Shoot at sight

Baiju Patil was a young man living the quiet life of an artist in Aurangabad. He would spend his days painting and his friends would tell him he had an eye for capturing the colour and drama in a scene. When he was about 25 years old,he saw foreign tourists at the nearby Ajanta and Ellora caves,going shutter crazy with their cameras. A sudden craze took hold of him and like them,he too wanted to take photos. So he bought a camera and to his surprise,his eye for beauty served him just as well with photography. On September 4,Patil’s picture of a great cormorant eating a golden fish won the Yes Bank Saevus Natural Capital award,an Asia-wide award with 15,000 wildlife photograph entries from countries such as South Korea,Pakistan,Nepal and China,among others.

“I took this photograph in February,after 10 days of following the bird around at Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in Rajasthan. It captures a rare moment. The golden fish is one of the fastest swimmers in the water,and the cormorant swims even faster to follow the fish. Once the bird catches the fish underwater,he has to come up,so he can swallow it. Capturing this moment,when the cormorant emerges out of the water for a second or two,is quite difficult,” says Patil. “The fish was actually quite big,and the cormorant had to keep coming up every now and then to try and swallow again,but he kept swimming away from me. Sometimes,the birds are known to swallow fish so huge,that they get stuck in the throat and then the bird dies,” he explains.

When Patil went to Delhi to receive the award,several people told him how beautiful the photo was,with the light,colours and action in it. “It was the first time an Indian had won the contest and everyone was amazed at how I had done it at such a young age,without the high-end equipment that so many other wildlife photographers have. Mine is a Nikon 700 camera and has a 500 mm lens,” he says.

While Patil takes portfolio photos for a living,it’s wildlife photography that is his true love. Every few months he travels to national parks,reserves or sanctuaries and comes back with hundreds of photographs. In his

fifteen-year-long career,many of these have gone on to win international,national and state awards. Last year,the 42-year-old received the Canon Photographer of the Year award for his picture of two fan-throated lizards fighting.

“I took that picture in Latur,where I had been going to study lizards for over three years. I had been following the lizard for a long time. Another lizard entered his territory and I saw his throat and body going from beige to a bright violet-blue. I knew there was going to be a fight and I pushed myself on the ground,” he says. Patil shares that this happened in a twelve thousandth of a second. “I know because my shutter speed was 12,000. They rose in the air for a fight,kicked up the soil around them; one of them bit the other and then it was all over and they scattered away,” he says.