We have invited the winner of our Photographer of the Year competition, Dr. Anupam Pal, to share his background and experience with our visitors.

We hope you will find his thoughts and images inspirational.

Biography

By profession, I am a researcher in mechanical engineering and a soon to be professor in Indian Instiute of Technology, Kanpur, India. Photography is my hobby which helps me relax and express my views in a different medium other than science and engineering.

I received my first training in photography when I joined the photography club of my undergraduate college in India about 17 years back. Although I learned the basics there, I found my style and expression after I moved to USA. I never took any formal course in photography. But I regularly study the works of the professionals. If I like a photo I try to analyze what I like about the photo, and if I don't like it I try to find why I don't like it.

...Through the process of critically analyzing others' work I also learned to analyze my own photographs. To me you just don't take a photo, rather you make it. Taking a photo is like setting your camera up with the widest focal length to get everything in the frame. Making a photo is carefully choosing the subject at the right light and eliminating everything else that distracts the viewer from the subject. I think that is the difference between the good photographers and the average ones.

...Although I shoot a lot of digital photographs, slide film is still my first choice. Digital cameras have improved significantly over the last couple of years. But even then you at least need some massaging of the digital image in terms of color and tone adjustment to get what you saw through the view finder. That is one aspect of digital photography, I don't like much. I love to spend my time behind a camera than in front of a computer.

...Also when you project a well exposed slide on a big screen it blows away even the most perfect digital image. But digital photography also has its merits. I can experiment more with digital without worrying about wasting film. Sometime I also try to create some fantasy using digital means. Photography is a creative hobby and I don't want to put a lid on my creativity if that means shooting a variety of subjects or shooting different mediums, or taking the help of computers.

Anupam

Web Design © 1999-2006 www.davidbutcher.net 2006 Learn Photography