Picture Perfect

We saw on Facebook, a very interesting picture by Debraj Chakraborty. For the benefit of our readers, we requested him to write to us and explain how he went about capturing such a beautiful image, and Debraj happily agreed. This picture reminds us what Ansel Adams once said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it”. Thank you Debraj for sharing your creativity. Here’s what he had to say about his image...

- Debraj Chakraborty

“I love to shoot water and it’s a key element in most of my landscape shots. As I belong to North East of India, I am blessed with lots of waterfalls, lakes and rivers nestled in-between its hilly terrain. Often, while shooting these water sources, I like to experiment with shutter speeds that depict the different characters of water. Likewise seascapes also attract me a lot but staying faraway from our coastline doesn’t give me enough opportunity to photograph seascapes. But this November I zeroed into some parts of our west coast – the Karnataka and Konkan coastline – which presented some exciting places to shoot with its rugged rocky beaches and islands.

The photograph you see here is from an island called St. Mary’s Island, just off the Malpe coast near to Udupi. This was on my list for a long time for its amazing hexagonal basalt rock columns which are unique of its kind in India. With a new set of filter system that I received from Nisi India and especially the 10- stop Neutral Density filter, it became even more exciting to shoot those rock formations while blurring out the details of the sea which gives a surreal touch to the image.