My name is Akshathkumar Shetty. I am a Bangalore based photography enthusiast specializing in nature and travel photography. Below is a brief story on how I got into photography.

In my school days I was very interested in arts and was regular at drawing, painting classes and used to spend most of my free time on it. I had also won few prizes during that time. During college days; the art part of me slowly took back seat and career took center stage and with time I totally lost touch with the art part of me.

As time passed, I started to get settled in life, started to learn computers. Computers were very interesting to me and I got into programming and developed few open source software and even build a dot com called DigitalDost during the dot com boom with help of few of my friends at my college, I was around 18 then. After this I got a decent job in a software company. Though I enjoyed working in software companies, the software development pressure started getting to me and I was all the time in front of computers either doing office work or doing my personal projects or some open source work (QuickServer.org is on of my proud open source work).

So then one day it suddenly occurred to me that I had lost touch with my creative side and was fully into technology. I then decided that I need to get back to my creative side and felt photography would be a good choice. So I immediately went and got a digital point & shoot camera, it was Kodak Z700. That was the turning point in my life. I soon got very interested in the process of image making and art of photography. I started by reading basics online over many photography forums, blogs and tutorials sites and was practicing this over weekends.

Before I got into photography, I used to never like traveling and within 6 months, every weekend I used to be out visiting some new place and looking for subjects and trying to get a good shot. I started appreciating small things in life, every detail around me was fascinating to my camera and to me. I started talking and making friends with total strangers on streets and when ever I met people. Camera started being an extension of me.

Most of what I have learnt is through Internet and online reading. After over 1.5 year of practicing photography and I upgraded to a Canon 350D – a SLR camera and bought few lenses to go with it. After this I went to one of the photography schools in Bangalore and attended a one-week workshop; I wanted to learn about film and wanted to know how professionals in the field did their stuff and the workshop at BSOAP was useful in that sense. I am now practicing Strobist methods and feel there is a long way to go in my photography journey and I am enjoying every part of it.

It was 2006 when I got my first camera and I have not yet restricted my self with any one kind of photography and I love to shoot all kinds of pictures. I am happy every time I click a photograph where I am able to capture true essence of what I felt in the seen and if I feel I can communicate it back through my pictures. I am passionate both about technology and photography.  I am still working in an IT company and go out and do photography over weekends and when ever I get time.

My photo stream (www.akshathphotography.com) features some of my better photographs, which I have been able to capture. I would like to end this with a quote I liked very much (this line is not by me.. but read it some place)

A “good” photograph is a photograph taken when the place/location is at its best. A “great” photo is when it is shot as no one has ever seen it.