Jawhar Unplugged

Jawhar is a former princely state around 2 hours away from Nasik...in the Palghar district...situated at an elevation of about 1466 feet. So its something like a hill station..not very crowded because it doesn't appear on the tourist map (thank god for small mercies).

My personal target for this trip was 7 keepers...I was happy that everyone in the group met this target! I'd earlier thought of putting up photos here like they are on the rest of my website with galleries labelled and titled but then changed my mind as we'd end up with individual galleries and I felt this would be best presented as sort of a joint effort.

It started off by us thinking of making a trip to Jawhar...sort of an unofficial DCP expeditions trip - An impromptu trip turned into quite a good photo opportunity where everything worked as smooth as clockwork...though I must say for some reason our sense of "time" is very flexible in India.

We were supposed to start off at 6:30am from Sangram's place however when I reached there, I was the only idiot at the place apart from Sangram who was anyway living there and Guru who didn't have a place to live in Nasik. Key learning - 6:30am in India is very different from 6:30am everywhere else in the world.

Shiva was the only chap on "time" - he was supposed to be picked up from Papaya Nursery and very dutifully called me up at around 7am to say he was waiting there - I told him yeah I'm waiting too. You now need to keep waiting for some more time!!! We managed to get Harshad and Sujit to head over in their car towards Papaya nursery and pick up Shiva. 

But I need to rewind a bit - I happened to speak to AmMo the night before and he was heading over to Jawhar too so we agreed to travel together as one group. I sort of figured that telling AmMo to meet up at o seven hundred hours would be preferable. So he rendezvoused with Harshad's new car (more on this later) and they started moving towards Jawhar.

We caught up with them at a small sidey fly infested restaurant where these guys where eating up vada pao's and stuff like they were starving for a week. Quick round of hello's       and some more vada's were followed by Harshad taking pains to correct my flawed anglicised pronunciation of the place "Jawhar". AmMo too along with me received some lessons on how the word "warli" (tribal paintings) is supposed to be pronounced. I'm sure Harshad must be telling him self "saale angrez log" every-time we massacred local names on the trip :) Sangram too joined him in correcting us when it got too much for the marathi manoos to hear warli being pronounced as "worli" and Jawhar being pronounced as "Jawa-her".

I told the group that there was a friendly challenge during the trip - each one needs to shoot 5 portraits of people they've never met in their lives earlier. Sujit was the only chap who seemed to be happy. I guess he looked at it as an opportunity to speak to 5 more babes who he didn't already know! 

Everyone agreed - I thought to myself..I just hope someone doesn't end up getting beaten up by villagers for taking photos of them!! Thank god I've worn proper shoes and can run fast!! 

Btw the lotus stupa shaped structure with the fabulous clouds was shot by Guru - he didn't tell us about it and shot it on the sly so he's the only chap with a pic of that structure. The 2 landscapes above were shot by me at some impromptu halts along the way.

I shot quite a bit using the tilt shift lensbaby composer with the wide angle attachment that I ordered from the US ....it arrived just a week before this trip. The 2 pics above were shot with it - You get photos which are blurred,with vignetting, weird colours, CA / Purple fringing etc etc.......Just to make life difficult its obviously a fully manual lens and focusing has to be done by turning a ring and praying and hoping that god is listening to you :) Exposure has to be decided by changing discs from f2 to f22 which fit into the front of the lens. I'm sure every guy who buys this lens has a wife in the background somewhere muttering "nutcase spent all these years wasting our money for new lenses saying they are sharper and now in his old age he's wasting even more money buying lenses because they give blurry pics"

The colourful pics above were shot by Sangram....stopping at this village near the waterfall on the way back was Amit's idea - we  parked at the side, spoke to some villagers and shot some pics. 

Sangram also shot the pic on the right on the palace grounds. This was  cheating because I stopped this shepherd and spoke to him for sometime..made the guy comfortable thinking I'll get some good shots......asked him if i could shoot some pics...he said yeah ok...I got 2 shots which I thought would be unique. The rest of the gang then very sweetly shot his photos for the next half hour....Grr!

The photo with the villagers and the plough also has a nice story behind it. We stopped the car and these guys immediately stopped using the plough and started staring at us. I walked up to them and asked if we could take some pics ...I'd heard all sorts of horror stories of tribals in this areas beating up people so I decided to play it safe and speak to people before we shoot. The guys were a bit scared of us to be honest. What I figured was that as long as you are nice to villagers and don't damage their property in most cases they are quite humble, polite and friendly. Unfortunately there are a lot of visitors who get drunk, create a scene and that's one of the reasons why villagers are sometimes hostile towards city folk. 

The drive was done via roads parts of which were excellent but parts of which made me wish i was back in the good old days in a Jonga / Willys jeep instead of Gurus Renault Duster.

But the drive was fun..the weather was awesome....the light was excellent...lots of clouds with few bits of light peeping through - just the way i like it.

Anyway...to cut a long story short...here's Jawhar through the lens of this motley crue which included a farmer, an engineer, a builder, a pilot, a call centre employee, an architect, a babe specialist and some others :)

For all his talks about being  a wildlife photographer, Sangram was on a roll and kept shooting everything - landscapes, people, water, macros etc etc. His latest claim to fame is of one of his photos from this trip being featured in the Lokmat Times:)

He got the pics above at a unplanned stop - I saw a nice bridge with a river and we stopped there and walked down. I just hope Harshad, Shiva and Sujit are not reading this - we kinda forgot to call them...they were in the car ahead and didn't know we had stopped here. So they didn't get these shots. On the other hand I'm sure they too went ahead and shot some pics we didn't get so its hisaab barabar :D

The photo with the 3 guys holding umbrellas was again at an unofficial halt shot with the tiltshift lens - Guru's duster and the rain helped :)

Our first "official" stop was at Jaivilas palace which was built by Raje Yashwant Rao Mukne. Locals say that when the work of palace was completed, the quarry from which the stone was extracted was broken down and now the Geological Department is trying to locate the quarry. The palace property is quite large and we got some excellent photos on the grounds as well as some abandoned outhouses on the premises.....we  got a few good shots of a bronzeback (snake) too.

The palace was also an excellent example of our good old Indian Jugaad - a  gatekeeper was allowing people inside the palace if you gave him hundred bucks. I'm sure his highness wouldn't be very pleased if he heard about this but as the phrase goes "we are like this only" :)

The first two pics below were shot by yours truly...the next two by Guru. He also managed to shoot a snake (bronzeback) that you see below. Sangram was busy for around 15 minutes on the palace grounds trying to shoot a dragonfly in-flight while the rest of us were wandering around checking the place out.

Abizer got some good shots in this trip....and he got a quite a few keepers at the palace - He tried out a few panoramas including a 360 degree one too....Unlike Guru and me he's shot the palace in colour so it looks a bit more liveable - the HDRs shot by Guru and me make it look like something out of a horror movie.

Along with everyone else he also shot some portraits though since he's been shooting weddings talking to people and getting them to give the right expression was easy for him. 

The rest of us felt a bit awkward at first since our conversations with kids went something like this - 

Me - Hi...i'd like to take a photograph of you..hope thats ok?

Village Kid - **blank stare** no response

Me - Err...can I?

Village Kid - **blank expression**

The photo on the left is from an earlier trip that I'd done to Jawhar - its the old abandoned palace which we were supposed to visit however couldn't cover on this trip due to lack of time. The one on the right was shot using the tilt shift lens mentioned earlier

Next stop was lunch - a simple restaurant with good simple Maharashtrian food before we headed off to Dabosa to shoot the waterfall. 

I'd shot this waterfall earlier too though i did notice that the trees had grown this year and we had to really move around to get a good angle. Here's the waterfall  by Sangram.

We need to plan a trip early morning to this place - climb down and shoot the waterfall from somewhere closer - I'm sure it will look different....I've always been on a quest to get photos that are unique and now since we went on this trip I guess almost everyone from the DCP expeditions group in Nasik will in the next 2 months get a similar shot so we'll need to find a different view.

Every photographer has some favourite type of shots and they manage to get these irrespective of where they are - Shiva managed to do just this and these two photos shot by him are testimonial to the saying that once a nature photographer, always a nature photographer :)

To top it off he also shot some portraits of the shepherd and village kids that we came across during our journey. 

I seriously felt this trip forced all of us to try different genres including stuff that we weren't very comfortable with.

Sujit's version of the waterfall (above right) had a very different sort of a look to it due to the depth that he managed to portray -  Key learning: Focal length has a huge impact on the way things look. I also loved his monochrome rendition of the farmer ploughing the field - loved the light that he's captured in that photo.

Harshad too tried his hand at using the tilt shift lens and got this nice angle of the top half of the palace. I feel the photo is very good for someone who's shooting with this type of a lens for the first time - there usually is a very steep learning curve...

Sujit also got some lovely shots at the abandoned houses on the palace grounds that I mentioned earlier. 

Another pic that he shot which was very unique was the butterfly and leaves with pink bokeh - very creative! Though I'm sure he shoots these type of pics only because chicks like them :p

The photo above is a very unique shot that Harshad managed to get with the palace, the cliffs and valley in the same frame - he didn't show me this location so I'm sure he shot it while wandering around on his own while we were busy elsewhere :) 

One can almost imagine how this would have looked in the good old days when the Mukne's were at the height of their power - flags fluttering in the breeze, soldiers standing on top of those towers.....

Harshad - this is just not done dude....you anyway haven't given us a treat for the new SUV and now your going off and shooting different angles without telling us :p 

Harshad also shot some portraits of the kids below - these kiddo's had really turned into celebrities with all the attention they got :)

Our trip was supposed to end with shooting a sunset but like I always tell people - good landscapes are only shot if you keep going to the same place daily till you find that perfect light after you've discovered a perfect location. Sunset point had a good view - but I couldnt get the sort of light  I wanted nor could I get a good composition. So while I just stood there and did nothing, the rest of the group started taking pics of some of the village kids who were playing there.

I wanted to do a lot of different things related to photography on this trip that have now moved to the next trip - I was carrying everything in addition to my full frame DSLR - right from a film camera loaded with Kodak Tmax400,  prime lenses of 18mm to 500mm, GND filters, Infra red filters, ND filters etc etc - but didn't get to use most of them. Opportunities are not in our control and this hobby of photography reminds me of a line from Robbie Williams - I sit and talk to God..and he just laughs at my plans :)

Another thing that's pending for us is Warli paintings. Jawhar apparently is famous for them however we were unable to find any warli painting workshops or artists at work - we looked and asked around however - no luck.

One of the reasons why I like Jawhar is its got that nice easy laid back feel to it.... the sort of place where people like to take things easy. Makes me think about how our lives in a city are so materialistic and artificial.

The trip was fun ...so a sincere thank-you to everyone who tagged along. It was great shooting with you guys and we hope to catch up once again in August - think of a good location till then :)

Over and out!