Debabrata Ray Photography
The Photography Home Page of Artist Debabrata Ray
Safdarjung’s Tomb – A picture story
In the heart of Delhi lies this magnificent monument popularly known as Safdarjung’s tomb. This tomb (built in 1754) – looks very similar to and is built on the same mughal architecture as the other very popular monument in Delhi – Emperor Humayun’s tomb. As history is recalled this monument is considered as the last flicker of Mughal architecture in India – as this was one of the last monuments to be built during the Mughal rule before Bahadur Shah Zafar stepped down as the last Mughal emperor of India and handed over the reigns of this country to the Britishers.
ANIL WEDS SHEETAL
Anil and Sheetal got married on the 6th of May, 2011 in Raipur and I was called in to shoot this beautiful wedding ceremony. Indian weddings and especially Hindu weddings can get quite hectic, both for the bride,groom and their families. I reached Raipur the previous evening and got started with shooting the Haldi and Mehendi ceremonies of the groom. The next morning was a bit easy before I started shooting again at around 4pm for the bridal make-up, going on to the groom’s make-up, the baarat (or the grooms wedding procession), the tilak, the wedding cemerony and the bidai (farwell given to the daughter by the bride’s family) – finally ending at 8am the next morning. Here’s sharing with you all pictures taken of this beautiful ceremony. Enjoy the experience!
DELHI JAZZ FESTIVAL 2011
Saturday brought in a gust of fresh air with I getting the chance to visit the Jazz festival hosted in the sprawling lawns of Nehru garden in Delhi. The atmosphere was electric, the bands were fantastic and the music ecstatic! The Delhi Jazz festival was organized by Seher along with the British Council, The Embassy of Canada and the Embassy of Sweden. With free entry and an exposure to Jazz music from all over the globe – this was a perfect platform for both the artists and audience to connect with each other. Seher is an organization that keeps conducting such cultural activities bringing together people and cultures of the world onto a single stage. You can find more information on Seher and up-coming events at their website www.seher.in and www.sehernow.in. The festival is a 3 day musical extravaganza with bands from various countries in the world performing on a single stage. Saturday was day 2 of the festival and the bands that were playing were – Christin Jensen Quintet – a Classic Jazz band from Canada, Fractal – a techno and electronica Jazz band from India and Jump with Joy – a popular Jazz band from Sweden.
THE NEW DELHI RAIL MUSEUM
I have to admit, trains, especially locomotives have a very special place in my heart. From when I was a kid I used to love travelling in or just plain watching trains. I remember the horn of an approaching train used to make me run to the nearest vantage point to get a peek at this wonderful master-piece of human engineering – I sometimes would count the number of wagons the train has – if it was a freight train (those can be pretty long – at times having 100+ wagons) or trying to see the name of the train written on the side of the first and last bogie’s. Today I got a chance to visit the National Rail Museum in New Delhi.
Like this:
ANNIVERSARY SHOOT – SUPRATIM AND NANDITA
I know I’m writing after a very long time but today I’m really happy to write this post. Today I got the opportunity to click pictures of a lovely couple – Supratim and Nandita Ghosh. Supratim and Nandita met, saw each other and fell in love, during their summer internship about 10 years ago. That was the start of a 8 year long courtship which culminated into marital bliss about two years ago. They’re celebrating their anniversary on the 15th of April and Supratim wanted to gift something to his wife which they both would cherish forever. Supratim asked me whether I could make them a photo album that would in some-way show their love, while bringing back the charming old memories of when they were courting each other – a fine blend of love flowing across the borders of evolving relationships – from that of a fiancée to that of a Wife.
LONDON – THROUGH MY LENS
One of the good things about my job is that I get to travel around the world a lot. The not so good part is that apart from work I really don’t get a lot of time to go out and do what I love to do – take pictures! I was in London this year in early November for a 3 day training program. As luck would have it, my hotel was within terminal 5 of the Airport – to which I could reach using the underground Heathrow express train in 5 minutes without actually getting a glimpse of the city (it can’t get any worse than this is it). My training programs were full day affairs for all the three days followed by group dinners (you can’t really escape and go do your own thing in such cases). My training was to start on a Tuesday and I reached London on a Monday afternoon (I was lucky – my first time in an Airbus A380 from Dubai to London – loved flying in the belly of the giant). I along with a friend of mine decided to take a quick tour of the city while we could on the remains of a day we had left for ourselves.
DIWALI 2010
This year on Diwali, again like the other festivals, I thought of focusing on some of the finer aspects of this festival in India rather than the usual fireworks display or the fireworks going off in the sky. I happened to visit this busy market place near my house on the eve of Diwali with my wife – we had some pending shopping to be completed and I noticed these beautiful collectibles, one would buy for Diwali (I actually wanted to click something that was symbolic of Diwali as a festival and something that anybody could easily relate with apart from fireworks and crackers). The whole place was lit up as one would expect during Diwali and it was abuzz with people – lots of people. There were colorful lights everywhere, nice & beautiful earthen candles (diyas), chocolates, sweets, flowers and idols of lord Ganesha and Lord Lakshmi – basically anything and everything that would brighten up your house and your mood. To me these pictures capture the essence of color along with lights, which so truly define Diwali as a festival.. Happy Viewing!
CONNAUGHT PLACE FLOWER MARKET – A WEEKEND SHOOT
Yesterday I had the opportunity to join a group of photographers and photo enthusiasts to go shoot at the connaught place flower market in New Delhi. I found out about this group on Facebook – “Delhi Photographers” and these folks keep gathering from time to time, go out and do what they love doing the most – take photos. Thanks to Rahul Malik (another great guy who takes amazing pictures – gosh there are so many of these folks who click really nice pictures) for letting me know about this group – I’ve always been raring to go out and shoot pictures and having a group of like-minded people in this aspect really helps a great deal in boosting your own enthusiasm levels.
FOCUS ISSUES IN MY NIKON D90 RESOLVED
I just thought I’ll share an interesting analysis (actually its more of an experimentation rather than analysis) with all of you. Recently whenever I would sit down to start working on my pictures I would notice that the area I wanted to be tack sharp (yeah I’m a sharp junkie) wouldn’t really turn out that way. I know from experience that there are a lot of factors that could contribute to this – some of them would be lesser shutter speeds causing motion blur, higher ISO noise, a camera focus issue, a lens issue (Somewhere in my mind I was thinking this may be the problem – especially when I had dropped my 18-70mm lens on the floor last month) and of-course a factor typically overlooked in some of these cases is the sweet spot of the lenses – i.e. what is the aperture at which the lens shoots the sharpest (majority of the lenses produce very good results when stopped down a little bit and the kit lenses typically would produce really sharp images at an f/7.1 to f/9.0 range.
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DURGA PUJA 2010
As in the previous years I decided to cover Durga Puja in my photography journal this year as well. This is a time of the year, when there are two of the biggest Indian festivals lined up one after the other – Durga Puja in October and Diwali in November. People are in the best of their moods, wearing new clothes with vibrant, bright colors and a sense of celebration and joy can be felt all around in the air.
