He walks around the mandap capturing the moment when the groom whispers sweet nothings in the bride’s ear. Capturing the beautiful little ‘off beat’ moments of wedding is his passion.
Mumbai-based wedding photographer Subhendu Sen who will showcase his collection in Bangalore next week spoke to City Express about his passions, photography and big fat Indian weddings.
“There are so many customs and different types of rituals in each wedding. They are always colourful and funfilled,” he says.
For Sen, each wedding is unique. Couples, guests, relatives, situations, emotions, expressions - everything differs from wedding to wedding. “Except for the rituals, I keep walking around the venue to capture moments. So, my photographs are also different in each wedding. Each wedding is a new challenge for me,” says the photographer.
When asked why he chose wedding as this subject of photography, Sen says with a smile, “Indian wedding industry, has a turnover of $20 billion (Rs 1 lakh crore) per year. It’s wise to be a part of such a huge industry.”
On the serious note he says that he is just following his passion. “I believe when passion becomes profession, nobody feels the work pressure. Job satisfaction is always there. And wedding is a happy and most important occasion in anybody’s life. The best way to remain happy is to be surrounded by happy people,” he says.
Explaining his profession, he says, “My work is very different from that of traditional wedding photographers, who normally stand at a particular place and shoot stage group shots or traditionally posed photographs of people. Some of them are really very important for record-keeping purposes but many of these poses are duplicated, specially stage group photos look quite similar. We, the new-age wedding photographers work more on capturing the moments and emotions, use lights and angles differently. We also post-process and treat each photograph individually. You may call us fine artists of wedding photography. So, each of the contemporary wedding photographers’ work is a piece of art and different from each other.”
When asked how difficult it is to capture the dynamism of reality in still images, he says “I don’t think it’s difficult. When an artist looks at a situation or frame, he sees it differently than others. Even each artist sees the same frame differently. I look for opportunities. I look for moments. I look for emotions. I look for stories. I try to capture frames which will remind the couple or the people in the frame that something special happened when I captured the photograph. So, instead of just flipping through the photographs, they discuss each picture. There should be something in the photographs that even who were not present during the wedding, ask for the story behind it. At the same time, each of them should look great visually and technically as perfect as possible. I wish that the couple should relive the best day of their life whenever they go through their wedding photographs.”
Explaining the theme for the exhibition he is going to put out in Bangalore, he says, “The exhibition called Moods of Wedding, will have some of my own wedding photography works. No photographs are available for sale as they are personal in nature. The purpose of my exhibition is to spread awareness about the new-age wedding photography.”