In our 'In the spotlight' series, here we bring an interview of another inspiring Photographer Arpit Rastogi.
Here is quick introduction of Arpit in his own words - "Hi, I am Arpit Rastogi, I belong to Meerut (U.P.). I have done my schooling from Meerut and I was a complete nobody out there. I did my engineering from Chandigarh and that was when I stopped being nobody. I used to take part in Nukkad Natak competition with friends and we called this group Dramebaaz. I also have a blog called Notebook which started in college as well. I later joined a software company in Chandigarh itself, May ‘10"
Tell us since when you've been taking pictures. When did you start taking photography seriously?
"So this photography keeda bit me when I was working. I was back home for Holi in March ’11, borrowed my friend’s camera for a day and since then I am almost crazy for various cameras and lenses. My first camera was Nikon P500 and then I moved to Canon DSLR. I shot three weddings of my very good friends from my company, posted them on Facebook and response to those photographs was overwhelming. Then few things happened here and there and I ended up switching my job in Feb ’13 to start working as a freelance wedding photographer as well. "
"I am into wedding photography. I have Canon 6D, Sigma 35mm 1.4, Sigma 85mm 1.4 and Tokina 11-16 2.8, and my biggest achievement would be that I paid for all this stuff through photography itself. Not much but still I am proud of it. I love prime lenses, because of the better results in terms of image quality, background blur, low light performance and most importantly I get to work on my framing rather than just zooming in and zooming out on a subject. In wedding photography, my main challenge is people’s mind-set towards us the wedding photographers. I am still working out on that one."
"Though I am not taking up photography assignments now but becoming a freelance photographer has been one amazing experience that I cherish a lot. It was a humbling experience for me."
"My inspiration in wedding photography is Mr Amar Ramesh, his work is quite amazing and actually I got to know about candid wedding photography through his work on facebook. My other favourite photographers are Nayeem Kalam and Ata Adnan from Bangladesh.
I don’t approach people for their pictures, I let them ask me for their pictures otherwise I keep it candid."
What piece of advice do you wish to give to aspiring photographers, and readers of the post?
"Learn the basics and work on them, framing is the most important thing and you easily miss it at first. I actually missed it all in my frames, rule of thirds, patterns, leading lines. Blurring the background may come handy with DSLR but that’s not everything, at the end of the day you need a story out of your photographs. Having said that I am still playing with depth of fields and keep missing on depth of feelings easily so I am working on my frames and overall feel of the photographs these days. And lastly you should keep shooting, take expert advice and follow them! "
That’s all from my side.
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