The Monthly talks to Parag Gopale about his career as a photographer – Part 2 – The art of wedding photography in India

You move into wedding photography at some point. How does that transpire?

After my undergraduate degree in Computer Sciences, I enrolled in a Masters Degree in Communications. I specialised in Advertising and Digital Communication. I was also working as a Photographer’s Assistant. The photographer I was assisting left to do his Masters in Photography in San Francisco, in the United States. He passed on his contacts to me and I started to get the work that he could no longer do because he was no longer living in Mumbai.

While I was doing my Masters, I was at an event and I met an organiser, a Japanese women, who was marrying an Indian man. She didn’t have a big budget, she wanted some couple portraits and I agreed to do that job, and it went very well. We shot some lovely dramatic photos in their apartment. We also did some outdoor photos on the rooftop of the apartment. It was August, it was the monsoon season and we had a really dramatic background.

Those photos were shown to the editor of India’s largest online wedding magazine and the photos were posted and featured in that magazine. After a little while, a month or so, I started getting calls for jobs to take photographs for weddings. I would get calls in the middle of my lectures. I would take these assignments over the weekend or whenever I had the time.

Do you move towards being a photographer of weddings in India at that point?

In my final semester, for my placement, I was able to secure a job in the Department of Corporate and Brand Communications in a big company in the Tata Group. This was the kind of job that you don’t get fired from. In a very large company in India, once you start to work there, you will more than likely end up working at this company for life.

My parents were very happy and it was a very well paid job. It was still a very basic job, looking after corporate communications, making sure that the executives had everything they needed. I might go and pick up executives at the airport, or be involved in event management, making sure all the material was available for the company events. But it was a very tiring job, I had hardly any time for photography, I just had no energy for anything else, and after 7 to 8 months I was extremely unhappy.

What happens then?

I had to tell my family that I really didn’t want to do this job. The strange thing was, I was doing really well and my boss has said to me if I could work there for a few years they might send me to the United States. My parents wanted me to stick it out for a few years.

But when I looked at his life, he had no work life balance. All he did was work and that is not what I wanted to do with my life. I quit the job, went home, and I started to respond to all the queries for photography jobs.

I might, at that point, convert every 10 queries into 1 job. I didn’t want to be dependent on my parents so I did have to get another job with a start-up to make ends meet. I worked three days a week and slowly my photography work built up. Eventually I established myself as a wedding photographer.

It sounds quite exciting?

It could be. Even before I became full-time I would fly to different cities around India to do jobs, and by 2016 I had started to employ people and I also started to work internationally. Weddings are a huge business in India and if you want to get a good wedding photographer you have to book months in advance. People started to fly me to places like Thailand to photograph their wedding.

My parents started to relax as they could see I was doing really well at my chosen profession. They would see that people were flying my team to other countries and that meant I must have being doing something right. The family culture which I come from, we didn’t have any entrepreneurs in the family so it was quite a departure and my parents really had to adapt to that. But it all worked out well in the end.

What are you looking for when you take a wedding photograph?

Indian weddings are a different ball game altogether. It is a billion dollar industry. It is the biggest event parents will ever be part of in their lives, their children’s weddings. And it can be a very stressful because it is such a significant event. There is always a lot of activity, a lot of chaos, on the day.

In a typical day, the bride will have stylists doing her make-up and her hair, there’s lots of movement, lots of activity, her friends will be all around, and there will be lots of people both in the couple’s personal environment and in the environment around them. You can’t just manipulate people in the way that you would like to and you can’t always intrude on every intimate moment. You have to identify the framing of each photo and then try your best to position the couple in the most advantageous areas for a good photograph. My photos often look like paintings. I was always trying to make sure that I could situate the couple in amongst the surroundings.

In Mumbai there is very little space, you are always close to people, and that is the case whether there is a wedding or not. There are people everywhere. That means that you need to think very carefully regarding how you want the photo to appear. You need to think carefully where the couple will be placed. You really need to think quickly and you need to ensure that you are capturing moments.

Often it is the case that the couple really don’t know what I am doing and they are often very surprised at the results. I think I did a very good job in doing that and my work was very much in demand.