A bit of chit-chat before we dive into the question.
Shweta and I are blessed to get a lot of love and warmth when we go to cover weddings. It happens particularly when we are shooting together. I guess, its probably because in such shoots people see us more as another couple - a husband and a wife - than just two photographers doing their job. It helps us a lot, trust me, to get those carefree moments captured in our camera.
Shweta is one chatter-box and its usually not long before the women and the girls start giving her the loving smiles and a few of the young guys start chatting up with her and I am left a bit jealous. Ouch!! In fact, had it not been almost 10 years that we are now married, I could have been one insecure man.
Yes! On 20th April, 2016, it will be 10 short years that we would be married to each other. So, here's a photo that we had taken in our slightly younger days on one of the 20th Aprils. The 2008 one.
So, we have seen that the most common questions that we are asked are how Shweta and I met and then how did we get into photography - how we learnt photography - how we got to founding The Creative Lens.
The first one is pretty straight forward to answer actually. Shweta and I were Engineering classmates with back to back roll numbers which helped her cheat her way through the four years of Engineering. Yes, seriously. And she admits that she used to cheat from me even when we were not on talking terms for about a year. Well, yes, that happened too. I kind of proposed to her during our second year and she replied back with the usual "I don't see you that way" stuff and I, the hurt lover, stopped talking to her. We patched up, ironically, amidst the fight of another couple in the class a year or so later. Shweta and I were the only two other students in the class and she got fed up and called me over for a chat outside the class. Things kind of restarted and after an exchange of thousands of free sms-es and long phone calls and a few meetings (can I call them dates?) later during late study hours we realized that it was the 4th year and we will probably not be able to have college romance ever after this and so this time she uttered the lines. Oh Sweet Revenge!!
As to how we got into photography, well, we started with two D40s during mid 2007 after we found that just one of them was leading to fights. The second D40 was probably a birthday gift to Shweta. Together with two of our very close friends Anup and Vikas, we used to go out every weekend at wee hours in the morning to places around Bangalore just to take photos. We read books and articles on the net and clicked a lot. We shared the photos on Flickr and used to wait eagerly for the photos to come in Flickr Explore. Those were real fun days.
Here are some of the photos we took in those days. We have not re-edited them. Any guesses who clicked which ones?
We got our D80s when Shweta and I went to Germany and Switzerland respectively and could afford them. They were our first impulsive buys in Switzerland. Pretty places that they were, we had a nice time there too. Some of the photos from those days are below.
It was in Basel, that Shweta, after her maternity break decided that she had better things to do than earning a nice onsite salary. She decided to pursue photography as a career and started with Lifestyle photography. We got good support from our colleagues there initially and also local residents of Basel and a few nearby towns who were our first few clients.
In one of the vacations, Shweta covered two weddings. Interestingly the first wedding she covered was a Destination Wedding! That was our induction to the fascinating genre of Wedding Photography. Over a period of time and after shooting a few weddings myself, in 2013 I could muster enough courage to quit my desk job with Infosys and dive into our full time venture - The Creative Lens.
So that's that.
I will possibly always remember 2013 as the year I took this crazy decision.
