It always feels better to work get published in a paper magazine. This time I am featured in Smart Photography as “Master Craftsman” with some of my landscape photographs and a lengthy interview. Thank you Smart Photography, especially Unnati Sagar and the editorial team for contacting me, working together, and giving me the honor.

It’s very difficult for most of you to read the text from the screenshots I have shared earlier on my Facebook wall. The discussion I had with Unnati is saved from the email and here you go for you better read, if any of you is still interested. I can say that this may prove beneficial for those who have just started photography.

Questionnaire

How, why and when did you decide to take up photography professionally, in spite of having an established career as an engineer?

First of all, I must say that I am very much grateful to the Smart Photography editors and the entire crew for giving me an opportunity to showcase my work in your esteem magazine and at the same time I am honored.

I have started photography seriously around 6 years back when I have got a DSLR camera. Since then I am very much devoted to photography and at that very moment, I didn’t have any plan what to do with photography going forward. Now, at this stage, I am focusing on long-term photography projects and most personal in nature and I have not decided yet to leave my software consultancy job. However, I have plans in near future to completely jump into photography as a career and work on a full-time basis. For now, I manage to do photography works after fulfilling the demands of my software consultancy works.

What are your personal favorite genres of photography? And how different are the themes of your personal projects from the commercial projects?

If you see my whole portfolio (at www.sudarshanmondal.com), you will have a clear picture that I am a cross-genre photographer. And I am more or less comfortable from the 16mm to 200mm focal range. I shoot nature, landscape as well as people. But, if I need to choose one particular genre, I would say it is People Photography, taking portraits of people from different social backgrounds. I enjoy the entire process of taking an image of a person – I love to listen to their stories, the situations they go through, and just try to understand the person as a whole, try to assess their personality, and make a serious effort to put that in my photograph.

My current photography practice is primarily the love for the medium. Now, as most of us are having a camera in hand, be it a DSLR, mirrorless, or a mobile phone, it challenges to create more compelling and innovative work. I choose and work on photographic subjects which I enjoy, love, and come directly from me. I normally do not much care about the acceptability of the work, but I try to keep it fresh, refreshing, fit for the photographic media, and my personal work to some extend depicts a totality of me in some way or other and I let it happen with a conscious effort. But, for commercial work, or photography for some other organization or people, I give more emphasis on the need, the intention of the job, and the client’s expectation.

I am completely into digital photography since I have started and I prefer to shoot in RAW file format. So, I need to do the post-processing of the RAW files to create the final image out of it. Post-processing is an essential part of the digital photography workflow. It starts from renaming the camera image files, putting those in a folder with correct nomenclature, keywording an image file, geo-tagging, and adding mandatory metadata like creator name and signature information. And finally based on the motive and intention of the image, we need to process the RAW file to make it a final one. In my current workflow, 90% of the photo files management and post-processing I do use Adobe Lightroom and the rest with Photoshop.

As a serious photography practitioner, I do believe that knowledge of basic color management is very important for a photographer. Before doing anything, we need to make sure that the monitor we are working with is a calibrated one. I always work with a calibrated monitor. If I am not sure what the true color is, how can I adjust and evaluate the colors while doing my post-processing adjustments. Also, printer color output and monitor color have to be in sync, so that you are very sure what you are seeing on the monitor will appear in the final print. Brilliant post-processing gives the life of a photograph. Right while balance, contrast, brightness, sharpness, and color saturation are very vital aspects in a professional-grade image which are the integral parts of post-processing. However, it is worth mentioning that the content of the image is far more important than anything else. Content comes first and then the rest follows. By content, I mean the inherent meaning of a photograph, the purpose, and the intention behind the image. If the content is very weak, does not convey much to the viewers, and you have all brilliant post-processing techniques applied to it, it’s still a mediocre image.

So, once you have the right content, and based on the intention of the image and the message or expression you want to convey, you have to do the post-processing of the image. Understanding the whole process of it is a part of digital photography altogether.

Yes, it is true and I wholeheartedly agree with you. Fine art is a still-evolving genre in photography. But, certainly, it is changing very rapidly in forms. As of today, digital photography is completely technology-based and the technology is swiftly changing than ever before, as a medium, photography is also changing equally at the same pace. Now photographs are not just for hanging on the walls or showing in art galleries. We can exhibit on the Facebook wall, Instagram pages too. Photobooks are the next big thing. The self-published photobook is now very common in serious photo communities. Publishing work in the form of PDF books, displaying on a website – all are the various form of disseminating work in different channels. And all of these channels have their beauty and limitations as you can think of.

With the advent of advanced and sophisticated cameras, I started believing that good looking pictures, well-composed images are just not enough in the 21st century, today’s photographs have to tell more than that, need to have layers of untold stories in the pixels, it has to bring more innovative ideas, insights and though the process. Photographic projects have to be different than other media like cinema, paintings and it should stand on its own.

To be honest, this depends on what you are photographing and what is the end result the photographer wants to achieve with the image. The same subject can be photographed in different ways and it is completely the photographer’s taste how he or she would like to represent that. Interestingly, there is no rule and that’s how it is surprising at times. If you ask my own opinion, I always try to put an additional layer on the subject, so that it says more than what you just see – I give a conscious effort for that. I try to represent the way I feel about it rather than how it actually looks. I always try to associate my intentions, opinions, and objectives in the frame in a very subtle way while photographing. It’s true that it is not always possible, but there is a mindful try for that always.

In the last 5-6 years, I have traveled to many cities for my software consultancy work as well as for personal interest. Each place I have traveled, I learned something from there. Places have a personality, with its look and feel, with its people and architecture. As a photographer, understanding and analyzing the spirit of the place, depicting the right personality in the frame is the job that I have experienced with my travel. At the same time, every new place is a new learning, new experience, new challenge, full of surprises, and that the pleasure of traveling, it’s integral to all photographers. So, of course, it helps to develop maturity as a whole.

Literally, I have started photography seriously when I was in Dallas, Texas back in 2010 and around that time I have got a chance and opportunity to see closely the work of the studio and portrait photographer. He used to shoot fashionable and glamorous portraits of everyone and I was very touched and influenced by that kind of photography at the beginning. Over a period of time, I have shifted from that type of shooting to my personal style with a documentary touch. I used to read lots of articles, beginner’s photography materials and was an active member of some internet and Facebook forums and at the beginning, it helped to understand the basics. Later on, I moved to New York City, and that time, I got huge exposure to shoot in street and started learning from my own experience. Not influenced by anyone as such that period of time. In New York City, around mid of 2014, I attended a workshop by Brooks Jensen who is the editor and publisher of an internationally acclaimed photography periodical LensWork. From that period of time, I started shooting in a directional mode and try to form a story, expression, or theme with my images. Later, I started admiring Alec Soth’s work and now I follow Dayanita Singh too. Apart from that, there are hundreds of photographers, I forget their names, but I moved extremely with their work.

Photography (or as such any art form) is a passion, a way of life. If you have an artistic soul and heart, you have to do it otherwise it becomes too tough to survive. However, when it is photography, it demands a lot. We need to go to places, meet different people, and make stories out of it. These are the activities that are not possible with a very tough schedule. But feasibility and constraints are always there and accordingly, we have to make little compromises as well. For serious landscape photography, it is close to impossible to make stunning and groundbreaking images without going to mountains, unknown or very little known places, and at the same time, it is also important to be there at right time with the right photographic gear. It needs planning, so everyone’s primary job schedule won’t permit this. In that scenario, for the love of photography, we might need to shift the genre and concentrate on something else that balances with the artistic need and matches with time after regular office work. There are ample subjects, ideas, and unexplored social topics we can work on within our limitations and not going too far, but it really needs focus and dedication. So, I would suggest doing whatever comes in your way with love and compassion and over time and consistency, it will definitely give results.