Tamil Nadu photographer wins laurels

Varun Aditya’s tryst with photography started at a young age when he was in school. It was through all the travelling in his childhood, that he developed a love for nature. When he moved to London to do MBA, he fell in love with the city and started clicking photos regularly on his mobile and shared it with parents and friends back home. Eventually he persuaded his parents to get him a DSLR and continued clicking photos. 

“Photography became an addiction and a stress-buster. Slowly, I developed an interest for ‘action photography’ and realised I had a craze to freeze anything, which moves. Freezing things is possible only in photography, and this pushed me to visit all the parks in London to capture flying birds. I also realised the challenges in taking such pictures but that is what people love to see. So, my action photography started with the birds. In 2013, I won in a competition conducted by Nat Geo and got a chance to travel to Panama, Costa Rica. I was fortunate to travel with Micheal Melford, who has been the landscape photographer of Nat Geo for 40 years and learnt a photography during the trip,” he shares. 

Furthermore, he toured places with his friend and wildlife photographer Saravanan Sundaram and thus, gained some wonderful insight into these magnificent creatures. He was awarded Nat Geo Nature Photographer of the Year for a picture of a Green Vine Snake recently in the Animal Portraits category recently. 

“I shot this at Amboli, Maharashtra, India, on July 24, 2016, during a morning stroll into the blissful rain forest. Ceaseless drizzles dampened the woods for ten hours a day; the serene gloom kept me guessing, if it was night or day. The heavy fog, chilling breeze and perennial silence could calm roaring spirits and there I saw this beauty. I wondered if I needed more reasons to capture the habitat, for I was blessed to see this at the place I was at. I immediately switched from the macro to the wide-angle lens and composed this frame,” shares Varun.