Pack 038; Shoot

Walk on the wild side and come back with great pictures with the help of photo tours n Irena Akbar

Walk on the wild side and come back with great pictures with the help of photo tours
Every Saturday morning,Amoghavarsha,a 26-year-old wildlife photographer in Bangalore,leads a group of 15 on a two-hour drive to the Banerghatta forest reserve. There,inside a makeshift classroom,he teaches the group of young executives,retired professors and the odd teenager,the finer points of photographyplay of light,composition,angles,aperture,types of lens and shutter speed. Class over,they venture into the forest and try for that perfect picturethe frisky deer,the slithery snake or the white peacock. As the sun sets,they are back in the classroom,reviewing their pictures before dozing off in their tents. On Sunday night,after another day of photography,they drive back to Bangalore,ready to upload their pictures on Flickr,Picassa and Facebook. Some upload them on their blogs and sell them to anyone whos interested.

Digital cameras have made an amateur photographer out of most of us. For ones who want to get better at it,weekend photo tours are the new urban trend. Today,some 20 professional photographers conduct such tours in Bangalore,says Amoghavarsha. While most are independent and take small tours around the city,some tie up with travel companies for photo getaways outside the city.

Getoffurass,an adventure tour company in Bangalore since 2003,organised its first weekend photo tour to Gorur in June last year. It was house full, says owner Santosh. He organised four more in quick successionCoorg November 2008,Goa February 2009,Allepey August 2009 and Hampi,which took place this month,in collaboration with photographer instructor Hellmuth Conz. Most of the tours are for weekend travellers. They are more of a rage in Bangalore and Mumbai; Delhi has one photo tour company even though the newly-set-up Delhi School of Photography has started organising tours for outsiders,besides its students.

Photo tours though arent relaxed holidays. They are workshops with gruelling schedulesgetting up before sunrise to catch the first sight of the sun,sitting through sessions and walking through jungles,mountains or beaches for that perfect photo-op. Travel companies screen people interested in the tours. Getoffurass asks you to fill a form detailing photography and travel interests. Photosensitive,a Delhi-based group led by photographers Shalain Parker and Joginder Singh,organises a photo trek to the Himalayas every summer and holds an exhibition of the best photos clicked on the trek. Before taking on people,it opens a discussion on Internet forums to gauge ability levels. Though anyone can sign on for the weekend workshops we hold in Delhi,for the Himalayan treks we ask for a little moreknowledge,experience and level of seriousness, says Singh.

Serious amateurs are plenty. Ranjan Bhattacharyya,a 34-year-old head of operations at a software company in Mumbai,signed up for two photo tours this year,one to Hampi and another to Ladakh,organised by Photo Tours,a Mumbai-based company run by amateur photographer Anirban Biswas. I love travelling and I love clicking. This was a double treat, says Bhattacharya,who has uploaded some 3,000 pictures on Flickr taken with his Canon PowerShot A-5 digicam. At Hampi,which has massive rock formations,I learnt how angle and light can change the way the shape of a structure looks, he says.

Aditi Das Patnaik,a 31-year-old marketing manager with IBM in Bangalore,decided to invest in travel photography as a serious hobby after her point-and-shoot Nikon camera delivered great results. She bought a digital SLR and travelled,often alone,on weekends to nearby places. Obsessed with photographing landscapes,she decided to test herself by taking a photo tour to nondescript Gorur. It was a desolate place brought down by a dam. In the absence of a scenic view,I learned from our instructor that even little,mundane things can make a great picture. At the railway station,there were tin sheets stacked over one another which I would otherwise have ignored but the workshop taught me to look at them differently, she says.

Myths about photography are also corrected in the tours. Vikram Ponappa,a 44-year-old architect from Bangalore,learnt not to shoot like a machine gun on a photo tour to Allepey. With digital photography,people shoot first and think later,clicking hundreds of images with the expectation that 10 would turn out good. They dont frame the image in their mind, says Amoghavarsha. Another myth,says Mumbai-based Neville Bulsara,who arranges photo tours for foreigners visiting India,is that an expensive camera gets you better pictures.

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Participants also have their share of fun. Mansi Midha,who went on a Himalayan photo trek,writes on the Photosensitive blog: Each of us has a special memory attached with the trip8230;be it the cheesy humour,the fact that we made it from one camp to next,the sole-less people,the camera that was never charged,the medicine tablet used to keep the shutter open to capture the star trails,all the jugaad!

Such bonding is perhaps why companies send their employees on photo tours. Great Escapes,a Bangalore-based travel company,has organised three photo tours for IT companies over the last six months. A team of 15 from each company were taught by a professional photographer while on tour to Agumbe rainforest research station,Kudremukh and Bandipur in Karnataka to build team spirit.
Photo tours are still rare in India. Its meant for the evolved traveller. Count two years before it takes off full steam. For the past decade,NatGeo photographers in US have been taking people on photo tours around the world, says Subhash Motwani,CEO,Compact Travels,a Mumbai-based tour operator that has tied up with professional photographer Aneesh Bhasin to form a photo tour venture. Their first tour to Turkey is set to take off in March.