This weekend was Pongal, a harvest festival celebrated in southern India and essentially the Tamil equivalent of thanksgiving. We split it into four different days:

Day 1: Bogi aka Spring cleaning

Day 2: Surya Pongal - praise the sun for being warm, radiant and nourishing our crops

Day 3: Mattu Pongal - praise the cows for all their help in harvesting crops

Day 4: Kannum Pongal - day to commemorate and appreciate our community, inviting guests and family into the home

Out with the old and in with the new is the essence of the first day of Pongal. We not only clean out our houses and rid ourselves of old clothes and belongings, we also refresh our mind of the thoughts that have been weighing down on us and leave room for new ideas and ventures.

I decided to take this opportunity to rid myself of self-doubt and finally open my long-awaited photography business. I have been doing informal photoshoots and event photography for two years and have always thought of starting a business, but it was always left at just that, a thought. I spent the past few months building a website for my business but when I was doing research for layouts and features that I should include, I consistently got intimidated by all the great work so many photographers were doing around me. In my subconscious mind I could NEVER be like that. But I knew my conscious was stronger that and I overrode these negative thoughts by first acknowledging that I can learn. Everyone has to start somewhere and you can always get better. The process of learning never stops. I looked back at one of the first pictures I took and some of my most recent work and realized that there was a ridiculously significant difference in quality.

This was proof to me that I had learned and will always continue to learn and get better. There's only one way you can go if you work hard and that's UP. For the next couple of months I focused on turning the intimidation into into inspiration and designed and completed my website with the amazing support of my friends and family.

I decided to make one of the biggest personal investments I've made for the sake of photography, I bought a full-frame Canon camera. After searching for a long time and deciding that buying a full-frame at full price was not within budget, I started looking for second hand cameras. I finally landed a good deal on a Canon 5d Mark III and a Canon Speedlite 600EX II-RT Flash (for darkly lit event photography purposes). My last camera (Canon t5i) was a beginners camera and this was a huge jump, so I was skeptical at first, but all my doubts ceased to exist when I saw the results of what this camera could do, I was blown away. It was definitely worth every penny for my purposes. Of the following two images, the first was taken with my t5i and the second was with the 5D Mark III.

For the first image I was standing a good ten meters away, the full-frame allowed me to stand closer to the subjects with the 85mm lens (which is primarily used for portraiture, but I use it as my main lens). The second image was also taken in a less than ideal lighting situation and the Mark III handled it so gracefully, with little to no grain and giving me the same, and even crisper image quality than the first. This was it. With a new community event coming up for pongal, I made my decision to make it official, but first I needed new content to start with a bang. I photographed the pongal event and took to the interwebs to launch my photography facebook page. After I finally posted all of the pictures from the event, my hunger to learn grew. What did I learn from this shoot? How can I change for the next shoot?

All my learning in photography has been progressive, taking a photoshoot, finding the flaws and improving those flaws during the next shoot. I slowly got used to the controls on my camera intuitively and had a general idea of what each function would do and a decent understanding of the exposure triangle (ISO, aperature and shutter speed). My next goal is to learn with deliberation and thoroughly understand how to handle my camera and the technical aspect of the hardware to truly get a grasp on how to shoot images of a superior quality. The first thing that intimidated me in the Mark III was its amazing level of customizability, the number of features (I would say) easily doubled from the t5i to the Mark III and I barely knew all of the features to start with. So over the next few weeks I'm going to practice understanding each setting. There are alot of amazing tools online to learn what you want to learn and they are all available for free, I personally stumbled upon the work of Sudhi Shivaram and was speechless when I saw his work he is the world's number one wildlife photographer and with reason. You can see his deep understanding of his camera in the ridiculous quality of his work. Luckily, he offers some online material on the basics, so I took to that to start. Look forward to more!!

Happy Pongal 🙂
Aarthi Ganesh