Where I Am Now

I moved to Hyderabad from Downingtown, Pennsylvania, alongside with my husband whose assignment will likely keep me here through 2028, maybe longer. This is the first entry in what I'm calling Notes Along the Way, and I wanted to start by explaining where I am and why, before I get into the specific places and animals that will fill the rest of this journal.

Pennsylvania is still home. The fall light there, the white-tailed deer at the edge of the yard, three seasons with the Lehigh Valley Photography Club - that's the work most of my longtime friends know. Hyderabad is a different kind of field season, and I'm still learning how to see it.

A few things are new here that I didn't have in Pennsylvania. Festival season is one of them - color used deliberately, in powder and marigolds and fabric, in a way I'm used to finding only in a single flower or a bird's wing. I haven't photographed a festival properly yet. I want to figure out how to do it without it turning into a postcard.

Village life is another. Not far outside big cities, the pace changes completely - a woman sweeping a doorstep at sunrise, cattle moving down a lane, the particular quiet of a place that isn't trying to be anywhere else. It's close to the kind of patient, observational work I already do with wildlife, just pointed at people instead.

And then there's the city itself at night - Hyderabad's traffic and lit-up flyovers and the noise of it, which is about as far from a forest clearing at dawn as I can get. I don't know yet if I'll be any good at that kind of photography. I'd like to find out.

The bigger plan, the one I keep coming back to, is India's tiger reserves. I want to see how the forest and the light and the tigers themselves differ from one reserve to the next, not just collect a list of parks. That's a multi-year project, which is fine, because I have multi-year to spend here.

Jaipur is a different kind of pull - less about wildlife, more about wanting to stand in front of the City Palace and Amber Fort with a camera and figure out what's actually worth photographing versus what a thousand other photographers have already shot from the same spot. I don't have a trip booked yet. It's on the list.

I don't have a tidy way to end this one. I'm three-ish years into a period of my life I don't fully understand yet, in a country that keeps handing me more to photograph than I have time for. The posts that follow this one will be smaller and more specific - a morning at Tellapur Nursery, what I've learned photographing birds around Ameenpur Lake, my first tiger encounter to Kanha - and I'd rather let those speak for themselves than try to summarize India in one entry. This was just the introduction.

More soon.

— Natalia

Best secret of Sarhi

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