We recently connected with Aniket Patel and have shared our conversation below.

Aniket, appreciate you joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

Now, this is very interesting because nobody knows how I got into photography & artist stuff, not even my friends & family, But now they will come to know. From the beginning, I was in love with mother nature & its creatures and I was also raised in the village so that is very obvious that you get connected with nature. Later on for my study, we moved to the city, but whenever I got the chance I always went to my village to revisit those places where I loved to go & I still do visit those places. One time when I was in my village when I was about 16 years old. I was wandering on the farm & there was one big stack of dry grasses that we used to give to cattle to eat. In that stack of grasses, I found one bird nest(I guess it was a fantail bird) & there was also one baby bird whose parent birds were continuously feeding. I was in awe because that was my first closest encounter with any baby bird and I was so excited that I wanted to take pictures of them but I didn’t have a camera back then, not even a smartphone. I didn’t lose my excitement there, I backed myself a little far from the nest & watched them doing their stuff. That! That was the moment when I felt so much connected to nature & felt joy & satisfaction from inside & that was the moment when I decided that I will do wildlife photography & capture those kinds of moments and share them with the world & spread awareness about mother nature & its creatures. And back then I was also watching the show on an animal planet named Austin Steven’s adventure. He travels the globe with his camera & takes pictures of animals & spreads awareness about them, so that show also influenced me a lot to take this path. Fast forwarding to the Covid 19’s year, I got some time to think again & to make plans about my dream job. And this was the time when I found my second dream job or thing that I will love to do whatever happens & that was painting & making artwork related to wildlife & nature.

Aniket, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Alright…So first let me tell you about myself. I’m a very introverted person & I’m very proud of it and I will say this thing until I die. In general, I don’t like to talk too much(only with those with whom I feel connected in some way) & only when needed. Rather, I like to listen to people. Hence I won’t bore you with that. I don’t know how to put it into the word, because I have never said these things about myself before, But I would say that I’m a very down-to-earth guy, I like to live a simple life like in earlier times, like farmers like villagers while being connected with nature. At the same time, I want to travel the world & experience new things, and also want to dedicate my life to wildlife & nature doing what I love to do & contribute to society as much as possible. I want to live LIFE to its fullest. There is also another thing that I trust people so quickly(only those with whom I’m very comfortable talking), I don’t know if it is a good thing or not. I guess I have faith in humanity.
So as I said before about the moment when I felt that no matter what happens I will do wildlife photography for the rest of my life. It was easy to make that decision because I didn’t know about the price it came with. So years passed… I passed out from the 10th class & I decided to take a biology stream for my further study. I was passionate about wildlife photography, but it was expensive to chase. And from now on things got a little confusing, but don’t worry it will make sense in the end.
So to become a full-time wildlife photographer I had to do something else to create a backbone for my dream job. So I decided to become a forest officer. Two years passed and I entered college & took up Zoology for further study. And during my first year of college covid 19 took place.
Now for many people Covid 19 was miserable & it was for our family too… but for me personally, it changed me from the inside. The Pandemic gave me more time to think, to discover more opportunities for careers related to wildlife & nature. I came to know that a college degree will not help me to be successful in life.
All I wanted to do was stabilize my family financially, making them completely stress-free and helping wildlife & nature. So I made the big decision to drop out of college (that’s definitely not a way to make my family stress free… anyway moving on) & to do things that I really love to do, to become a self-independent artist.
So… I searched & found multiple income streams related to wildlife & nature that I really love & I can do. Youtube was the thing for me back then (and it’s still for me), I started learning sketching, digital painting, photoshop, photography, and video editing all by watching videos on youtube. I also found many professional independent artists who started from the ground and now are so successful in life. They inspired me a lot & made me more passionate about what I do. I followed them and learned so many great things from them.
Time passed and I started growing from the outside & more from the inside. I learned about myself, mindset, productivity, YouTube, selling artworks, writing, TIME, and many other things too. If you ask me how long it has been since I first started learning all these things, it has been almost 3 years now.
First, half-year has passed in deciding what to do & how to do it, and now I’m trying to balance all things so that it goes in a straight line & trying to do things more accurately & professionally and I know it’s an ideal condition and the train will definitely stop at stations. I’m still not a professional, and never will be… I still get bad days & sometimes a bad week, but I am still learning many new things every week.
So what service or what I do in general is
I do Wildlife Photography, but for now, I just do this for myself, not for any brands or companies. But you can get the prints of my photographs from my online store (link:- https://www.redbubble.com/people/WildernessShop/shop?asc=u )if you like them. Most of my photographs include birds, insects & nature.
I also do digital painting related to wildlife & nature, but recently I also started doing human portraits and some movie fan art paintings too. If I’m doing real-life animal painting then my painting will fall into the middle of realistic & cartoony styles of paintings.
And I also do photo manipulation using photoshop & again all related to wildlife & nature, but now it is open to anything that inspired me to make artwork related to them.
Other than that I also have two separate YouTube channels on digital painting & Photo manipulation. And I offer freelancing services in both fields so you can contact me if you want to make something whether it is digital painting or editing your photos. And I also do a full-time job as a video editor at NJCT for their educational videos.
What sets me apart from others? Frankly speaking, I really don’t know. I think I haven’t found my style yet or maybe I have found it and I don’t know it yet. Can’t say anything. I guess I’m still finding my style.
There are mainly two things of which I’m so proud, the first being My friends & family(they support me a lot whatever I do) and the second is what I’m doing(That is, all artist stuff that I do on daily basis)
Another thing that you should know about me is that I have a very strong belief in God, I don’t show it to everyone but I have. And especially in Good things & Bad things. I literally can’t do anything bad to anyone. It feels wrong from inside whenever I do something bad or kind of cheat on anyone. I don’t like to break the trust of anyone whether they have it in you or not. If you ask me to do something whether it is painting or photo editing or anything else then I will do that work with full dedication & if you are not satisfied with the work then I will not charge you. And I don’t like to keep the professionalism wall in between me & another person. There will be little professionalism in the talk, but it will be the most friendly kind of talk. Whatever comes into my mind or whatever I like to say to you I say it whether it is good or bad things don’t matter. But sometimes it also depends on people, those not likable people. I don’t say things to them, I just like to keep my distance from those people.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

There is actually only one goal that is driving me & keeps pushing me to do things even on my bad days and that is I have to do something for Wildlife & Nature. There are other personal goals that everyone has but this one is the principal one. I mean we all know now what is happening to mother nature & its creatures. Many people are doing things to save them, but most people are not fully aware of what is happening. They are doing things without thinking about their consequences, I also fall into this category sometimes, I’m not denying it. But there are some people who don’t care anything about mother nature, they do what they want to do at any cost. Half of them are not educated about the problem & they don’t have anything that they can do about the problem. But half of them are rich people who can make some serious change in the world by just supporting the people who are trying to save this mother nature or they can do something on their own. But I seriously don’t understand why they don’t do something like this. They carelessly do things that cause serious problems. So my goal is to educate these people through my artworks & photographs & let them know about the beautiful world we are living in and encourage them to do something about it. Now, this thing I haven’t said to anyone, only my close friend knows it, and that I like to be really rich or successful or I earned enough that I can support my family & Wildlife. And I have made a decision a long time ago that most of my income will go towards supporting wildlife & the rest will be for me & my family. And In the future, I would like to be a bridge between people and mother nature. People who want to save mother nature but don’t know how.
So this is the ultimate goal or mission that drives me to do hard work, to hustle to grind every day & that supports me on bad days. But sometimes even this can’t help me when it is a very bad day. Then I took a rest for that day & from the next day I started again fresh.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Actually, there are lots of people & videos that have changed my thinking and perspective to see things differently, and how I work. They have had a very significant impact on me when we were dealing with Covid 19, rather than the books because I haven’t read many books till now. So let’s talk about them a little bit, they definitely deserve a shout-out. They don’t need it but I like to thank them. There are many people but I will mention only those who made a significant change in me, you can find them on any social media. I will not say much about them because if you check their work then you will get who they are. So for photography & videography, there are Shaaz Jung, Varun Aaditya & Peter Mckinnon. For Photoshop work there are Benny Productions & Phase Runner. For Painting there are Aaron Blaise, Keshart & Gawx. Shaaz Jung & Varun Aaditya are more active on Instagram rather than on any other platform so you can look out there and expect that everyone has their own YouTube channels so you can check them out there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/aniket_patel
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/visualsofaniket/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100022216355415
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AniketPatelPS
• Other: LinkTree:- https://linktr.ee/aniket_patel

Image Credits
Aniket Patel