Stage 1What Photography Is, and How to Use This Guide

A photograph is a record of light. Light leaves the sun or a lamp, strikes a face or a wall, passes through a lens and lands on something that can remember it: a silvered copper plate, a sheet of coated glass, a strip of film, or a silicon sensor divided into millions of tiny wells. Every setting, rule of thumb and argument in this book comes back to that chain of events.

The word says as much: photography joins the Greek roots for light and for writing.

Two centuries in brief

The optical half of photography is ancient. A camera obscura, Latin for "dark room", is a darkened space in which light entering through a small hole throws an upside-down image of the outside world onto the opposite wall. Scholars described the effect more than a thousand years ago, and Renaissance artists used portable versions as drawing aids.

The chemical half took until the nineteenth century. Around 1826 or 1827 Nicéphore Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph taken from nature, a view from an upstairs window of his house at Le Gras in France, on a pewter plate that needed an exposure of many hours. His partner Louis Daguerre went on to perfect a different process, announced in 1839: the daguerreotype, a single, astonishingly sharp image on a silvered copper plate, with no negative and therefore no copies. In England, William Henry Fox Talbot was developing paper negatives from which any number of prints could be made. Daguerre's plates were sharper. Talbot's idea won.

Each later advance made photography faster, cheaper or more portable. The wet collodion process of the 1850s gave sharp negatives on glass, but a plate had to be coated, exposed and developed within minutes, so landscape photographers hauled darkroom tents up mountains. Factory-made gelatin dry plates freed them from the late 1870s. George Eastman's first Kodak camera of 1888 came loaded with film for a hundred exposures, and the owner sent the whole camera back to be developed and reloaded. The Leica of 1925 used 35mm cinema film and fitted in a coat pocket. Kodachrome made colour slides practical from 1935. In 1975 a Kodak engineer, Steven Sasson, built a prototype digital camera. Within three decades digital had overtaken film, and the camera phone has since put a lens into billions of pockets.

How this guide works

Part I is the craft anywhere in the world, from light and exposure to the genres and the ethics of photographing people. A band of three stages then covers storing and preserving cameras, film, prints and digital files, because photographers have more to lose than almost any other hobbyist. Part II is the Indian story, from the first photographic societies to the studios, the photojournalists and the law today. The reference section holds a glossary, further reading and a list of the pictures this book calls for.

The book is written for four readers at once: the complete beginner, the practising photographer, the serious specialist, and the general reader who enjoys a good story. The main text serves the first and the last. Three kinds of box serve everyone:

• First Steps boxes tell a beginner what to do, cheaply, today.
• For the Photographer boxes carry numbers, specifications and technical detail.
• Sidebars hold stories, people and arguments.

You need buy nothing to begin: a recent smartphone is a capable camera.

Stage 2Light and Colour

Photographers talk about light the way cooks talk about ingredients. The same face at noon and at dusk makes two different photographs. Before worrying about any setting, learn to see three things about light: its quality, its direction and its colour.

Quality: hard and soft

Hard light comes from a source that is small compared with the subject: the bare sun in a clear sky, a naked bulb, a flash fired straight from the camera. It throws dark shadows with crisp edges, brings out texture and raises contrast. Soft light comes from a source that is large compared with the subject: an overcast sky, a big window out of direct sun, a white wall with light bouncing off it. Its shadows fade gradually at the edges, and it flatters faces.

The size that matters is apparent size, as seen from the subject. The sun is enormous but so distant that it is a small disc in the sky, which is why its light is hard. A layer of cloud turns the whole sky into the source, and the light softens. Move a lamp closer to a face and, for the same reason, its light grows softer.

Direction

• Front light, coming from behind the photographer, shows everything and flattens it.
• Side light rakes across a surface, revealing texture and giving round things their shape.
• Back light rims the subject with brightness, makes leaves and thin cloth glow, and can turn people into silhouettes.
• Top light, the midday sun, drops the eyes into dark sockets and hangs a shadow under every nose.

Across most of India the sun climbs high for much of the year, so midday light is harsh for long stretches. That is one reason so much good photography here happens early and late. The golden hour, roughly the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset, gives low, warm, directional light. The blue hour is the twilight when the sky turns deep blue and lit windows and street lamps balance against it. Monsoon cloud, meanwhile, makes a vast soft light that is kind to faces and unkind to skies.

Brightness and distance

Light from a small source spreads out as it travels, and its brightness falls with the square of the distance: twice as far from a lamp, a quarter of the light. This inverse square law is why a person sitting beside a window is far brighter than the back of the room, and why a flash that lights a bride well leaves the guests a few metres behind her much darker. Bouncing a flash off a white ceiling or wall makes a larger, softer source and evens out the fall-off.

Colour temperature and white balance

Light sources are not all the same colour. Candlelight and old filament bulbs are orange; midday sun is close to neutral; open shade, lit only by blue sky, is distinctly blue. Photographers describe this as colour temperature, measured in kelvins (K). Confusingly, lower numbers are warmer in colour and higher numbers cooler.

Your eyes and brain adjust constantly, so a white shirt looks white under a bulb and in the shade. A camera has to be told what white is, and that setting is white balance. Automatic white balance is right most of the time. It is fooled by scenes dominated by one colour, such as a sunset or a stall heaped with orange marigolds, and by mixed light, like a room lit by both a window and a tube light. The remedies are a preset (daylight, shade, tungsten), a custom setting made by photographing a white or grey card under the light, or, best of all, shooting RAW files, in which white balance can be changed afterwards without loss (see Stage 9).

Correct is not always right. The warmth of an evening scene is part of its mood, and "correcting" it to neutral can kill the picture.

Digital images are stored in a colour space, a defined range of colours. sRGB, the standard for the web and most screens, is the safe choice for sharing; wider spaces such as Adobe RGB matter mainly for printing (see Stage 10).

Stage 3Exposure: Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO

Exposure is the total amount of light a photograph gathers, together with how strongly the camera amplifies it. Too little and the picture is dark and muddy; too much and the bright parts turn to featureless white. Three controls set it: the aperture, the shutter speed and the ISO. Each has a side effect on how the picture looks, which is what makes exposure a creative decision rather than a chore.

The stop

The unit of exposure is the stop. One stop more means twice the light; one stop less means half. All three controls are marked in stops, or in thirds of a stop, so they can be traded against each other exactly.

Aperture

The aperture is the adjustable opening inside the lens, formed by a ring of overlapping metal blades. It is described by an f-number: the focal length of the lens divided by the diameter of the opening. A 50mm lens set to f/2 has an opening 25mm across. Because the f-number is really a fraction, bigger numbers mean smaller openings, and f/16 is a pinhole beside f/2.

The standard full stops are f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16 and f/22. Each step halves the light. The numbers grow by about 1.4, the square root of two, because what matters is the area of the opening.

Side effect: depth of field. A wide aperture (a small f-number) gives a shallow zone of sharpness and a soft background; a narrow aperture puts more of the scene in focus (see Stage 5). Most lenses are sharpest two or three stops down from their widest setting, and very small apertures soften the whole image through diffraction, the spreading of light as it squeezes past the edges of a small opening.

Shutter speed

The shutter speed is how long the sensor or film is exposed, usually a fraction of a second: 1/1000, 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15 and so on. Each step doubles or halves the light.

Side effect: motion. Fast speeds freeze movement; a batter's swing or a bird's wings may need 1/1000 or faster. Slow speeds blur it, which can be ugly (a shaking hand) or beautiful (silky water, streaks of traffic at dusk). A rule of thumb for hand-holding is a shutter speed no slower than one over the focal length, so 1/200 for a 200mm lens, and faster still on smaller sensors. Image stabilisation, in the lens or the camera body, lets you go several stops slower, but it only steadies the camera. It does nothing for a child who will not sit still.

ISO

ISO describes sensitivity. With film it is a fixed property of the emulsion, printed on the box; with a digital camera it sets how much the sensor's signal is amplified. The scale doubles: ISO 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400.

Side effect: noise. Amplifying a weak signal amplifies its random speckle too, seen as noise in digital files and as coarser grain in film. Higher ISO does not create light; it turns up the volume on what little arrived. Even so, a sharp picture with some noise beats a clean blurred one, and modern cameras give usable results at ISO 3200 and beyond.

Trading stops

Because every control is counted in stops, many combinations give the same brightness. These are equivalent exposures:

The sunny 16 rule

Before meters were built into cameras, photographers carried a rule in their heads. On a clear day with crisp shadows, set f/16 and a shutter speed of one over the ISO: at ISO 100, f/16 at 1/100, or the nearest setting, 1/125. Open up one stop for light haze (f/11), two for overcast with soft shadows (f/8), three for heavy overcast (f/5.6) and four for open shade (f/4). Over bright sand or snow, close down to f/22. It is still a good check on a meter that seems to be lying.

Exposure modes

In program mode (P) the camera sets both aperture and shutter speed; in aperture priority (A or Av) and shutter priority (S or Tv) you set one and the camera the other; in manual (M) you set both. Many working photographers use aperture priority with auto ISO, which raises the ISO when the shutter speed would otherwise fall too low.

Stage 4Metering and the Histogram

A camera's light meter measures the light reflected from the scene and suggests an exposure. It rests on one assumption: that the scene, averaged out, is a middle tone, neither light nor dark. For most scenes that is close enough. For some it is badly wrong.

How meters are fooled

Point a meter at a whitewashed wall, a man in a white kurta or a field of snow, and it will try to render them middle grey, so the picture comes out too dark. Point it at a black buffalo in deep shade and it will lighten the scene towards grey, so the picture comes out too bright. The fix is exposure compensation, a dial or menu marked with a plus-and-minus scale. Add light, perhaps one to two stops, for mostly bright scenes, and take it away for mostly dark ones. It feels backwards at first, brightening something already bright, but you are correcting the meter's assumption, not the scene.

A handheld incident meter avoids the problem by measuring the light falling on the subject rather than the light bouncing off it, so the subject's tone does not matter. A cheaper route to the same answer is to meter from a grey card held in the subject's light.

Metering modes

• Evaluative or matrix metering divides the frame into many zones and weighs them by the camera's own rules. It is the best default.
• Centre-weighted metering averages the frame but gives most weight to the middle.
• Spot metering reads only a small circle, often a few per cent of the frame, so you can meter exactly the face or sunlit wall that matters.

Most cameras let you lock an exposure, often with a button marked AE-L, and then recompose.

The histogram

The histogram is a graph of the picture's tones, from pure black at the left to pure white at the right, with the height at each point showing how many pixels share that tone. There is no correct shape. A snowfield piles up to the right and a night street to the left, and both can be perfectly exposed.

What matters are the walls. A tall spike jammed against the right-hand edge means clipped highlights: areas gone to pure white with no detail left to recover. A spike against the left edge means clipped shadows. Most cameras can also flash clipped areas on the playback screen. One caution: the camera builds its histogram from a processed JPEG preview even when you shoot RAW, so a RAW file usually holds a little more highlight detail than the graph suggests.

Dynamic range

Dynamic range is the span from the darkest to the brightest tones a sensor can record in one exposure, counted in stops. Modern sensors manage a great deal, often twelve stops or more at their lowest ISO, but some scenes hold more. A dark temple corridor opening onto a sunlit courtyard is the classic case. The choices are to expose for the highlights and lift the shadows later in a RAW file; to take several bracketed exposures and blend them, known as HDR (high dynamic range); to add light; or to let the shadows go black and make a picture of shapes. Colour negative film tolerates a good deal of overexposure; slide film has little latitude and loses its highlights quickly.

Stage 5Focus and Depth of Field

A lens focuses sharply at only one distance at a time. Everything nearer or further is, strictly, out of focus. But on either side of that distance lies a zone where things still look sharp, and that zone is the depth of field. How deep it is, and where it sits, is one of photography's most powerful choices.

What "acceptably sharp" means

Depth of field is calculated from a circle of confusion, the largest blur spot that still reads as a point at a given print size and viewing distance. Enlarge a picture and the zone of apparent sharpness shrinks, which is why a frame that looked crisp on a phone can disappoint as a big print.

Sensor size explains phones. Their tiny sensors give deep focus almost whatever the setting, which is why portrait modes fake a blurred background in software, and why they often smudge the edges of hair and spectacles.

Focusing for landscapes and streets

The hyperfocal distance is the focus setting that makes everything from half that distance to infinity acceptably sharp. Landscape photographers use it to hold both foreground and horizon. Street photographers use a related trick, zone focusing: set the lens by hand to a distance and a fairly small aperture, and anything inside the resulting zone is sharp without waiting for autofocus. With a 28mm lens on a full-frame camera at f/8, focused at about three metres, the zone runs from roughly one and a half metres to far into the distance. Depth-of-field calculator apps give figures for any lens.

Do not simply stop down to f/22 for maximum depth, because diffraction softens everything (see Stage 3). Many landscape photographers work at f/8 to f/11, and where that is not enough they use focus stacking: several frames focused at different distances, blended in software.

Autofocus

What matters most in autofocus is the mode:

• Single autofocus (AF-S or One Shot) locks focus on a half-press and holds it. Use it for still subjects.
• Continuous autofocus (AF-C or AI Servo) keeps adjusting while the button is held. Use it for anything that moves.
• Subject detection, on recent mirrorless cameras, finds and tracks eyes, faces, animals, birds or vehicles.

Many photographers move focusing from the shutter button to a separate rear button, known as back-button focus, so they can focus once and then shoot repeatedly without the camera refocusing. For manual focus, use the magnified view or focus peaking, which outlines sharp edges in a bright colour.

Where to focus, and when it is not focus

In a portrait, focus on the nearer eye. In a group, stop down and focus about a third of the way into the group. In a landscape, use the hyperfocal distance or focus a third of the way into the scene.

Soft pictures have many causes besides focus: camera shake, subject movement, a poor or smeared lens, diffraction, and, in an Indian summer, heat shimmer, the rippling of hot air over roads and rooftops that ruins long-lens pictures by mid-morning. Look at what is soft. If nothing in the frame is sharp, suspect shake or haze. If something other than the subject is sharp, the focus missed.

Stage 6Lenses and Focal Length

The focal length of a lens, given in millimetres, decides how much of a scene it takes in on a given camera. Short focal lengths give a wide angle of view; long ones give a narrow view that magnifies distant things.

The usual figures assume a full-frame sensor, the size of a 35mm film frame, 36 by 24 millimetres. Smaller sensors crop the image, so the same lens shows a narrower view. The ratio is the crop factor, and multiplying by it gives the equivalent focal length: a 35mm lens on an APS-C camera frames roughly like a 50mm lens on full frame. Phone makers describe their cameras this way, and a phone's main camera is typically a wide angle of about 24 to 26mm equivalent.

A normal lens gives a view that feels close to unaided vision in a print held at a comfortable distance. By convention it is about the length of the sensor's diagonal, roughly 43mm for full frame, and the 50mm lens has long filled the role.

Perspective belongs to your feet

It is often said that wide lenses distort and long lenses compress. Strictly, perspective, meaning how large near things look relative to far ones, depends only on where the camera stands. A wide lens used close to a face enlarges the nose because the nose is much nearer the lens than the ears are. A long lens used from far away makes a distant hill loom behind a person because, from that distance, person and hill are not so different in apparent size. Change lens without moving and you change only the crop. This is why portrait photographers favour short telephotos: they make you stand back, at a flattering distance.

Speed, primes and zooms

A lens's maximum aperture is part of its name: a 50mm f/1.8 opens to f/1.8. Lenses with wide maximum apertures are called fast, because they allow faster shutter speeds; they also cost more, weigh more and give shallower depth of field. Many zooms have a variable maximum aperture, such as f/3.5–5.6, which narrows as you zoom in.

A prime lens has one focal length; a zoom covers a range. Primes are usually smaller, faster and cheaper for their image quality. Zooms save lens changes, which matters in dust, rain and crowds. Before buying a second lens, sort your existing pictures by focal length, which the camera records with every frame: if they cluster at one end of your zoom, that tells you what to buy.

Specialist lenses and filters

• Macro lenses focus close enough to record a small subject at life size on the sensor, a ratio written 1:1.
• A circular polariser cuts reflections from water, glass and leaves and deepens a blue sky, most strongly at right angles to the sun. On ultra-wide lenses it can darken one part of the sky unevenly.
• Neutral density (ND) filters darken the whole scene evenly, allowing slow shutter speeds or wide apertures in bright daylight.

Stage 7Cameras: Film and Digital Sensors

How a digital sensor sees

A digital sensor is a grid of millions of light-sensitive photosites, each turning light into an electrical charge. A photosite records only brightness, so most sensors are covered with a mosaic of red, green and blue filters, usually in the Bayer pattern: each block of four holds two greens, a red and a blue, green being doubled because the eye is most sensitive to it. Software then estimates the full colour at every point from its neighbours, a step called demosaicing. A larger sensor gathers more light in total at the same exposure. That is why sensor size matters more than megapixel count for quality in dim light, and why it affects depth of field (see Stage 5).

Kinds of camera

• Smartphones pair tiny sensors with great computing power, merging several frames for each shot to cut noise and hold highlights. They are superb for everyday work, and struggle with fast action in dim light, long telephoto reach and large, finely detailed prints.
• DSLRs (digital single-lens reflex cameras) use a mirror to send the image to an optical viewfinder, flipping it out of the way for the exposure.
• Mirrorless cameras drop the mirror and show the image in an electronic viewfinder, previewing exposure and colour before you press the button. The major makers have moved nearly all new development to mirrorless, which makes good used DSLRs something of a bargain.

How film works

Film is a thin layer of gelatin holding light-sensitive crystals of silver halide, coated on a flexible plastic base. Light striking a crystal forms an invisible latent image. The developer turns exposed crystals into specks of black metallic silver, and the fixer dissolves away the unexposed ones so the film no longer reacts to light. In a black-and-white negative the image is made of silver, dark where the scene was bright.

Colour film has several layers, sensitive to blue, green and red. During development, coloured dyes form beside the silver, which is then bleached away, leaving an image made only of dyes. This chromogenic process matters later, because dyes fade, even in the dark (see Stage 15). Colour negative film is developed in the C-41 process, and colour slide film, which gives a positive image for projection, in E-6.

Common formats are 35mm film (also called 135), with 36 by 24mm frames; 120 roll film, with larger medium-format frames such as 6 by 6cm; and large-format sheet film, starting at 4 by 5 inches.

People still shoot film for its look, for the discipline of a few frames and for the pleasure of a slower process. It is not cheap. Prices rose steeply in the 2020s, and in India only a limited number of labs, mostly in the larger cities, still process colour film, so many enthusiasts develop black-and-white at home. Darkroom chemicals need basic care: ventilate the room, wear gloves, keep chemicals away from food and children, and ask the local authority how to dispose of used fixer, which carries dissolved silver.

Stage 8Composition

Composition is deciding what goes into the frame, where it sits and what is left out. The most important compositional decision is where you stand; the second is when you press the button. Everything else is refinement.

Know what the picture is about

Before raising the camera, ask what drew you to the scene: a face, a gesture, a shaft of light, a colour. Then make that thing unmistakable. Most weak photographs are not badly exposed or out of focus. They are about too many things at once. Move closer, change angle, or wait for the distraction to leave.

Then check the edges: run your eye round the frame before pressing the shutter, looking for a pole growing out of a head, a bright wrapper in a corner, a hand cut off at the wrist, a horizon running downhill. Each is easier to fix by moving than by editing.

Useful guides, not laws

• The rule of thirds. Imagine the frame divided by two horizontal and two vertical lines. Placing a subject or horizon on those lines, rather than dead centre, often gives a picture more life. Most cameras can display the grid.
• Symmetry. Some subjects demand the centre: a temple gateway seen head-on, a stepwell from its axis, a face looking straight into the lens. Symmetry works when it is exact; nearly symmetrical looks like a mistake.
• Lines. Roads, riverbanks, steps and the rows of a tea garden lead the eye into the frame. Diagonals feel energetic; horizontals feel calm.
• Frames within the frame. Doorways, arches, windows and carved jharokha balconies contain a subject and add depth.
• Layers. Crowded streets reward pictures built in foreground, middle ground and background, each with something happening.
• Figure and ground. A subject stands out when it differs from what is behind it in tone, colour or sharpness. A dark face against a dark doorway vanishes.

Viewpoint and moment

Most photographs are taken from standing eye level, which is why so many look alike. Crouch to a child's height, climb a staircase, sit on the ghat steps. A metre up or down can change the whole picture. Before leaving a subject, try it from closer, further, higher, lower and from either side; the best frame is seldom the first.

A photograph freezes a fraction of a second, and which fraction is a choice. Anticipate: find the background and the light, then wait for someone to walk in. Watch hands and faces. A short burst helps with movement, but bursts catch the instant before and after as often as the instant itself, so learn to press once, at the right time.

You can crop later, but a picture composed in the camera nearly always beats one rescued in software, because cropping discards resolution and cannot move your feet. Choosing which pictures to show, and in what order, is composition too. A strong set of ten beats a mixed set of a hundred.

Stage 9Editing and the RAW Workflow

RAW and JPEG

When a camera saves a JPEG it has already made a string of decisions about white balance, contrast, colour, sharpening and noise. It then compresses the result, discarding detail the eye is unlikely to miss, and stores eight bits per colour channel, or 256 levels of each. JPEGs are small, open anywhere and are ready to share, but they do not stand heavy editing.

A RAW file holds the sensor's data with the camera settings attached. It is not yet a picture: software must demosaic and render it (see Stage 7). It usually stores 12 or 14 bits per channel, thousands of levels rather than hundreds, which leaves room to recover highlights, open shadows and set white balance afterwards without damage. The costs are size, the need for software, and formats that differ from maker to maker (see Stage 16).

A workflow

1. Ingest. Copy files from the card to the computer rather than working on the card. Rename them to a consistent scheme, add your name and copyright, and make a backup copy before formatting the card for reuse.
2. Cull. Go through quickly, rating or flagging. Reject the blurred, the blinking and the near-duplicates. A library too big to look at is nearly as lost as one deleted.
3. Develop. Work from global to local. Straighten and crop; set white balance, exposure and contrast; recover highlights and lift shadows; adjust colour. Then lighten or darken parts of the picture, remove dust spots, and apply noise reduction and sharpening last.
4. Export. Make a copy prepared for its use: a JPEG in sRGB for screens, a full-size TIFF for printing. Never overwrite the original.
5. Archive. Back everything up in more than one place (see Stage 16).

Software and screens

Most photographers do most of their work in a non-destructive editor, which never alters the original file. Edits are stored as instructions, in a catalogue database or in a small sidecar file beside the image, and can be changed at any time. Adobe Lightroom Classic and Capture One are well-known commercial examples, darktable and RawTherapee free ones. For work in layers, pixel editors such as Photoshop or the free GIMP take over.

Edit on a calibrated screen with the brightness turned well down; an over-bright screen is the commonest reason home prints come out dark. Over-editing shows as halos along edges, crunchy textures, orange skin and skies bluer than any sky. Push a slider until the picture looks good, then pull it back by a third.

Honesty

In art you may do as you like, though viewers deserve to know when a picture is a composite. In documentary and news work the line is firm. News agencies and major competitions allow adjustment of tone, colour and cropping within limits, but not adding, removing or moving anything in the frame, and some ask for the original RAW file to check. Generative tools that invent pixels make that line more important, not less. Keep your originals: they are your proof.

Stage 10Printing

A print is looked at differently from a screen. It has a size, a surface and a weight; it holds the eye for longer than a thumb pauses on a phone; and it shows flaws, such as soft focus, a crooked horizon or muddy shadows, that a small bright screen hides. Printing your best work is the quickest way to improve it. A well-made print, well kept, is also the one form of a photograph that needs no device to be seen in fifty years (see Stage 15).

The routes to a print

• A photo lab makes chromogenic or C-type prints: colour photographic paper exposed by laser or LED and developed in chemicals. Nearly every Indian town has a studio or lab that will do this cheaply from a phone or memory card.
• An inkjet printer, at home or at a fine-art printing studio, lays down microscopic droplets of ink. Studios often sell such prints as giclée, which is a marketing word for inkjet.
• A darkroom makes silver gelatin prints by projecting a negative through an enlarger onto light-sensitive paper, which is then developed much like film.

Inks and papers

Inkjet printers use either dye inks, dissolved colourants that look vivid on glossy paper but fade faster, or pigment inks, tiny solid particles that last far longer in light. For anything meant to hang or to last, choose pigment. Stage 15 explains why.

Papers come in glossy, lustre (a light texture between gloss and matte) and matte surfaces, on bases from ordinary resin-coated stock to heavy cotton rag and baryta papers, which imitate traditional fibre-based darkroom paper. Many bright-white papers contain optical brightening agents, which absorb ultraviolet light and glow blue-white; the effect fades over the years, leaving the paper warmer than when new.

In Indian humidity, inkjet paper cockles and ink takes longer to dry. Keep paper sealed in its box until you use it, and leave fresh prints to dry flat and uncovered for a day before framing or stacking them.

Resolution and size

Pixels per inch (ppi) at the final print size is the working measure of detail. 300 ppi is the usual target for prints viewed close up; 200 to 240 ppi is often indistinguishable; and a large print seen from across a room needs far less.

Getting colour right

Prints that come out too dark or the wrong colour are the most common complaint, and the causes are nearly always the same: an uncalibrated, over-bright screen, and printing without the right profile. The cure is colour management. Calibrate the screen with a hardware calibrator. Use the ICC profile, a data file describing how a particular printer, ink and paper reproduce colour, which paper makers and labs supply. Most editors can soft-proof, simulating the print on screen. Then make a small test print and judge it in daylight, not under a yellow bulb.

Stage 11The Genres: Street, Landscape and Portrait

Photography divides into genres the way writing does, each with its own kit, habits and kind of patience. This stage and the next cover five of the main ones.

Street

Street photography is candid photography of life in public places: unposed, unstaged and usually of strangers. Its tools are modest. A small camera or phone draws less attention than a big lens. A focal length of about 28 to 50mm equivalent puts you close to the action. Zone focusing (see Stage 5), a shutter speed of 1/250 or faster and auto ISO let you react without fiddling.

Approach matters more than equipment. Some photographers follow whatever catches the eye; others find a promising background and light and wait for the right person to walk into it. Either way, move slowly and stay visible and relaxed. People notice furtiveness more than they notice a camera. If someone objects, stop, and delete the picture if asked. Indian streets are among the richest in the world for this work and among the most crowded, so carry water, watch the traffic, and think about whom you photograph and how (see Stage 13).

Landscape

Landscape photography depends more on light and weather than on location. The same valley is dull at noon and extraordinary at dawn after rain, so landscape photographers scout, check sunrise times and forecasts, and return. A tripod allows low ISO, small apertures and slow shutter speeds. A foreground of rocks, a path or a flowering bush gives depth, and hyperfocal focusing or focus stacking holds near and far sharp. A polariser deepens skies; graduated neutral density filters, dark at the top and clear below, or bracketed exposures blended later, hold a bright sky above dark land.

Landscape work takes people to dangerous places, and no photograph is worth an injury. At high altitude in Ladakh, Spiti or Sikkim, ascend gradually and acclimatise, and treat a worsening headache, breathlessness at rest, confusion or unsteadiness as a warning: go down and get medical help. In deserts and on the plains in summer, heat exhaustion comes on quickly, so carry more water than you think you need and rest in shade. In the monsoon, keep away from swollen streams, loose slopes and cliff edges, where landslides and flash floods come without warning. Tell someone your route and when you expect to be back.

Portrait

A portrait is about a person, not about lighting. Rapport comes first: talk, explain what you are doing, show people the pictures. Short telephoto lenses of about 85 to 135mm equivalent give flattering perspective from a comfortable distance, and a wide aperture separates a face from a busy background. Focus on the nearer eye. A large window out of direct sun makes beautiful light, and a white sheet or card on the shadow side fills it in.

The environmental portrait shows a person in their own place: a weaver at her loom, a potter at his wheel, a mechanic in his workshop. The surroundings carry as much meaning as the face, so a wider lens and deeper focus are usual.

Direct gently: a turn of the shoulders or something for the hands to do achieves more than an elaborate pose. For any portrait that will be used commercially, such as in advertising or on packaging, get a signed model release, the written permission of the person photographed (see Stage 22).

Stage 12The Genres: Wildlife and Documentary

Wildlife

Wildlife photography asks for long lenses, fast shutter speeds and, above all, knowledge of animals. A lens of 300 to 600mm equivalent is typical for birds and shy mammals; shutter speeds of 1/1000 or faster freeze wings and running feet; continuous autofocus with animal detection helps; and high ISO is the price of that speed at dawn and dusk, when animals are most active. In a safari vehicle, a beanbag laid over the door or rail steadies a heavy lens better than a tripod.

The best wildlife photographers are naturalists first. They know when a bird returns to its perch, how a deer behaves before it bolts, where the light falls on a waterhole at seven in the morning. Start in a garden, a park or a wetland near home; local birdwatching groups are generous teachers.

The animal's welfare comes before the picture. That means no baiting with food or live prey; no disturbing nests, roosts or dens; no playing recorded calls where it stresses birds or breaks park rules; keeping a respectful distance and not crowding animals with vehicles; following the rules of protected areas (see Stage 22); and saying so in the caption when an animal was captive. Keep yourself safe as well. Never leave a vehicle in tiger or elephant country unless a forest guide says it is safe, and never approach elephants, bears or snakes.

Documentary

Documentary photography tells a true story through a body of pictures made over time. It overlaps with photojournalism, which is news-driven and fast, and with street photography, but its signature is depth: a project on one village, a trade, a river or a family, sometimes pursued for years.

Access and trust are its working capital: documentary photographers spend time without the camera before they spend time with it, and come back to show people the pictures. They keep notebooks, because an accurate caption, with names, place, date and what was happening, is part of the photograph. They edit hard and sequence with care, and many projects end as a photobook, where order and pacing do the work of a narrative. Because documentary claims to show how things are, and because its subjects often have less power than the photographer, it carries the heaviest ethical weight in photography (see Stage 13).

Stage 13Ethics and Consent: People, Children and Sacred Places

The law tells you what you may photograph; ethics asks what you should. The two overlap less than people assume, because much that is legal is unkind. Indian law is covered in Stage 22. This stage is about the judgement no law supplies, and three questions do most of the work. Whose story is this? Who benefits from the picture? What could go wrong for the person in it if it is published?

Photographing people

Consent comes in degrees. Explicit consent is a yes, spoken or signed. Implied consent is a smile or a nod when the camera goes up. Informed consent means the person understands what the picture is for: a family album, a competition, a newspaper, an advertisement. The further a photograph travels from the moment it was taken, the more informed the consent needs to be.

There is a long and defensible tradition of candid photography in public places, but candid is not careless. If someone objects, stop; if they ask you to delete a picture, delete it. Think hard before photographing people at their most vulnerable: injured, grieving, begging, or in shock after an accident or disaster. Ask whether the picture serves them, or the public's genuine need to know, or only your portfolio.

Power runs one way when a comfortable photographer points an expensive camera at people with little. Poverty photographed as picturesque spectacle is a cliché, and it wounds. If you promise to send someone a print or a copy on their phone, send it. And in many parts of India, photographing women without permission causes real offence, and in some settings real trouble for the women themselves. Ask, and accept no.

Children

Ask a parent or guardian, and ask the child. Take particular care with children who are vulnerable: children living on the street, in shelters or institutions, at work, or caught up in conflict or crime. A picture that identifies them can follow them for life. Do not publish details that reveal where a child lives or goes to school, and strip location data from files before sharing them (see Stage 16). Indian law restricts publishing anything that identifies child victims and children in conflict with the law (see Stage 22).

Religious sites and rituals

Temples, mosques, gurdwaras, churches, monasteries and fire temples each set their own rules, and they differ. Photography is often forbidden in a sanctum or inner shrine, and some sites ban it altogether. Look for signs, ask, and if in doubt, do not. Never use flash during worship. Dress as the place requires, remove shoes where others do, and never climb on shrines or sculpture for a better angle.

Rituals need more care still. Weddings belong to the families. Funerals and cremations are private grief in public places, and at cremation grounds photography is widely regarded as deeply disrespectful. Some places, such as the Parsi Towers of Silence, are closed to outsiders entirely. At big festivals and fairs, the scrum of photographers around a sadhu or a devotee can itself become the intrusion. Be one of the few who asks, or who walks away.

Storage and Preservation

Stage 14Storage: Cameras, Lenses and the Indian Climate

Most photographers think about preservation the day after something is lost: the lens that came out of the monsoon with a grey web inside it, the box of a grandparent's negatives that smells of vinegar, the hard drive that simply stopped. These three stages are written for the day before. This one covers the enemies, the Indian climate and cameras; Stage 15 covers film and prints; Stage 16 covers digital files, family collections, disasters and a routine.

The enemies, one by one

• Humidity. Relative humidity (RH) is the water vapour in the air as a percentage of the most the air could hold at that temperature. Sustained above roughly 60 to 70 per cent, it lets mould grow on gelatin and paper and fungus on lens glass; gelatin swells and turns sticky, and acetate film decays faster. Below about 30 per cent, gelatin shrinks, cracks and curls.
• Heat. Every chemical reaction that destroys a photograph runs faster when warm. As a rough rule of thumb, storing film and colour material about 5°C cooler can double the time before decay shows.
• Swings. Rapid change does more harm than a steady middling level. Image layers and their bases expand and contract at different rates until they crack apart, and cold equipment carried into warm, humid air collects condensation inside as well as out.
• Light. Ultraviolet does the most damage, but visible light fades dyes and yellows paper too. The damage adds up and never reverses.
• Pollutants. Ozone fades dye inks. Sulphur compounds and peroxides, given off by rubber, fresh paint, some woods, cheap cardboard and traffic fumes, attack silver images, turning them yellow or leaving a metallic sheen called silvering. Salt air corrodes metal and electrical contacts.
• Pests. Silverfish and cockroaches eat gelatin, paper and paste. Termites eat wooden frames and cardboard boxes. Rats and mice nest in albums.
• Handling. Skin oils and salts leave fingerprints that etch into emulsions and feed fungus on lens glass.
• Well-meant fixes. Laminating a print, taping a tear, wiping a negative with a cloth, cleaning a lens on a shirt, sealing damp things in an airtight box: each does harm, often permanent.

The Indian climate

Indian conditions are harder on photographic material than most foreign guides assume.

The monsoon is the main enemy. For weeks at a time RH across much of the country stays above 80 per cent, and in coastal cities such as Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata it is high for much of the year, with salt air that corrodes camera bodies, tripod legs and battery contacts. In the north, summer heat routinely passes 40°C, and a top-floor flat under a concrete roof, or a cupboard on a sun-facing wall, gets hotter still. Pre-monsoon dust storms drive fine grit into zoom lenses and camera seams. Power cuts stop air conditioners, dehumidifiers and dry cabinets, and a closed room's humidity can climb within hours. Termites live in walls and wooden almirahs, and naphthalene balls and camphor, used against insects, give off vapours that should be kept away from photographs.

What works, affordably:

• Choose the place. An interior room, on an inside wall, away from bathrooms and kitchens, off the floor and not directly under the roof. A steel almirah or powder-coated steel cabinet resists termites; wood and cardboard do not.
• Measure. A digital thermo-hygrometer costs a few hundred rupees (2026, approximate) and tells you what is actually happening. Check its accuracy with the salt test: seal it in a box for several hours with a bottle cap of table salt dampened to a paste, and it should read close to 75 per cent.
• Use silica gel properly. Silica gel absorbs moisture until it is saturated, then does nothing. Buy indicating gel, preferably the orange kind that turns green when saturated, and avoid the old blue-to-pink kind, which contains toxic cobalt chloride. To recharge it, spread it thinly on a metal tray in a low oven, roughly 100 to 120°C, for an hour or two until the colour returns, or follow the pack's instructions, then cool it in a sealed jar. Plastic sachets may not survive the heat, so keep loose beads in a tin or cloth bag, out of children's reach.
• Seal small things. An airtight box with silica gel and a hygrometer inside is a small, stable climate that rides out a power cut.
• Beware the air conditioner. It dries a room while it runs, but switched off each morning it lets humidity flood back, and that daily swing does its own damage. A dehumidifier or a sealed box gives steadier conditions.

Target conditions

No home matches an archive, and published standards differ in detail. These are honest ranges to aim at. Stability matters more than the exact number: a steady 55 per cent does less harm than a daily swing between 35 and 75.

Cameras and lenses

Fungus is the Indian photographer's particular enemy. Its spores are everywhere, and in warm, humid, dark, still air, such as a padded camera bag shut in a cupboard through the monsoon, they germinate on lens surfaces and feed on dust, skin oil and traces of lubricant. Fine threads spread across the glass, and the acids they produce can etch coatings and glass for good. A technician can often clean fungus off an inner element if it is caught early; etched glass cannot be saved. Fungus also spreads, so keep an affected lens away from the rest of your kit until it is treated. Haze, a milky film on inner elements, lowers contrast and is also a technician's job.

To check a lens, detach it, open the aperture fully if it has a manual ring, and shine a bright torch through it from behind while looking in from the front at an angle; then turn it round. A few specks of dust are normal. Threads, spider-web patterns, spots with feathery edges or a milky fog are not. Make the same check before buying any second-hand lens, however good the price: a lens that spent years in a humid coastal flat can look perfect outside and carry fungus within.

To keep gear safe:

• Store it dry. A dry cabinet, an electronic cabinet that holds a set humidity, is the best answer for a serious kit. Small ones start at a few thousand rupees and large ones cost considerably more (2026, approximate). Set it to about 40 to 50 per cent; much below 35 is unnecessary and can dry out leather, rubber and the lubricants in old mechanical cameras.
• Unpack after every outing, especially after rain. A bag is for carrying, not storing.
• Use it. Once a month, take everything out, fire the shutter at several speeds, work the aperture, run the focus and zoom through their range, and look through each lens against the light. Idle mechanisms stiffen, and air and movement discourage fungus.
• Take the batteries out. Leaking cells corrode contacts. Keep lithium-ion batteries part-charged and cool, and never leave them in a parked car in summer. A swollen battery must not be charged or used again; take it to an electronic-waste collection point.
• Beat condensation. Before carrying a camera from air conditioning into humid air, seal it in a zip-lock bag and keep the bag closed until the camera has warmed up, which can take half an hour or more.
• Clean gently. Blower first, then a soft brush, then a microfibre cloth with a drop of lens-cleaning fluid on the cloth, not the glass. Never use canned air on a sensor, since its propellant can spray out as liquid; if a blower does not shift the dust, take the camera to a service centre. Never open a lens yourself.
• Keep records. List every item's make, model and serial number, with a photograph and the invoice. You will need them for insurance, for a police complaint after theft, and to prove ownership when you sell.

Stage 15Preservation: Negatives, Slides and Prints

A negative is the original. Every print and every scan is a copy, and a copy is only as good as the negative on the day it is made. Family negatives are often in more danger than the prints on the wall, because they sit forgotten in envelopes in hot cupboards.

Film bases, and the two that are dangerous

Nitrate film is the hazard to take seriously. It burns fiercely, carries enough oxygen in its own chemistry to keep burning when smothered, and gives off poisonous gases. As it decays it yellows, turns sticky, then brittle, and finally crumbles to brown powder, and badly decomposed nitrate kept somewhere hot is known to have ignited with no flame nearby. Never keep suspected nitrate in a sealed tin, a hot loft or near a stove; never try a burn test; never put it out with household rubbish. Separate it, keep it as cool as you can, have the images copied, and ask a film archive or a conservator how to deal with it.

Vinegar syndrome is the chemical decay of acetate film. Moisture and warmth break the acetate down, releasing acetic acid, the acid in vinegar, and that acid speeds further decay, so once begun it accelerates. The film shrinks, curls and turns brittle, and the image layer wrinkles into raised channels as the base shrinks beneath it. Acid vapour spreads to other film stored nearby. The decay cannot be reversed, only slowed, and cold slows it dramatically. A-D Strips, small dye-coated indicator papers made by the Image Permanence Institute in the United States, change colour in acid vapour and show how far decay has gone.

Cold storage at home

A domestic freezer is a practical way to slow vinegar syndrome and colour fading in a small collection. The danger is moisture, not cold, so the packing is everything:

1. Leave the sleeved film for a day or two in a room at moderate humidity, ideally 30 to 50 per cent.
2. Put it in a zip-lock polyethylene bag, press out the air and seal it. Seal that bag inside a second one.
3. Label the outer bag and freeze it flat.
4. To use the film, take the package out and leave it sealed until it reaches room temperature, which takes several hours; overnight is safe. Opened cold, the package draws condensation straight onto the film.

A power cut does less harm than people fear: the sealed bags keep moisture out and a closed freezer stays cold for hours. What matters is avoiding repeated thawing and refreezing.

Cold also slows dark fading. Colour negatives, slides and prints made by the chromogenic process hold their images in dyes, and those dyes fade whether or not light reaches them. Many family colour prints and negatives from the 1970s and 1980s have already shifted towards red or magenta as one dye faded faster than the others. Slide films varied: Kodachrome held its colour unusually well in the dark but faded under the heat and light of repeated projection. Faded colour material should be digitised early.

Enclosures and handling

The safest sleeves, envelopes and boxes have passed the Photographic Activity Test (PAT), an international standard test of whether a storage material harms photographs. Look for it on the packaging.

• Plastic: uncoated polyester, polypropylene and polyethylene are safe. PVC is not; it releases acidic compounds as it ages. Soft, slightly oily, strong-smelling sleeves and slide pages are usually PVC. Plastic lets you see an image without handling it, but a glossy surface can stick to it in damp conditions, so plastic needs dry storage.
• Paper: acid-free, lignin-free enclosures breathe and never stick, though the negative must come out to be seen. For colour material, cyanotypes and nineteenth-century albumen prints, conservators have traditionally preferred unbuffered paper, without the alkaline reserve added to buffered paper.
• Glassine, the translucent paper of many old negative envelopes, can turn acidic with age; move negatives into better enclosures.

Write on the enclosure before the negative goes in, in soft pencil. Handle film and prints by the edges, over a clean table, in clean nitrile gloves; cotton gloves shed lint, snag, and make a slippery negative easier to drop. Never wipe a negative; use a blower. Stand sleeved negatives upright in archival boxes, not crammed tight. Store glass plates on their long edges, each in its own paper enclosure, in a strong box, never stacked flat.

Prints

• Silver gelatin black-and-white prints, well processed and well kept, last a very long time, but they yellow, stain or silver over when pollutants and damp reach them.
• Chromogenic colour prints fade in light and in the dark, and their whites yellow over decades.
• Pigment inkjet prints on good paper are among the most light-stable colour prints made. Dye inkjet prints, especially from inexpensive printers, can fade noticeably within a few years on display and are sensitive to ozone and humidity. Independent testers, Wilhelm Imaging Research among them, publish comparative permanence ratings.
• Instant prints carry their own chemistry sealed inside; never cut or peel them apart.

Display is what kills most prints. Hang a copy and keep the original flat in an archival box, in the dark. Keep framed prints out of direct sun and spotlights, and rotate them. Museums light sensitive photographs dimly, often somewhere around 50 to 150 lux, and limit how long they stay on show. UV-filtering glazing, glass or acrylic that blocks most ultraviolet, slows fading, but visible light still does its work.

Albums, mounting and framing

Self-adhesive "magnetic" albums, with sticky card pages under a clear plastic sheet, were popular from the 1970s and are a slow disaster. The adhesive yellows, turns acidic and grips the prints harder every year, and the sheets are often PVC. First photograph or scan each page as it stands, so captions and order survive. Then lift only the prints that come away easily, sliding a thin, blunt palette knife slowly under a corner. If a print resists, stop: a torn print is worse than a stuck one, and a conservator can advise.

Older albums with black pages and photo corners are acidic too, but such an album is a document in itself, with its sequence and handwriting. Record it completely before removing anything; often the better course is to box it whole and scan it.

Mount prints with photo corners of archival paper or polyester, so no adhesive touches the print, and avoid dry mounting, spray adhesive, tape and glue for anything you value. Frame a print behind a window mat of acid-free, lignin-free board, so it never touches the glazing, which in humid weather it can stick to; on a backing of the same board; behind UV-filtering glazing; with the back of the frame sealed against dust and insects. Hang it on an inside wall, away from stoves and air-conditioner vents, with small spacers on the back corners so that air moves behind it.

Materials: use and avoid

Cleaning and repair: what not to do

Do not wash, wipe or soak prints or negatives, and do not use tape, glue, alcohol, bleach or household cleaners on them. Do not force a curled print flat, and do not try to separate prints stuck together or stuck to frame glass after a monsoon; they need controlled humidification, which is a conservator's work. If a photograph matters, stop and ask. In India, museums with photography collections and the conservation laboratories of organisations such as INTACH can advise or recommend a conservator.

Stage 16Archiving: Digital Files, Family Collections and a Routine

A digital photograph has no base to crack and no dye to fade. It fails differently: all at once, silently, and usually completely. A drive that worked yesterday does not start today. A format that opened ten years ago no longer opens. An account is locked, a password forgotten, a phone dropped in a river. A digital archive needs as much care as a box of negatives, of a different kind.

Formats that stay readable

Metadata and captions

A photograph without a caption slowly becomes a picture of strangers. Metadata is information stored inside the file. EXIF data is written by the camera: date, time, settings and often GPS location. IPTC fields, a standard used by news organisations and archives, hold what you add: caption, keywords, creator, copyright and place names. XMP is a way of storing such information inside the file or in a small sidecar file beside it.

Write captions while you still remember: who, where, when, what was happening, and who took the picture. Back up your editing software's catalogue, but do not trust it alone; set the software to write metadata into the files or their sidecars, so the information survives if the catalogue is lost. Phone pictures often carry exact GPS coordinates, so strip location data from pictures of children and of your home before sharing them. Many social platforms compress images and strip metadata, so a social media account is never an archive.

Folders and names

Keep one master library, not pictures scattered across phones, laptops and old drives. A plain, date-based structure outlives any software:

• a folder for each year, such as 2026;
• inside it, a folder for each shoot or event, beginning with the date written year, month, day so that it sorts correctly, such as 2026-08-15 Independence Day Pune;
• file names that also begin with the date, such as 20260815-0042, so files stay unique and in order wherever they are copied.

Do not rely on camera file names, which repeat after 9,999 frames and across cameras.

How storage fails

• Hard disk drives have spinning platters and moving heads. They wear out, and fail after knocks, heat or simply age, often without warning.
• Solid-state drives have no moving parts but can lose data if left unpowered for long periods, faster when warm. They make good working drives and poor shelf archives.
• Memory cards and USB sticks are for moving files, not keeping them.
• Recordable CDs and DVDs vary widely in quality, and many burned in the 2000s are already unreadable. Copy family discs to current drives now, while you still own something that reads them.
• RAID arrays and network drives mirror data across disks so that one failure does not stop work. They are not backups: a deleted, corrupted or ransomware-encrypted file is mirrored faithfully.

Files can also decay silently, a few bits at a time. A checksum is a short code calculated from a file's contents that changes if a single bit changes, so software that stores and compares checksums can warn you that a file is damaged before you need it.

The 3-2-1 rule

Archivists and professional photographers work to one simple rule:

• three copies of everything that matters, the original and two backups;
• on at least two different devices or kinds of storage;
• with one copy off-site, where a fire, flood or burglary at home cannot reach it.

In an Indian household that can be the computer, an external drive at home updated weekly, and a second drive kept at a relative's house or at work and swapped every month or two, or a cloud backup service instead of the second drive. Some photographers add a further copy kept disconnected, which ransomware cannot touch.

Verify, or it is not a backup

A backup you have never restored from is a hope. Every few months, open a dozen files chosen at random from each backup and compare them with the originals. Use backup software that verifies copies by checksum. Once a year, restore a whole folder as a rehearsal. Check each drive's health with a diagnostic tool, and replace drives before they grow old; many photographers retire a drive after about five years.

The cloud, with caveats

Cloud storage puts a copy off-site with little effort, which makes it an excellent third copy. Know its limits:

• Sync is not backup. A synchronised folder copies deletions and corruption as faithfully as good files. Choose a service with version history, so earlier states can be recovered.
• Some services compress uploads or strip metadata unless you choose original-quality storage.
• Accounts can be locked after a forgotten password, a failed payment or an automated suspension, and help can be hard to reach.

Download a full copy of your cloud library once a year, and check it.

Migrating to new media

Every few years, copy the whole archive to new drives, check the copy, and retire the old drives. At the same time, check that every format still opens in current software, and convert anything at risk: obscure RAW formats to DNG, files from abandoned software to TIFF, family videos on old discs to current formats. An archive is not a place but a habit of moving forward.

Digitising the family collection

Most Indian families hold albums, loose prints and negatives that nobody has scanned. Start with what is most at risk: nitrate and vinegar-smelling negatives, fading colour prints, pictures trapped in self-adhesive albums, and anything unique to one branch of the family.

• Equipment. Flatbed scanners handle prints well, and models with a transparency adapter can scan negatives and slides; dedicated film scanners do film better. Camera scanning, photographing prints or film with a macro lens on a copy stand over an even light source, is fast and can be excellent.
• Resolution. Scan prints at about 600 ppi, and small prints higher; scan 35mm film at about 2,400 to 4,000 ppi.
• Masters. Save scans as TIFF, 16-bit for film if possible, or keep camera-scan RAW files. Do dust removal, colour correction and any restoration on separate copies, and leave the masters untouched.
• Backs. Scan the back of every print that carries writing, a date or a studio stamp. They date the picture and name the people (see Stage 18).
• Voices. Sit with the oldest relatives and go through the pictures together. Record names, places and stories into the metadata while someone still knows them.
• Originals. Keep them. A scan is a copy, not a replacement, and a well-kept original can be scanned again with better equipment.
• Inventory. Keep a simple list of the physical collection: what each box or album holds, its condition, and where its scans are stored.

Then share copies across the family. The more copies in more homes, the safer the pictures.

Disaster planning

Floods such as those in Mumbai in 2005 and Chennai in 2015 destroyed family photographs by the houseful. Plan for flood, fire and theft before they come:

• Keep nothing irreplaceable on the floor, on the lowest shelf, or in a ground-floor room in a flood-prone area.
• The off-site copy is the real fire and flood plan. With it in place, you can take the albums and go.
• If prints get wet, act within a day or two. Rinse off mud gently in clean cold water if needed, and air-dry them face up on clean paper or towels, never stacked, or they will fuse together. If you cannot deal with them in time, conservation guidance is to freeze wet modern prints and negatives until you can. Do not wet or freeze glass plates, daguerreotypes or other early cased images; get advice.
• Insure equipment properly. Household policies may exclude or cap cameras, especially away from home, and professional use usually needs separate cover. Keep the serial-number list and receipts somewhere you can reach if the house is lost.

A routine

Stage 17Photography Arrives in India

Photography reached India almost as soon as it existed. Within a few years of the announcements of 1839, daguerreotype apparatus was being advertised and demonstrated in Calcutta and Bombay, the ports through which new European technology arrived. By the 1850s the camera had become a serious interest among colonial officials, army officers, doctors and a growing number of Indians. Bombay had a photographic society by 1854, and Calcutta soon followed.

The official camera

The East India Company, and after 1858 the British government of India, found many uses for photography: recording monuments, surveying territory, documenting campaigns and classifying the people it ruled. Linnaeus Tripe, an officer of the Madras Army, made large, grave photographs of Burma and of the temples of south India from paper negatives in the 1850s. John Murray, a Company surgeon at Agra, photographed the Taj Mahal and other Mughal buildings in the same decade. After the uprising of 1857, Felice Beato photographed the ruins of Lucknow and Delhi.

In the 1860s Samuel Bourne made celebrated journeys into the Himalaya, with porters carrying his glass plates, chemicals and darkroom tent. With Charles Shepherd he built Bourne & Shepherd into one of the best-known photographic firms in India, and its Calcutta studio was still operating in the twenty-first century.

Photographing "types"

The camera was also put to a darker use. The People of India, published in eight volumes between 1868 and 1875, presented photographs of people from across the subcontinent as examples of castes and tribes. Projects like it treated human beings as specimens and helped harden colonial categories that outlived the empire. Such pictures are evidence of how the photographers saw, not simply of who the sitters were.

Indian photographers and patrons

Indians took up the camera early, as professionals running studios and as wealthy amateurs. Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II of Jaipur, who ruled in the mid-nineteenth century, photographed his court and household with enthusiasm, and a large body of his work survives in Jaipur. Indian-run studios were soon operating in the major cities, and by the 1880s an Indian photographer, Lala Deen Dayal, stood among the most successful in the country (see Stage 18).

Stage 18Studios, Courts and Raja Deen Dayal

The studio in the town

By the late nineteenth century a visit to the photographer's studio had become an event for families in India's cities, and during the twentieth century the studio spread to almost every market town. Studios offered painted backdrops of gardens, balustrades and seascapes, and props, a chair, a table, a clock, later a bicycle or a telephone, that let a family present itself as it wished to be seen. Weddings, graduations, new jobs and departures were marked with portraits. Framed, garlanded portraits of ancestors still hang in homes across the country, often in kitchens and prayer rooms, where smoke, heat and light slowly fade them (see Stage 15).

Raja Deen Dayal

Lala Deen Dayal was born in 1844 at Sardhana, near Meerut. He trained at the Thomason College of Civil Engineering in Roorkee and worked as a draughtsman in the Public Works Department at Indore, where he took up photography in the 1870s and found patrons among the ruling family and senior British officials. His photographs of the monuments of central India illustrated Lepel Griffin's Famous Monuments of Central India, published in 1886.

He left government service to photograph full time, with studios in Indore, Secunderabad and Bombay. In Hyderabad he became court photographer to the sixth Nizam, Mahbub Ali Khan, who conferred on him the title of Raja. He photographed palaces and ceremonies, viceregal tours and royal visits, hunting parties and architecture across much of the subcontinent, and he received a royal warrant from Queen Victoria. Like any large studio of the time, his firm employed many assistants, so not every picture bearing his name was necessarily made by his own hand. He died in 1905. A large collection of his glass plate negatives is held by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi.

Stage 19Photojournalism in India

The freedom movement

Illustrated newspapers and magazines grew quickly in India in the early twentieth century, and with them the press photographer. The freedom movement became one of the most photographed political struggles of its age. Kulwant Roy photographed its leaders for years, at meetings and marches and in quieter moments. Kanu Gandhi, a grandnephew of Mahatma Gandhi who lived in his household, made an intimate record of Gandhi's last decade. Foreign photographers came too. Margaret Bourke-White of Life photographed Gandhi beside his spinning wheel in 1946 and the refugee columns of Partition, and Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed Gandhi shortly before his assassination in 1948, and then his funeral.

Homai Vyarawalla

Homai Vyarawalla, born in 1913 into a Parsi family in Navsari, Gujarat, and trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay, is widely regarded as India's first woman photojournalist. She began publishing in the 1930s, much of her early work appearing in The Illustrated Weekly of India, often under the name Dalda 13. She moved to Delhi in the early 1940s to work for the British Information Services, and from there photographed the end of the Raj and the first years of the Republic: the transfer of power, visiting heads of state, and Jawaharlal Nehru, a favourite subject, many times over. She stopped photographing around 1970 and lived quietly in Vadodara. She was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2011 and died the following year. Much of her archive is now in the care of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Famine, war and disaster

Sunil Janah photographed the Bengal famine of 1943 for People's War, the newspaper of the Communist Party of India, helping to bring the catastrophe home to readers. He went on to photograph the new nation's dams and steel plants, its dancers and its tribal communities. Kishor Parekh of the Hindustan Times covered the 1971 war in Bangladesh, and his book Bangla Desh: A Brutal Birth remains one of its most powerful records.

Raghu Rai, born in 1942, worked for The Statesman and later as picture editor of India Today, and joined the Magnum Photos agency in 1977 on the nomination of Cartier-Bresson. His photographs of the Bhopal gas disaster of December 1984, with those of Pablo Bartholomew, became the defining images of a catastrophe widely described as the world's worst industrial disaster.

Today

Photojournalism in India is fast, crowded and at times dangerous. Agencies, newspapers and freelancers cover everything from elections to floods, often with phones alongside cameras. Danish Siddiqui of Reuters shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography with Reuters colleagues for their coverage of the Rohingya refugee crisis; he was killed in July 2021 while covering fighting in Afghanistan. Staff jobs have shrunk while every bystander has become a potential news photographer, which makes verification and accurate captions matter more than ever (see Stage 12).

Stage 20The Street and Documentary Tradition

India's streets, bazaars, ghats and stations have drawn photographers since cameras became portable, from foreign visitors hunting the exotic to Indian photographers working in their own cities. The best of this work goes past spectacle to show how people actually live. Some of the most widely seen twentieth-century pictures of India were made by visitors, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Mary Ellen Mark among them; Indian photographers have long answered with work made from the inside.

Raghubir Singh and colour

Raghubir Singh, born in Jaipur in 1942, worked in colour when serious art photography in Europe and America was overwhelmingly black-and-white and colour was associated with advertising and holiday snaps. He argued that in India colour was not decoration but part of how life was lived and seen. His books on the Ganga, Banaras and Calcutta, and a late series built around the Hindustan Ambassador car, are dense and layered, full of incident right to the edges of the frame. He died in 1999, and his reputation has grown since.

Other voices

Raghu Rai's black-and-white photographs of crowds, cities and religious gatherings, dense with figures at every depth of the frame, are among the best known of all Indian pictures. Sooni Taraporevala, also the screenwriter of Salaam Bombay!, has spent decades photographing her own Parsi community, an insider's record rather than an outsider's survey. Dayanita Singh, born in 1961, moved from photojournalism to books and exhibitions that treat photographs as objects to be sequenced and rearranged. Her book Myself Mona Ahmed, made with a member of Delhi's hijra community who lived in a graveyard, and her portable wooden "museums" of prints have been shown around the world.

The tradition today

Street and documentary photography flourish among young Indian photographers, many working with phones, sharing through online communities and collectives, and meeting on photo walks through the old quarters of big cities. Much of the strongest recent work comes from photographers documenting their own families, neighbourhoods and communities, and it has sharpened an old argument about who gets to photograph whom. The cliché of India as a pageant of sadhus, coloured powder and poverty is still produced in bulk. The photographers worth following have moved past it, and they take particular care over consent when photographing women and children in crowded public places (see Stage 13).

Stage 21The Scene Today

Almost everyone in India now carries a camera, and most photographs made here are made on phones and shared within minutes. Alongside that flood, a serious photographic culture of museums, festivals, clubs and working professionals has grown stronger.

Museums and archives

• The Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru, opened in 2023, holds a large collection spanning art and photography, with exhibitions and public programmes.
• The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi holds a major collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of South Asia, and exhibits and publishes from it.
• The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi holds the Raja Deen Dayal collection.
• Museo Camera in Gurugram, founded by the photographer Aditya Arya, is devoted to cameras and the history of photography.

Much of India's photographic heritage is still in private hands: studio negatives in shuttered shops, press and family archives, albums in almirahs. Its survival depends on owners who know how to care for it (see Stage 15 and Stage 16).

Festivals, galleries and clubs

The Chennai Photo Biennale brings Indian and international photography into public spaces across the city, and other cities hold photography festivals of their own. World Photography Day, 19 August, is marked by clubs, exhibitions and photo walks in many cities (see Stage 1). A handful of commercial galleries in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru specialise in photography. Camera clubs and photographic societies in most large cities run outings, talks and competitions, and many members enter international salons held under the patronage of FIAP, the International Federation of Photographic Art, whose distinctions form a recognised ladder for competition photographers.

Working as a photographer

Weddings are one of the largest sources of paid work for Indian photographers, and wedding photography has moved from formal group pictures to candid, documentary-style coverage, pre-wedding shoots and albums designed like magazines. Advertising, fashion, food and product photography, stock and news make up much of the rest, and most professionals combine several. Design schools such as the National Institute of Design, university media departments, private academies and countless workshops teach the craft; exhibitions, books and time on the street still teach it best.

Stage 22Photography and the Law in India

This stage outlines the kinds of legal restriction photographers meet in India. It is general information, not legal advice. Rules change, notifications are issued and withdrawn, and officials interpret them differently, so check the current rules with the relevant authority before any shoot where the law might matter, and take a lawyer's advice for commercial work.

Drones

Civil drones are regulated under the Drone Rules, 2021, as amended, issued by the Ministry of Civil Aviation. In outline, drones are classed by weight; most must be registered on the government's Digital Sky online platform; and an official airspace map divides the country into green zones, where flying within set height limits needs no prior permission, and yellow and red zones, around airports, borders, military sites and other sensitive places, where permission is needed or flying is forbidden. Many categories of operation also need a remote pilot certificate. Protected monuments, national parks and some cities add restrictions of their own. Check the rules and the airspace map before every flight.

Monuments and museums

Centrally protected monuments are administered by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958. Personal still photography is allowed at many of them, but tripods, lights, filming, drones and commercial shoots commonly need prior permission and a fee, and some interiors restrict photography or ban flash to protect paintings and surfaces. State-protected monuments, working temples, and museums, palaces and forts run by trusts or families set their own rules, and many charge a camera fee. Rules have changed more than once; check at the ticket counter or the site office.

Defence, borders and sensitive places

The Official Secrets Act, 1923 makes it an offence to photograph or sketch places notified as prohibited, which include defence establishments. Military areas, airports, and many bridges, dams, power stations and railway installations are signposted as no-photography zones; obey the signs and any instruction from security staff. Some border and tribal areas need special permits to enter: several north-eastern states require an Inner Line Permit for Indian visitors from outside the state, and foreign nationals need Protected or Restricted Area Permits for various border regions. Military installations and checkposts there are strictly off-limits to cameras.

Forests, wildlife and tribal reserves

National parks, sanctuaries and tiger reserves come under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and state forest department rules: entry permits, fixed routes and timings, vehicle rules and, in some parks, camera fees. Disturbing or feeding wildlife is an offence, and drones need permission. In the Andaman Islands it is an offence to photograph or film members of the Jarawa community.

People, privacy and publication

No single Indian law says when you may photograph a person in a public place, but several bear on it. The Supreme Court recognised privacy as a fundamental right in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India in 2017. Section 66E of the Information Technology Act, 2000 punishes capturing or publishing images of a person's private areas without consent, and voyeurism is an offence under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaced the Indian Penal Code in 2024. A photograph published with a damaging caption can be defamatory. Using a recognisable person's image to sell something without a signed model release invites a claim, and courts have protected well-known people against unauthorised commercial use of their likeness. How far the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 reaches photographs of people is still being worked out; check the current position.

Children and survivors

The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 restrict publishing anything, photographs included, that could identify a child victim or witness, or a child in conflict with the law. The law also forbids revealing the identity of survivors of sexual offences. These rules bind anyone who publishes, including on social media.

Copyright

Under the Copyright Act, 1957, copyright in a photograph arises automatically, without registration, and the photographer is normally its first owner. There is an important exception: when a photograph is taken for payment at another person's request, that person is the first owner unless an agreement says otherwise. For wedding and commissioned photographers, a written contract stating who owns the pictures and how each side may use them is essential. Photographs found online are not free to use without permission. The term of protection for photographs was changed by amendments in 2012; check it before assuming any picture is out of copyright.

If police or security staff ask you to stop photographing, stop, and stay calm and polite. If you believe a demand, such as to delete pictures, was unlawful, note the details and take advice afterwards.

Glossary

A

A-D Strips — indicator papers that change colour in acid vapour, used to detect vinegar syndrome in acetate film. [Stage 15]

Albumen print — a nineteenth-century print on thin paper coated with egg white, usually mounted on card. [Stage 17]

Aperture — the adjustable opening in a lens that controls how much light passes through. [Stage 3]

B

Bayer pattern — the mosaic of red, green and blue filters over most digital sensors. [Stage 7]

Buffered paper — paper with an alkaline reserve added to neutralise acids; unbuffered paper has none. [Stage 15]

C

Checksum — a short code calculated from a file's contents, used to detect corruption. [Stage 16]

Chromogenic — a colour process in which the image is formed by dyes during development. [Stage 7]

Circle of confusion — the largest blur spot that still reads as a point, used to calculate depth of field. [Stage 5]

Colour temperature — the colour of a light source, measured in kelvins; lower numbers are warmer. [Stage 2]

Crop factor — the ratio by which a sensor smaller than full frame narrows a lens's view. [Stage 6]

D

Daguerreotype — the first commercial photographic process, announced in 1839: a unique image on silvered copper. [Stage 1]

Demosaicing — reconstructing full colour from the separate red, green and blue readings of a sensor. [Stage 7]

Depth of field — the zone in front of and behind the point of focus that looks acceptably sharp. [Stage 5]

DNG — an openly documented RAW file format published by Adobe. [Stage 16]

Dry cabinet — an electronic cabinet that keeps equipment at a set low humidity. [Stage 14]

Dynamic range — the span of tones, counted in stops, that a sensor or film can record in one exposure. [Stage 4]

E

Exposure compensation — a control that makes the camera's metered exposure brighter or darker. [Stage 4]

F

f-number — the focal length divided by the diameter of the aperture; larger numbers mean smaller openings. [Stage 3]

Focal length — a lens's optical length in millimetres, which sets its angle of view on a given sensor. [Stage 6]

Fungus — mould that grows on lens surfaces in humid conditions and can etch coatings and glass permanently. [Stage 14]

H

Histogram — a graph of an image's tones from black to white. [Stage 4]

Hyperfocal distance — the focus distance that makes everything from half that distance to infinity acceptably sharp. [Stage 5]

I

ISO — the sensitivity setting of film or a digital sensor. [Stage 3]

M

Metadata — information stored in or beside an image file, including camera-written EXIF data and user-added IPTC captions. [Stage 16]

Model release — written permission from a person photographed, needed for commercial use of the picture. [Stage 11]

N

Nitrate film — early film on a cellulose nitrate base, highly flammable, especially as it decays. [Stage 15]

P

PAT (Photographic Activity Test) — an international test of whether storage materials harm photographs. [Stage 15]

Pigment ink — inkjet ink made of solid particles, far more light-stable than dye ink. [Stage 10]

PVC — polyvinyl chloride, a plastic that releases acidic compounds and must never touch photographs. [Stage 15]

R

RAW — a file holding a sensor's unprocessed data and the camera settings. [Stage 9]

Relative humidity (RH) — water vapour in the air as a percentage of the most it could hold at that temperature. [Stage 14]

S

Shutter speed — the length of time the sensor or film is exposed to light. [Stage 3]

Silica gel — a reusable drying agent that absorbs moisture from enclosed air. [Stage 14]

Stop — a doubling or halving of light. [Stage 3]

T

Three-two-one (3-2-1) rule — three copies of your files, on two kinds of storage, with one copy off-site. [Stage 16]

U

UV-filtering glazing — frame glass or acrylic that blocks most ultraviolet light. [Stage 15]

V

Vinegar syndrome — the self-accelerating acid decay of cellulose acetate film. [Stage 15]

W

White balance — the camera setting that makes neutral colours look neutral under a particular light. [Stage 2]

Z

Zone focusing — presetting focus and aperture so that a known range of distances is sharp. [Stage 5]

Further Reading and Organisations

Technique

• Ansel Adams, The Camera, The Negative and The Print.
• Bryan Peterson, Understanding Exposure.
• Michael Freeman, The Photographer's Eye.
• Henry Horenstein, Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual.
• Barbara London and John Upton, Photography, a long-running textbook revised in many editions.

Seeing and thinking

• Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing and Understanding a Photograph.
• Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment.
• Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs.

Care, preservation and archiving

• Bertrand Lavédrine, A Guide to the Preventive Conservation of Photograph Collections.
• James M. Reilly, Care and Identification of 19th-Century Photographic Prints.
• Henry Wilhelm with Carol Brower, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs.
• Peter Krogh, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers.
• The storage guides of the Image Permanence Institute, including its guide to acetate film.

India

• Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs and The Coming of Photography in India.
• Judith Mara Gutman, Through Indian Eyes.
• Sabeena Gadihoke, Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla.
• Raghubir Singh, River of Colour.
• Kishor Parekh, Bangla Desh: A Brutal Birth.
• Dayanita Singh, Myself Mona Ahmed.

Organisations and institutions

• Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, United States: research and guidance on storing photographs and film.
• INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) and its conservation centres.
• National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property, Lucknow.
• Archaeological Survey of India, for photography at centrally protected monuments.
• Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Digital Sky platform, for drone rules.
• Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi.
• Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi.
• Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru.
• Museo Camera, Gurugram.
• Chennai Photo Biennale.
• FIAP, the International Federation of Photographic Art.
• World Press Photo, Amsterdam.
• Magnum Photos.

Image Sourcing Sheet