Fond frames

Blistering technological virility has ensured that the line dividing the professional and the amateur dims to a flicker.

Drushtikon 2010 displays the creative outpouring of the shutterbugs that make up the photographers@pune club

Blistering technological virility has ensured that the line dividing the professional and the amateur dims to a flicker. Photography today is for no expert to claim as his exclusive territory. SLRs are accessible,the Internet teems with advise on everything from picture taking to equipment handling,and camera makers are churning out model after model at burst mode. In such a world did a virtual body called photgraphers@pune take birth. A group tagged to Flickr,this club today boasts of over 2000 members who have or had some form of connection to the city. The group was started in 2004 by six friends who shared a common passion for photography. The idea was to meet and share ideas on the Net, says Suhas Desale,who is the administrator for the event. What started as a hobby club has today snow-balled into a community of dedicated camera-wielding bodies from myriad professional backgrounds.

The exhibition series started four years back,and took up the name ‘Drushtikon’ from the second year. This year,around 800 members sent in their beloved frames to a judging panel that finally truncated the corpus to a little over 100 frames. We consciously decided not to follow a theme for the exhibition. This would attract only a specific set of viewers then. The emphasis is more on high quality pictures. Two of my frames will be on display. One is an abstract that I am sure will leave people wondering,and another one is a landscape snap taken during sunset at the Mula river, says Anshum Mandore,a member who is otherwise a marketing professional.

Eclectic exhibits like these can be a fantastic treat for the senses. The photos that have lined up for the event embrace no monotony. They are slick peddlers of sharp imagery. We never had imagined that this group would swell up to become one of the largest and most active photography groups in the country! gushes Soumitra Inamdar,one of the founders. A self-confessed ‘weekend photographer’,his professional center is the IT sector. We began as a collective of hobby photographers. We would meet once in a while,cover festivals together,and generally share and improve. Personally,I have refined my own work immensely just by watching others’ work. We learn to gauge each other’s perspectives better, he explains.

(Drushtikon 2010 will open to public at new Art Gallery,Ghole Road,from 10:00 am to 9:00 pm till Sunday)

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