About us
Vidya Vijay Kulkarni
An Electrical Engineer by profession and a lover of classical music, in my golden years, I became a photographer by passion.
It was in my golden years that my life began to on a different turn. It was during the sunset years that I turned to photography, which painted my life with glorious hues and soon I realized that age isn’t a barrier. Wildlife, and birding in particular became my obsession. This edged me to many wildlife sanctuaries, where I initially clicked caged animals or those in their natural habitat. However, it was while capturing the fine plumes of our avian friends, where my passion took wings.
Capturing birds on my lens from a moving boat, posed enormous challenges, but the results were exhilarating. This encouraged me to spread my wings and experience birding in lakes and forests.
Goa, Bharatpur, Bhigwan, Nal Sarovar, Little Rann of Kutch, Ganeshgudi, Rajaji National Park, Chopta, Sattal, Jim Corbett, Ranthambore, Tadoba, Sasan Gir and various birding places in and around Mumbai became my favourite hangouts.
My like-minded friends on Facebook gave me a great opportunity to peek into their lens and spot birds that they had shot and this helped me hone my own skills. I stole the opportunity that technology and social media lent and for a lark, began uploading my muses on FB pages displaying various birding sites such as Wild Bird Trust of National Geography, International Photography Site PIXOTO and Sanctuary Asia. To my surprise, they were well-received and the acknowledgements like ‘Photographer of the Day’, ‘Photographer of the Week’ and also ‘Photographer of the Year’, gave me wings for more.
Book Journey…….
The editor of ‘Saamana’, a vernacular newspaper approached me to write bird articles in the weekly ‘Fulora’ supplement for a year and I took it up as a challenge. My college friend Shobha Karnik, joined me in the detailed study of birds for writing the articles. The study helped us to understand the exceptional qualities of birds such as sensing the weather changes and adapting accordingly, caring for the young ones and community nesting. Birds, with their mere presence not only enhance the world, but through their tweets enliven the atmosphere, aid in the preservation of plant life by indirectly aiding in pollination and enrich the soil with their droppings. I started compiling images for the articles and to my surprise, found that I have enough of birds in my collection. While writing about birds in Samana, we felt that it is a great pleasure to study birds in depth. It created a sense of belonging and closeness to winged beauties. Soon we decided to present our treasures before the people in the form of books with detailed information and pass on the message of Nature conservation. In our Book venture, Vandana Rajhansa and Sathya Vagale also joined us.
Shobha Karnik
Shobha Karnik is an engineer by profession and got involved in birds because of me. Out of curiosity, she joined me in my photo walks, even accompanying me to places like Uttarakhand. This kindled the interest to know more about the birds and we both started working on bird articles. Since then we have been working together on birds.
Vandana Rajhansa
A chartered accountant by profession, Vandana always had a flair for photography. When she joined Rotary in 2016, I invited her for photo walks and pursued her to take up wildlife photography. Both of us travelled together to many places like Tadoba, Jim Corbett and Ranthambore for birding.
Sathya Vagale
Sathya Vagale is an architect and city planner by profession and holds a post graduate degree from the University of Delhi. His interest in photography started during his college years. He has been handling a camera for the past 55 years, but it is only in the last 12 years that he has been able to pursue his passion aggressively. As a wildlife and landscape photographer, he has travelled to most forests in India, and to different geographic regions such as Masai Mara in Kenya, Iceland, Ecuador in South America and the Svalbard Artic Region near Norway, USA and Sri Lanka. He is also into fashion photography and has clicked nearly 300 models in Bangalore, Singapore and Malaysia. He is highly experienced in shooting products such as jewellery and sarees, and portfolios based on different themes.
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed to our entire journey of book and website making, without whom this mission was not possible. We would sincerely like to thank and acknowledge the following people …
Asavari Joshi, Soumendra Mukhopadhyay, Aakash Sarawal, Kane Lew, Saravanan Janakrajan, Lakshminarayan Nandiraju, Kabir Samiul, Kamlesh Mirkale, Vaijayanti Gadgil, Amit Rane, Karan Mulchandani, Sujeet Kothare, Mriganka Datta, Anand Limaye, Neelima Chavan, Shubhrata Iyer, Athika Wawda, Vanaja and Suryakumar
Xeno-canto (Sharing bird sounds from around the world) - a website for birds voice calls