Photography found me before I found it. I was sixteen, on a family trip to Coorg, and I had borrowed my father’s point-and-shoot Canon. I don’t remember much about that holiday, but I remember the morning I woke up early and walked down to the coffee plantation as the mist was still sitting low over the rows of plants.
I took one photo. The camera’s autofocus hesitated, then locked. The shutter clicked. And something in that click felt different — felt like a door opening.
I didn’t pick up a camera seriously again for another three years. But that photo — slightly soft, poorly exposed, compositionally naive — stayed with me. When I eventually bought my first DSLR with money saved from summer work, I knew exactly why I was doing it.
Photography, I was beginning to understand, is not really about cameras at all. It’s about paying attention. It’s about being present in a moment so completely that you notice the light shifting, a face changing, a scene arranging itself into something true.
That’s still what I’m chasing. Every time I pick up a camera, I’m trying to take that photo in the Coorg coffee plantation again — only better.