Painting with light

Rahul Ravi is one among those photographers who like to capture expressions. It would be the reason why his instant photo exhibition at the School Youth Festival venue of various performances and back stage preparations made him get noticed in the crowd. His USP probably lies in capturing the expression with his lens, a process followed by artist while making paintings. According to Rahul his photography is more about painting with light. When he saw an advertisement of a photography competition being organised by a major textile brand of the state he decided to give it a try and therefore, came up with something unique.

The  photographer who has more than, 60,000 followers on Instagram recreated four of Ravi Varma 's famous paintings for the photographs he sent for the competition, a task he says was one of the most difficult one till date. "Ravi Varma paintings are a fabulous amalgamation of light and colours and therefore it was really thrilling as well as difficult to take it up. Though zeroing in on a model was not a difficult task, arranging for the ornaments and jewellery that would look authentic to the era the paintings were created was extremely tough. We had to search a lot in order to source them.," he says. Ask him if it was necessary to be so precise for a competition and Rahul replies "Clean and precise work has always been of top notch priority for me. I didn't want people to think that I had just copied the poses from the paintings. I wanted to recreate them and was ready to take any risk to do complete justice to the photo shoot. I am sad that i had to compromise on some minor elements like the fruits kept in the plate and the pot as we could not find out the names of the fruits and a replica of the pot.

Rahul adds that the model, Vyshnava K. Sunil who rose to fame for dressing up as lord Krishna dance during Ashtami Rohini festival, is the best aspect of the photographs and provides the look he had envisioned.