Capturing images on pages

frozen frames

It was a picture perfect book launch for any new author. Filled with celebrities, family, friends and a whole lot of media representatives, there was not an empty chair at the Landmark, Forum, for Diinesh Kumble’s Dream Safari – A Pictorial Journey Through Africa’s Cradle of Life.

Though the presence of Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath (who tip-toed his way through the crowd and dashed out before the media got hold of him) may have brought majority of the audience, it was Diinesh who shined as the celebrity amongst them all. After all it was his big day.

Being the elder brother of Anil Kumble, Diinesh recollected the days he advised Anil to take a camera when he went for his first under-19 cricket camp. An advice which Anil follows even today. Diinesh’s passion for nature and wildlife began at a very young age.
Growing up in the City he was highly fond of pigeons who were a regular visitor to his terrace, but the love for photography came to him when he went to the US for his Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering. “The first thing I bought there was a camera and a music system,” he said, revealing a secret to his parents only on the day of the book launch. “It was so expensive that I couldn’t have told them about it,” he added.
When the power of digital came to his grasps, the first thing he did was to head for Africa with his family on what he explains was a ten-day dream Safari. “In all my years of experimenting with the camera I had picked up a few tips from the professionals at wildlife photography and I finally got to apply them on this trip,” he explained.

Every time a wildlife photographer heads out in to the forest, he hopes to see a kill or a lion or better yet a chase, but not every photographer has that luck. But in his two trips to Kenya and Tanzania, Diinesh managed to capture all those and more in his 254-page book which he took more than two years to compile, and he owes it all to an element called patience. “You can sit and look through your lenses for three hours but a picture happens only at a fraction of a second. That is the beauty of freezing a beautiful moment in a picture,” he concludes.