My love for photography began in school. Seeing my fascination, my dad bought me a Canon SX50 HS. It was a marvel at the time, its main draw a staggering 50x zoom. I’d spend hours on our balcony in Erandwane, Pune, trying to identify birds, my lens reaching for life in the distance. I joined birding races, traveling across the Pune district in a single-day quest to spot as many species as possible. Nature photography became my world, and the camera became a close friend.
I was obsessed with the technicals - fiddling endlessly with aperture, ISO, and shutter speed, hunting for the most aesthetically pleasing shot. My hard drive is still a testament to that era, filled with thousands of bird photos from every conceivable angle and zoom level. I’d shoot in RAW, then spend hours in editing software, sharpening images and correcting the grainy aberrations that came with pushing the ISO too high. A few of those photos even made it onto Wikipedia, a point of immense pride.
Then came 12th grade. My focus shifted entirely to the mind-bending Indian engineering entrance exams, and slowly, my passion for photography began to fade. The next few years were a blur of new pursuits - learning German, the strange isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunities to go out and shoot reduced. Eventually, the camera stayed on the shelf.
That all changed when I moved to America.
I landed in San Diego for graduate school, and the city was a visual treat. The UC San Diego campus was a world of its own, with its lush Torrey Pines and crystal-clear skies. From the La Jolla pier, you could see the magnificent Pacific Ocean. From the iconic Geisel Library, you could sometimes glimpse the snow-clad mountains to the east. The urge to click photos started rising again. Still, grad school was a stressful time, a whirlwind of classes, teaching assistantships, and the hunt for internships and jobs. Photography remained on the back burner.
But once I graduated, with a new Google Pixel in hand, everything shifted. I started traveling the US, first with my family on a grand tour of the East and West Coasts, then on my own after moving to Austin, Texas. My travels took me from Boston and New York to Seattle and San Francisco; from Orlando and Las Vegas to Detroit and Houston. In the last year, I’ve clicked well over a thousand photos all across the country.
Yet when I want to reminisce, I find myself drawn to only a handful - maybe thirty in total.
And these aren't the "most aesthetic" photos. They aren't technically perfect. They are the ones that anchor a specific event, a powerful emotion.
There’s a photo from Mount Soledad in San Diego. I remember the feeling of being utterly awestruck, looking out at the vastness of the Pacific after a month-long trip across the country. I had missed the water so much.
There’s another, taken outside Cafe Pomegranate in San Francisco. It’s just my hand holding a coffee cup. But I remember that photo because I’d woken up at 4 a.m. for three hours of interview prep. Afterwards, I walked to Pier 39 and video-called my friends in India, showing them the morning light on Alcatraz. On my way back, I stumbled upon that cute cafe. The photo doesn't just capture a view, but it captures a unique feeling of solitude, fatigue, and quiet satisfaction.
I remember the wind at the top of Twin Peaks. We had driven nonstop from LA to San Francisco, and my legs were dead on arrival. I didn’t want to drive the next day, but I had to. Standing up there, feeling the biting cold, I watched my mom and dad, their faces full of excitement at the magnificent view. That photo holds an emotion that is impossible to recreate.
Then there’s a shot of fall colors in Nashua, New Hampshire, with a hilarious story behind it. I’d flown on a redeye from Seattle to Boston, completely sleep-deprived, just to see the legendary Northeast autumn my aunt had raved about. A friend, guided by promising photos on Google Maps, led us to what turned out to be a random person's home. It was on the drive back, defeated and laughing, that I spotted a random river. We parked and walked a trail, and there they were: the fall colors, more brilliant than I could have imagined.
My approach has shifted entirely. I no longer fire off hundreds of shots hoping one will be perfect. Instead, I wait for moments that demand to be preserved - not for their aesthetic value, but for their emotional weight.
This realization troubles me. Why do these handful of moments feel like they represent an entire year? Countless experiences happened between these photographed instances, yet they've become invisible, overshadowed by the documented ones. The photos have become more than records. They've shaped how I remember living. The photograph has become a substitute for the experience itself, and perhaps a distortion of it.
Which brings me to my central question: Do these captured moments serve me, or do I serve them? Am I preserving meaningful experiences, or am I trying to escape the present by curating the past?
The rational part of me knows that moment at Twin Peaks is gone forever. It exists now only as electrical patterns in my brain, triggered by looking at pixels on a screen. Yet I return to these images, as if they contain something real, something I can possess. Maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe the act of photographing, of trying to capture and preserve, actually prevents us from fully inhabiting our experiences. Perhaps the most profound moments are the ones that exist only in the unreliable, ever-changing landscape of memory - unpreserved, unshared, and free. But again, the memory itself is unreliable. What should we believe?
Looking at these thirty-odd photos, I can't help but think: I was alive then. I was paying attention. I was awake to beauty and possibility.
Perhaps that's enough. Or perhaps it's exactly the problem.