Wildlife Photography in India | Saptagirish Oleti Photography

Notes From The Field

What follows is a sample of that work. A few of these frames took whole mornings in a parked jeep, dust settling on the lens hood, nothing happening. Others took ten seconds, when an animal walked into the light and there was no time left to think. The slow ones tend to hold up better, though I can rarely tell which is which at the time.

681 Published frames

296 Species photographed

8 Field reports

Most of it happens before the sighting

Wildlife photography in India usually happens before anything walks into the frame. You read the alarm calls, watch which way the wind is carrying your scent, follow a pugmark in the dust and make a guess about where it is heading. The camera comes up last. By then the picture has mostly been decided by an hour of sitting still and paying attention.

The habitat is half the photograph

A tiger in Tadoba and a harrier working the Little Rann are not the same problem to solve, and not only because of the animals. The grass, the noon glare, the way a wet forest swallows sound: all of it lands in the frame whether you planned for it or not. I have stopped trying to subtract the habitat. More often now I am trying to fit more of it in.

The case for keeping your distance

I am wary of the wildlife photograph that has been pushed too hard, where the animal has been crowded or baited just to fill the frame. I would rather hang back and come home with less. If one of these pictures makes a stranger look twice at a species they would otherwise scroll past, that is about as much as I can ask of it.

A few places that keep teaching me

The Little Rann is mostly empty space, and it has no patience for anyone in a hurry. You wait, and wait, and eventually a harrier drops low across the flats. The Western Ghats are the opposite kind of test: too much of everything, most of it in shade, half of it dripping. Tadoba photographs almost too easily, which is its own sort of trap. And then there is Bangalore, where I live, where a good morning often happens in some scrubby patch by the road that nobody would bother to map.

What I try to avoid

The temptation is to treat every sighting as a frame I am owed. I am trying to let that go. Some of the better decisions I have made in the field ended with the camera back in my lap and the animal wandering off undisturbed. No photograph, and no regret. Those mornings never reach the portfolio, but they are the reason I am still welcome to go back.

Selected Frames