“My conversation with Sephi Bergerson was only over the phone, but owing to a faulty connection and repeated technical snags, our interview lasted longer than it normally would have. At the end of our talk I could so easily see why anyone would welcome him into their homes and entrust him to capture moments of their wedding that they will cherish forever. Warm, energetic, humorous and with a penchant for quirky analogies, Bergerson is completely engaging and an artist in his own right.”

A good feature although I really cannot figure out what on earth made them choose the name ‘Knots & Crosses’ for a feature about my work. Anyway, it is done and I’m happy with the way it turned out.

The interview also mentions the Ultimate Wedding Photography Workshop that is to be held in Bangalore from January 13-15, 2012. The workshop will cover a whole gamut of concepts – branding and marketing, finding your niche in the market, how to promote yourself, equipment, how to shoot in the day/night, couple portrait, shooting with available light, creative flash use, contracts, negotiations, pricing, digital workflow and post production. If you haven’t applied yet there is still room for a couple more attendees so check it out and apply HERE

The magazine is now available in stores across India and Singapore so check it out.

Wedding Photojournalist based in India

BRIDES magazine is designed to be a resource for brides-to-be, with many photographs and articles on wedding dresses, cakes, ceremonies, receptions and honeymoons. The May 2011 issue of the UK magazine will include a special CD-ROM with an inspiring directory of high-quality products and services – all included to help you plan for your special day and honeymoon/wedding abroad. The directories are broken down into categories that include cakes, catering, fashion, florists, jewelery, venues and of course photographers who are willing to travel around the world to cover destination weddings in locations ranging from an island in the pacific to the deserts of Arabia. I hereby allow myself to shamelessly boast and say that I am happy and honored to be the only photographer from India and south Asia listed in this directory.

Sephi Bergerson is an award winning documentary and lifestyle photographer with more than twenty years of experience. Working on his book on traditional weddings in modern India, Sephi has arguably witnessed and documented a larger variety of Indian weddings than any other person on earth.

Are you planing a palace wedding in India, an Indian wedding in Africa or a destination wedding in Thailand? Are you looking for a wedding photojournalist to document your special day in the Maldives,or Mauritius? Sephi has been based in India since 2002 and has traveled extensively in and around the subcontinent. He has easy access to all destinations in Africa, south east Asia and of course India and the Indian ocean and will be happy to travel anywhere in the world.

Sephi Bergerson’s photographs make one experience a rush of emotions that help you relive weddings.

Though he has 20 years of photographic experience, Sephi’s interest in wedding photography began only three years ago, when he started working on his book Traditional Weddings in Modern India. Interestingly, Sephi says that the thought of being a wedding photographer never occurred to him. “In fact,” he says, “I was raised to mock the genre. The idea of being a wedding photographer always seemed a little uncool. The kind of respect it received was not as good as being a photojournalist or a portraitist.” However, he thinks that with a new generation of photographers and new perspectives, the genre is gaining a serious makeover that has been long overdue. Various photographers are trying to apply styles that are usually associated with other genres, while shooting weddings. Ask him to comment on his own style and Sephi is rather modest. “All I do is capture what unfolds in front of me,” he says. He believes that anticipating a moment is quite important, but at times, it is just not possible to do this.

He mentions one such incident at a Sikh wedding, where he was shooting rather mundane photographs as there did not seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Disappointed, he started going towards the gate he noticed a group of eunuchs. “They were making strange gestures, but in the midst of all the chaos, I managed to capture one great photograph that I eventually used in my book.”
Sephi does not like making his subject pose. There is a sense of spontaneity that is apparent in all his frames. According to him, one should let moments happen as they do. “I believe that photojournalism and wedding photography are similar. You need to narrate a story about what is happening, and not make things happen.”
Though he currently resides in India, Sephi is originally from Israel. “It is clear that India is a major player in the wedding industry. Indian weddings are a great opportunity for beautiful photographs.” He takes only a few wedding assignments each year, as this is the best way to concentrate on a wedding. “You need time. You need to know them as a friend. This will help you capture photographs that truly reflect who they are as a couple.” He adds, “After all, it is the celebration of a union and I am only privileged to document it.”

In the mean time, here are a couple of new publications that came out in the last two months. One is from The Guardian UK and the second is from a feature on Indian Express in Chennai.

Better Photography magazine had also published a feature about my work but have unfortunately not sent me the PDF so this will have to wait for another post.

I’ll be in touch soon . .

16-01-2011 The Guardian UK

21-01-2011 Indian Exress Chennai

]]> http://www.fotowala.in/press_and_publications/a-few-new-publications/feed/ 1 http://www.fotowala.in/press_and_publications/the-brides-dressing-room/ http://www.fotowala.in/press_and_publications/the-brides-dressing-room/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:47:05 +0000 fotowala http://www.fotowala.in/?p=3505 The bride’s dressing room is one place where excitement and emotions are at their highest. For every bride, the day evokes mixed feelings. There are moments when she feels all alone, despite the melee around her. She’s the star of the day all right, but what would the day be if one did not have friends to share the excitement with! The dressing room is a place that very few people come into. A room that brings some wonderful photo opportunities that are very different than the wedding ceremony itself. These are candid moments, images that bring the day back to life, even days, months and years after the wedding day.

Marie Claire magazine, in it’s opening story of the October 2010 issue now available in the stores, gives us a glimpse into the moments before the bride is led to the sacred space where she will become wife. Fantasy is better than reality, the anticipation of a wedding more delicious than the real deal. It’s the nervous moments in the bridal dressing room that remain priceless long after the bride becomes a wife. (Compiled by Priyamvada Kowshik / Marie Claire Magazine / October 2010)

Being a documentary photographer, I usually don’t play with PhotoShop effects in my work, but here I decided to give it a go and use some techniques that I wanted to experiment with. For this picture I used natural light coming from the door on the left side of the frame. Slow shutter speed. To get the color effect I first converted the image to Grayscale and then applied ‘Antique light’ filter in Adobe Lightroom. Further enhancement in PhotoShop to give some more depth and contrast. I then superimposed a second shot of a sheet of brown paper to achieve the texture on the wall and her body. The image looks somewhere between a picture and a painting with the textured wall looking like the painter’s canvas.

Published in Marie Clair (India) in the June 2010 issue, opening stroy by Priyamvada Kowshik.

Read the online version HERE . In the name of protecting moral rights and copyright,  please feel free to comment on the HT article and ask why the photographer (yours truly) is not credited! Thanks.

Hindustan Times feature my wedding images in the Match Point column, Saturday, November 28, 2009. See the original article here

I got into wedding photography only in October 2007, when I started working on my book, Traditional Weddings in Modern India.

As with almost every subject that I pick for a long-term personal project, the camera is only a method to study a social and cultural phenomenon. My personal projects have always influenced my commercial work and it was only natural that, after shooting a few weddings, people started approaching me for wedding assignments on a commercial basis.

I now take only a few weddings every year, so that I can keep working on other projects as well and not lose the passion for weddings altogether.

I set out on this project assuming there would be lots of similarities between the various wedding traditions, but I am pleased to learn that the differences are many more than the similarities. It is a wonderful subject for a visual study.

Israeli photographer Sephi Bergerson moved to India in 2002. His book ‘Street Food of India’ was published in February 2009; Horn Please — Trucking in India will come out in early 2010; and Traditional Weddings in Modern India the year after.

I am happy that the prestigious Smart Photography magazine have chosen to portray my work as a master craftsman in the November ’09 Wedding issue.
The interview itself will also be published online sometime later in the month, but I have included it here for those of you who have the patience to read all this text

The experienced advertising and commercial oriented Israeli photographer, Sephi Bergerson, moved to India in order to pursue his dream of becoming a documentary photographer. What we admire the most in a career spanning close to a decade in India, is that his personal projects have always influenced his commercial work. Even though he only undertakes to shoot a small number of weddings, yet his images are conceptualized to be natural and spontaneous rather than being deliberately created for the occasion. This is because of the extreme devotion and attention that he gives to the couple, to not only try to understand them better but also to portray what their wedding day was like.

What do you like the most in photographing Indian weddings and secondly, what is your approach in capturing the big day since every wedding is different in terms of the diverse caste and customs in India?

I got into wedding photography only in October 2007, when I started working on my book ‘Traditional Weddings in Modern India’. This will be my third book in India after ’Street Food of India’ that was published in February 2009, and ‘Horn Please – trucking in India’ that will come out in early 2010.
As almost every subject that I pick up for a long-term personal project, the camera is only a method to study a social and cultural phenomenon. My personal projects have always influenced my commercial work and it was only a natural development that after shooting a few weddings people started approaching me for wedding assignments on a commercial basis.

I take on only a small number of weddings each year so that I do not loose the passion for shooting weddings.  This way I am able to devote more care and attention to each couple with whom I work. I have the luxury of taking on only clients who are a step away from the ordinary (or many steps!). I devote extreme care and attention to each couple with whom I work and get to know them as a friend so that my images truly reflect who they are as a couple and what their day was like.

I document the wedding as it really was. The images are not deliberately created but rather they arise naturally and spontaneously, and the subjects are not given any direction on what to do. The approach is the same as for a photojournalistic assignment and the idea is to tell the story with images.

I set out on this project assuming there will be a lot of similarities between the various traditions, but I am so pleased to learn that the differences are many more than the similarities. It is a wonderful subject for a visual study.

What are the biggest challenges in this business apart from competition? Secondly, you shoot traditional wedding in an unconventional manner, is it an attempt to be different and how does the client react to the innovations in your art?

I do not think competition is an issue here. There are so many weddings that there is room for everyone. Unfortunately, traditional Indian wedding photography is still far from what is being offered in the west, and there are very few photographers in India that offer a documentary approach to wedding photography.

Although the Indian wedding industry is a fast growing business, the field of wedding photography in India is still less developed than in other parts of the world. To understand this, consider the US, where organizations, conventions and competitions for fine art wedding photography are already a routine. Top photography magazines grade their list of ten best wedding photographers every year. In India, that has not yet happened.

Wedding photography in India is still mostly dominated by the traditional wedding photographers. They know how to please your parents. They will take pictures of all your guests. They will also pose and photograph you in the same way as you can see in most wedding albums. Never the less, in the past few years, a whole new breed of wedding photographers has emerged determined to give the reputation of this line of work a serious makeover, and I think this will do good to everyone in this industry.

There are many different traditions of Indian weddings, but there are mainly two kinds of couples who get married in India: those who live in India and those who live abroad.

The first kind are most likely going to hire a local photographer. In many cases, it will be the same photographer who shot the weddings of the family for many years. The second kind – those who come to India for a destination wedding or come home to India to get married – have greater expectation from their wedding photographer and are more open to new styles and trends.

What equipments do you consider to be critical for wedding photography and how important is it to have a team along with you while photographing weddings?

As a photojournalist, I usually work alone and find it very convenient. It gives me the freedom to be myself and not feel like a wedding photography business operator. I do however feel that an assistant that would carry my bag and keep an eye on my gear would not be such a bad idea.

I have always maintained that photography is not about equipment. A good photographer can produce great images with any camera, and a good example is famous US based commercial photographer Chase Jarvis, who uses his iPhone camera to create some stunning images.

However, Indian wedding photos suffer from excessive use of flash, which is something I do not appreciate. Both Nikon and Canon offer professional digital SLRs with remarkably high light sensitivity of up to ISO 25600, making it is possible to shoot digitally in the once uncharted land of low light and dark shadow.

Many common scenes where light is marginal can now be captured without having to wash out the ambiance with flash, or bring everything to a dead stop for a long exposure. High-ISO photography has opened up a whole new world and is becoming very important to wedding and portrait photography.
Some scenes, especially on the dance floor, still require flash and for that I work with Nikon’s Creative Lighting System that gives me superb control of the amount and quality of artificially introduced light.

Tell us about the postproduction part (image editing in Photoshop). And how do you present the final output to the client, especially with Photobooks gaining popularity?

Being a documentary photographer and involved in projects for various clients around the world, I cannot spend a lot of time on the postproduction side of a wedding photography. For this reason I chose to work with a financial model that enables me to do the best job I possibly can, keep the couple happy and focus on what I do best which is photography, while not trying to make money on the prints, albums and all additional items that many photographers offer.

I charge the full amount of the professional fee up front and do not include albums as a standard part of my service. The client pays for my style, experience and expertise and I deliver the images on a DVD, which the client can use to make unlimited prints for personal use. This means that the couple can do pretty much anything they want with their pictures as long as it doesn’t generate any income for them or the people they share the images with. This gives the client many options such as creating their own album, having someone else make it, making digital slideshows instead of an album, or just printing the images at the local photo lab. The images on the disk are all high quality JPG files, color corrected and enhanced from the original RAW file.

This model enables me to get paid for my talent, overhead, business expenses and everything else necessary for me to stay in business and make the desired profit.

Have you encountered any unique, funny or interesting incident while photographing Indian weddings and if so take us through the episode?

There is an image that I like very much. It is from the morning after a wedding I photographed in Vishakapatnam. I went with the couple to a reservoir near the groom’s parent’s hometown of Vizianagaram  (about 1.5 hours away from Visag) to take some fun pictures. This kind of shoot requires that we find a dramatic location near the wedding venue that will provide us with opportunities to get some fun images. It can be a beach, a forest, a desert location or any other place where we can have some privacy for a couple of hours without the family and friends. Creating these images needs time without the worry of attending a wedding. As such, it must happen on a different day from the wedding and we usually come away with some fantastic images! That morning at the reservoir the couple climbed into a small fishing boat and the fisherman took them for a small ride. The groom took his shoes off to get in the boat and when they climbed back out of the boat, I suddenly noticed his painted toes. I did notice it during the event itself but the situation here was simply funny. I think it is a great portrait of the newly wed couple, she in her sandals and mehendi , and he, barefooted in jeans, both with painted toenails. I don’t think it fits my book, but it is definitely one of my favorite pictures.

(thanks to Mathew Thottungal for the interview, and the opportunity)

The sights and smells, noise and fervour, pomp and grandeur, rites and rituals… Can any other occasion on earth ever match the great Indian wedding saga? Yet, ask any married couple about the big day and they’ll tell you it was a blur, when they did as commanded – to keep the head low or dive for someone’s feet; to stand up or sit down; to hold hands or let go. Our weddings are a heady cocktail of religious and social commitments laid out like a cultural extravaganza. Rites and rituals form its backbone and every region, religion, community and sect has its own take. They celebrate the beginning of a shared life, assign roles, break the ice, and seek promises of loving and living together. Photographer Sephi Bergerson began documenting weddings two years ago.
His camera became an excuse to study this interesting social and cultural phenomenon. The original idea for Sephi’s book was to shoot five ceremonies. “But the subject kept growing,” says the Israeli photographer, who is stumped by how each wedding is different from the other. “I set out assuming a lot will be similar but there are so many different customs, they adapt and absorb.” And then there is Bollywood with its mehendi and baraat. Yet, when he asks people what is special about their wedding ceremonies, he is met with a dismissive shrug, “Oh, it’s nothing special, just a regular Indian wedding!” So it is.

Potpourri: (Top left) The bride was from Nagaland, her father a Sikh, the groom Swedish. As Bergerson says, “It was a mix of people that was so unbelievable that only India can provide.” Here, the bride, is being led down the aisle by her father at the breathtaking venue in Udaipur. Flying High: (Top) A Bengali wedding involves many elaborate and colourful rituals. On the night of the marriage, the bride sits on a low stool called piri, which is lifted by her brothers, and from her ‘elevated’ position, she circles the groom seven times, to indicate being wound-up securely to each other. The bride and groom then exchange garlands. Kabool Hai: (Left) A muslim bride signs the nikahnama before a Maulana. The bridegroom signs the Nikah separately and then the couple are pronounced married. “The entire ceremony took one minute and the wedding was over.” All In A Name: (Right) A Ladakhi Buddhist bride enters the wedding shamiana. Called bagston in the local language, weddings here are not religious but a social event. They don’t need a priest or a Lama. A couple can mutually decide to get married and inform the parents. This couple had been together for over 10 years and have two children. Relatives began to pressurise them to organise a ceremony where they could bless the couple by wrapping the sacred scarf or kathak on the pair as a symbol of their blessing

Quite An Earful: (Right) The sister of the bride examines the piercing for a dejhoru, an ear ornament that hangs from the middle of the cartilage. Young Kashmiri pundit girls get the painful piercing done as they prepare for their wedding. These ear ornaments symbolise marital status. Blown Away: (Below) Wedding games are part of most Indian marriages. In this wedding in Vishakhapatnam, the couple blows confetti into each others faces. “Sameera lived in Australia and Pradeep in the US and they came to their hometown to get married,” says the photographer. Strands of Love: (Above) In a Syrian Christian wedding, the sari that the groom presents his bride in church is called the mantrakodi. The night before the ceremony, strands of thread are drawn from this sari by the groom’s sister and twisted to form a cord. On this cord is tied the thaali, a leaf-shaped gold pendant with a cross. The mantrakodi is placed on the bride’s head by the priest, as he blesses her. Bangle Up: (Bottom right) The mother of a bride picks up the chura which is soaked in milk at a ceremony performed early in the morning on the day of a Punjabi marriage. The bride’s maternal uncles then slide the bangles down her wrist. The chura symbolises marital status and is worn by the bride for the next few weeks, or sometimes months. Tip Toe: (Left) In the temple town of Madurai, a groom slides a ring on his bride’s toe. The groom too wears his wedding ring on the second toe. The story behind this, says Bergerson, is that in the past, when women were expected to keep their heads down, the toe rings indicated to them the marital status of others.”

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