Something that reaffirms my belief that a phone can never completely replace the conventional camera. I got a spectacular shot of the Milky Way in all her dense and sparkling beauty. “Set your white balance to tungsten,” he told me before walking off to show Amit Nigam how to set the shutter release timer to reduce initial vibrations on the camera. I did the same and then set my aperture to f/3.5 - the widest my archaic 28-300mm lens can go down to and my shutter at 30 seconds. He came to my camera and asked me to manually set focus using Saturn as a reference because that is the brightest object in the sky over the Shapath campsite, which is our base for the night. He walked down our line of tripods giving out tips, tricks and techniques. Navneeth Unnikrishnan, the leader of this masterclass in astrophotography, is an amateur astronomer and astro-landscape photographer from Kerala.
And when the shutter is staying open for over 30 seconds, even a flash of light sullies the scene like a drop of motor oil in a ship’s drinking water supply. I say that darkness is the old friend tonight because to capture the Milky Way on camera the shutter needs to remain open for more time than it would take to blister a papad in a microwave. Soon, from behind the crest of high mountains, she makes an appearance - that celestial diva the Milky Way. The time of year chosen is perfect with the moon setting soon after the sun and the clouds have obliged by staying away. Ten of us from places as varying as Ludhiana to Poona to Chitradurga stood in darkness, bent over our tripod mounted cameras in the midst of the Zanskar Himalayas waiting for the star of the show to make an appearance. But the mantra of the evening was certainly the first line from the song, “Hello darkness, my old friend”.
The evening definitely cannot be titled ‘the sound of silence’, because there was excited chatter around me in a multitude of languages.
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