The first camera I ever used was my father’s. It was 2006, I was twenty, and I was going to IIT Bombay for a tech fest. Before I left he loaded a fresh roll of film into his Kodak KB10, showed me the basics, and told me not to waste the roll. That was my first photography lesson. Not aperture, not shutter speed, not composition, just don’t waste the roll.
It had thirty-six exposures. Thirty-six chances to come back with something, which meant that every time I raised the camera I had to decide whether what I was looking at was worth one of them. There was no burning through the roll and sorting it out later. I remember being excited pressing the shutter at Powai lake, outside the hostel where we were staying, at a railway station waiting for a local. Over two weeks I filled the roll.
My father is an interesting man. We don’t see eye to eye on much, but a lot of what I appreciate came from him, including a refusal to settle, the idea that you get the thing you actually want or you don’t get anything. He had hobbies once. Then life happened and he let them go one by one, and I suspect the KB10 was one of the things that went. We’ve never talked about it.
The tech fest itself was a disappointment, and we came back to two weeks of missed classes. I forgot about the roll completely. Then one evening a couple of months later the developed photos turned up. I looked at the first few, saw they hadn’t come out the way I’d imagined, and put them down. I never looked at the rest. Twenty years on I still haven’t seen most of that roll. They’re probably in one of the boxes my mother has kept for decades, and one day she’ll open it and message me saying she’s found some of my old photos and what do I want to do with them. I already know the answer.
For years after that I shot on whatever phone I had. Cameras were expensive and something else always took priority, so I never got round to owning one. What finally pushed me over was the gloom of the pandemic, and the fear underneath it of dying without ever having owned something I’d always wanted. I came back from Rwanda in September 2020 and the first thing I did was buy a Fujifilm X-T30 with the kit 18-55. I still shoot on it. It’s probably time for an upgrade, though I’m in no hurry.
That one is probably my favourite photograph I’ve taken. Sometimes you get lucky and happen to be somewhere at the right moment. Sometimes the subject is so beautiful that anyone pointing a camera at it would come away with something good. And sometimes there’s nothing in front of you at all and you have to find the picture yourself. That afternoon I was standing on my balcony, which I do several times a day for no particular reason, and a flock went past close to the building and threw its shadow across the concrete. I saw it and thought that would make a photograph, so I stayed there. A couple of minutes later another flock came through, or possibly the same one, and I got it.
What I’ve realised is that I still shoot as though there’s a roll of film in the camera. The X-T30 can take thousands of photos and my iPhone has more storage than I’ll ever use, and I still hesitate before pressing the shutter. I watch people take twenty frames of the same scene because storage is free and deleting is easy, and I can’t do it. If the light isn’t right, if the composition isn’t working, if something tells me not yet, I don’t press it. And if I do press it and don’t like what comes back, I delete it without thinking twice.
I’ve wondered why. Maybe I’m a snob, maybe I’m too choosy, maybe I’m chasing perfection in a medium where there’s no such thing. Or maybe one roll of film rewired something in me at twenty and it never went back. Whatever it is, I’m the one who has to look at the photo more than anyone else, and I want it to be the best I could have made at that moment. If it isn’t, I’d rather not have it.
The other two photographs on this page came from going out to look for something else entirely.
I’d ridden out along the Konkan coast last year to find an old lighthouse. The lighthouse was fine and not much more than that. On the way back I pulled over to photograph a boat out at sea, walked closer to the cliff edge for a better angle, and found the horses down on the sand instead.
The kingfisher at the top of this page was the same story. A few of us were at Kanha in February, parked near a pond and waiting for a thirsty tiger to come down and drink. I spent most of that time at full zoom, working through the eyepiece, scanning the thick cover for something striped that never appeared. What I found instead was that bird, alone on a branch, with the pond behind it going orange in the sunset and all that blue sitting against it.
That was February, and it’s close to the last photograph I’ve properly liked. The camera has stayed home on most of my rides since, and I’m barely shooting on the phone either. I don’t fully know why. Maybe it’s the validation that doesn’t come from the platforms any more, maybe it’s something else entirely. What I’m certain of is that it isn’t the gear, and I know that because I tested it. I bought the iPhone partly on the idea that a new thing in my pocket might restart something. It didn’t. A new lens won’t fix this and neither will a new body. Gear matters, but only after the drive is there, and mine seems to have taken a sabbatical.
Part of the reason, I think, is the fear sitting underneath all that carefulness. The fear of wasting a frame, of coming back with something bad that I’ll put down and never look at again, which is exactly what I did with that first roll at twenty. It made me deliberate, and being deliberate has got me photographs I’m glad to have. It has also left almost no room for enjoying any of it. I started doing this because it was fun, and it hasn’t felt fun or creative for a while now. Maybe I’ve finally run out of roll, or maybe I just need to find a different way to look.
