We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Vijay Purbhe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Vijay, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
Photography has always been a passion for me, both as creator and observer. I probably spent upwards of 8 years just experimenting with different cameras, photography genres (landscape, portrait, astrophotography to name a few) and subjects to narrow down on a couple of spaces that fascinated me the most, landscape and astrophotography.
Fortunately for me, I have a few friends that started dabbling in professional photography before me and they became my first guiding lights for the journey of learning this craft. I attended a few in-person sessions to learn the nuances of lights, shadows, shutter speeds, aperture settings and highlighting the subject matter in a way that brings out the story behind it.
Online sessions on streaming platforms such as youtube and instagram have been of tremendous help as well, especially in the area of post-processing. Learning the tools and its craft is a rewarding experience. As good as the cameras have become today, they still lack the capabilities of a human eye for dynamic range, focus and contrast. These tools provide me with the avenue to bring my pictures as close to what I remember seeing the event.
With all this learning, time and dedication is of essence and that is where I struggled the most. To be able to carve personal time out from both professional and family responsibilities is difficult as is, to then further dedicate some of that personal time to this learning was challenging.
A key skill when it comes to photography is framing your subject. The angles, lights, expanse, it all has to come together. Setting up the camera and clicking that picture is just a formality but unless you invest in developing the eye for and framing the subject to your satisfaction, photography will remain a collection of clicks with no story to tell.
Vijay, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I started out with photography as a hobby almost 10 years ago. It is an activity that goes very well with my other passions, hiking and travel. Eventually though, I have used my pictures as a medium to tell a story or capture a moment that will bring joy to others.
For my followers on various social media platforms, my goal is to create a moment of happiness, nostalgia, longing for a place, time or travel through my pictures. Ideally I would want them to want these pictures on the walls of their homes or businesses and share that moment further. So far, I have been fulfilling such requests on an individual basis but I am also in the process of setting up an interactive shop on instagram as well as an independent website.
I would love to collaborate with other photographers, artists and businesses. My Instagram handle is vijay.purbhe and I also have a Facebook business page at Vijay Purbhe Photography. Please visit these pages, follow and share your thoughts!
Contact Info:
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://vijaypurbhe.picfair.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vijay.purbhe/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vijaypurbhephotography/
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Apart from being a creative outlet, photography feeds my passion of storytelling. We all see the world around us through the lens of our experiences, biases, expectations and desires but there is also the need to belong and connect, to relive a moment or to connect the dots through our memory lanes to enliven the nostalgia that resides within all of us.
My goal is the journey itself. I do not wish to be tied to a specific outcome at the end of the journey would rather have people walk with me on it and see this world and its many hues through my eyes, lenses, and my words.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
A picture is worth a thousand words and for me, taking a picture is series of steps – to travel, to find the right moment, frame things right, take the picture, edit it to bring out the message that I so want to connect to my innermost thought of why I wanted to click it in the first place. And when it all comes together on the screen, that’s my reward.
It is entirely possible, and it happens many a times, that those who view those pictures may not share my euphoria or the emotions of the story behind it but it is still worth my satisfaction to have put it out for the world to see and enjoy.
Some of this content, finds its a way to someone across the globe that totally gets what I was trying to capture and say and they will reach out to resonate, which probably is the most fulfilling part of this endeavour.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://vijaypurbhe.picfair.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vijay.purbhe/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vijaypurbhephotography
Image Credits
I have the rights to all the images that I have shared and they are my own. There is no external credits.