18. AUTOBIO(PHOTO)GRAPHY - 1

In case the title sounds confusing, I mean that I plan to write about my biography in relation to photography. I would like to ruminate over how my interest in photography started and got stuck and never grew more at some point ! Some photographs of those periods of my life would be posted along with those incidents.

I remember the very first time when I handled a camera. It was immediately I finished my school and was about to enter into college. My friend had a borrowed camera to take some snaps of him in our school campus. He had the loaded camera and asked me to 'click' him in all different poses. I made him accept that one of those poses would be to my liking. I think it had 12 shots. 11 shots were over. For the 12th I made him stand on the cycle-stand and I lied down on the ground and took a shot! The film roll went for processing and printing and I don’t know what happened to that last click. I got only a comment that my friend looked like an abnormal skeletal structure! I felt sad that my friend had no taste for that ' cat's eye view '.
Then it took some years for me to have another camera, probably in my late twenties. This time I owned the camera and it was a Yaschica J, a viewfinder camera. I was just clicking around and nothing big about those days. But then I got my first SLR, a Mamiya Sekor. That would be in the late seventies, not my age this time!

In those days an SLR camera was a rarity and people were accustomed to see
TLR cameras of 120 format dangling around the necks of people. Interest in
photography makes one to keep taking photos and if something good comes out of it and if it gets due recognition that could make one feel great and the interest ,now turns into passion. Same thing happened to me. I did my B&W processing and printing in one of the two dark rooms of the Physics Department of our College. The Physics Professor V.Srinivasan was so kind enough that I can use the dark room anytime that I like. Since he showed interest in my photos I used to show now and then some selected photos. When he was impressed with one of my photos of that early period of my photography he had it in the departmental notice board with the technical details under my name. The word spread. Many students came to me with compliments or asking questions about it. That single photograph (Photo:1) got me some recognition in our campus and that kindled my interest further.