Passion, my friend Shailendra keeps telling me, is all you need (for being a good photojournalist). So before I tell you why I am interested in joining this training, I would like to show you whether I have the passion for it because I believe that Shailendra was right in this matter. Passion does go a long way.

Wanting to shoot what I see has been something that I remember I wanted to do as long as I can remember. I remember going through my father’s photos of ‘flying monkeys’ in Bardiya – well they were actually jumping from the tree across the road to another but they looked like they were flying – and then thinking ‘One day. I will shoot those monkeys too,’ with a camera of course. I think I remember taking my first photo –a rather hazy memory of a blurry shot of my dad on a narrow dark yellow balcony in 1988 with quite a handy ‘automatic.’ With the same camera I got my first ‘official’ photo of a palace – an in focus shot with a slight yellow tone – which my father had laminated. I still have it. After that camera ‘died’ it was another 10-15 years before I got hold of my next serious equipment.

Fast forward to 2003/4. I was working as a sports journalist when my father brought back a 5 megapix Sony Cypershot point-and-shoot. My beat was school sports and basketball. I know the possibilities of a point-and-shooter in the fast paced sports is kind of limited but in time I managed to adjust to it and its shutter lag and too wide lens and started taking usable shots. In the meantime I did manage to get a couple of ‘feature’ and news shots and get them printed as well. Just when I was making progress I got too close looking for an extreme low angle shot of two players jumping at a basket and then it was all over once again. They landed right on my camera.

Ever since, I have been seeing shots in my head but with no camera in hand. At times my photojournalist friends lent me their cameras and that’s how I have been managing to keep my hopes of one day getting my hands on a ‘real’ camera and one day join the group of my photojournalist friends and stop being the spectator who suggests and start shooting myself. One day I would start giving the life I saw around me and give it a different kind of life in my photos.

Then I acquired my Nikon DSLR a couple of months ago. Finally I could start doing what I have been imagining as long as I can remember. Converting all that feeling in my gut that got every time I turned the pages of the NatGeos that my father got from a sale.

But here I have to disagree with my friend Shailendra. Passion and zeal is not all that is necessary. Here I would go to events and other places and see an image in my head, ‘read’ the meter and shoot. Everywhere you read, the photo is the result of exposure, the combination of shutter speed, aperture, ISO sensitivity and white balance. You change them to get different depths-of-fields.

Yes getting that image I saw on my head into the photo on computer is simply the combination I mentioned above. But it isn’t that simple. I got very usable photos. Perfect for news photos here but that still didn’t satisfy me. It just didn’t express what I felt when I saw the subject and its surrounding. Well I did get some that DID. And there were others that were a little different than the picture I saw but expressed what I felt much better than what I saw. But they were a few lucky shots. There were more of photos not coming out as I wanted them to be. Usable photos but not exactly what I wanted.

Yes. Learning from my mistakes and my few successes is how you learn. And yes, a great photo is also the combination of all technical and emotional aspects and luck. But I want to minimize the luck factor to being at the right place at the right time and not to how the photo comes out. I feel what I need to hone right now is the technical aspect. When I look through the view finder I want the technical combination to match with the image in my head sort of automatically so that it leaves my brain free to focus most of its concentration on the composition and get that image I see. I even switched from time consuming reporting to the less challenging copyediting and night desk job which also has very little prospect of growth so that it would give me all the time I needed to concentrate on growing as a photojournalist.

Now is the time. The time to transform that image I have had almost all my life into reality. This time I am putting an end to this start-again, stop-again pattern I have been following. I have got the equipment and I have made the choice and commitment, put my four and half years’ career (I started on Feb 13, 2003) on the line to fulfill this passion that has been haunting me. I feel that learning from this training is going to be what will help in the transition of from a guy with a camera who takes good shots sometimes to the prospective photojournalist that translates the emotions of subject to his photos. And that is why I am interested in this training.

Sept 20, 2007

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