Walking in the gullies of Benares
The gullies offer many photo opportunities. Be alive to them!
A brief post.
Once again, I will write a brief post so that you can all focus on the photographs. Most visitors will walk along the ghats, searching for photo opportunities, sunbathing, listening to the noise, people playing music, watching them pray or bathe, or simply sitting by the river as the waters flow out to the ocean.
Do that, and in the next post, I will return to the ghats and share a few images of the action that happens on the ghats at dawn or at various times of the day.
The policemen were irritating.
During my last visit to Benares, policemen thronged the lane I termed ‘The Kashi Vishwanath Gully.’ This gully leads to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, and due to the controversy surrounding the temple and the adjoining mosque, they prohibited us from taking photos of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Sometimes the police officers popped out of the woodwork, at other times they sprang out from hidden corners, and at different times they appeared to materialize out of thin air. The officers were like ghosts who waved an admonishing finger under my nose.
“Thou shalt not go there.”
“Thou shalt not take your camera out of your bag.”
“Thou shalt not….”
The words and phrases of the punitive state hung in the air, and I realized the importance of compliance.
Many ancient temples and buildings have been lost to time.
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My Banarasi friend told me that when our current Prime Minister widened the road to the temple, he demolished many small, ancient temples, some of which people had constructed inside or on the walls of their homes. Our PM wished to give Shiva a broad road to walk on and to ensure nothing impeded his path to the temple. I do not understand why humans try to place themselves on a pedestal above the gods they claim to worship.
A few words on photography.
Even when you are photographing during the day, the light level drops as you walk along the gullies. You have two options. The first is to open your aperture, and the second is to raise your ISO level. Of course, you can increase the ISO and open the aperture together to ensure that you do not have too high an ISO or too open an aperture.
Some of you may be unfamiliar with the exposure triangle; therefore, I will briefly explain the principle. You have three levers of control: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO level.
If your camera is old, you may want to avoid raising the ISO too high, as this can make your photo appear noisy. If your aperture is too wide, then your depth of field becomes shallow, and focusing on people as they move poses problems. Finally, a slow shutter speed introduces motion blur and camera shake.
Because the gullies are in the shade, you will have less light than you have on the ghats. Remember this fact. You must also adjust your white balance to avoid taking images with strange colors.
The gullies have their ecosystem and present a treasure trove to the photographer. You have ample opportunities to photograph people, artifacts, architecture, old doors, or anything else that catches your eye.
I can create several posts on the different aspects of life in the narrow gullies of Benares, but I will resist the temptation to do so. One post is enough. However, I hope these images give you a flavor of life in the narrow gullies.
I will leave you with one more piece of advice: choose the focal length of your lens wisely! You do not want a long lens!
Listen to my voice!
I used my Nikon D 200 to make the photos, and edited them in Lightroom CC, and used Topa Photo AI.
Those are amazing pictures of the gullies in Benares. It would be great if you could publish a book of all your pictures of Benares. But there must be a gazillion picture books of Benares. The walkways are so narrow. It is amazing that any of this stuff still survives and for how long if parts or portions of it are redeveloped. Such a struggle to hold on to the old India when everyone is so busy creating the new India. And then there is a huge temple that seems a part of the old India that has been constructed in the middle of New Jersey, Baps Swaminarayan Akshardham North America in Robbinsville, NJ.