, at best a “good one”. Simple portraits are boring to them who spend their life researching in jungles. They would love to see unique behaviours not observed earlier or discover/record new life forms, conservation issues etc – not yet another “beautiful portrait of a kingfisher”.

So most of the nature photography that we see today is neither accepted by artistists community as work of art or by naturalists or field biologists as something useful to the field of natural history or field biology. Where do most of the images of nature that we make belong then ? I think it belongs only to us as “nature photographers” !! Who is a nature photographer ? What is his purpose in life ? I am not talking about those who make living from it. Most of the nature photographers don’t make living out of it. Most of the them are passionate week end warriors who don’t mind spending $$$$ on 500mm/600mm F4 lenses and trips to exotic places to make images.

Can/Can’t the purpose of nature photography be just freezing some beautiful moments in nature ? Without having to offer something of our own ? Can/Can’t it be just “see, enjoy, share and probably get some kudos” ? Is it acceptable to us as nature photographers that most of our work neither belongs to world of art nor belong to the world of natural history ? Should we stop feeling good or proud if someone calls our work “artistic” ?

While each of these questions can be debated till death the question remains

Who are we ?

We are not artists, we not naturalists, we are not field biologists – probably a separate confused tribe named “nature photogaphers” ? May not be bad as is but worth realizing where we stand ? May be, may not be ? May be worth an introspection ?

Life has been hectic these days and never had time to process my Corbett National Park images. Here goes the second installment (first one being – Corbet in Monotones shared below.) Nothing can do justice to natural beauty of Corbett (Dhikala to be specific). Here is an attempt at seeing this magical place and some panoramas. Hope you will enjoy seeing some of these below –

Panoramas – Corbett National Park, India

It is more than one and half months since I opened my camera bag – thanks to some week end work I am busy with. Yesterday morning I decided to visit my favourite place TG Halli to portray some monsoon mood. It was a cloudy moody morning – not sure how I wanted to translate that into pixels. I did some new experiments and tried to portray the moody clouds using an empty snail shell in the foreground. I tried to precisely control the depth of field and sharpness (blurness rather) to give a specific mood to the image. Made a couple of very satisyfying images after a long time. You may click the images to see them in larger size on my website or visit this link.