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Aishwarya Sridhar
Aishwarya
Sridhar is a
23-year-old
photographer,
conservationist
and filmmaker
from Mumbai,
India. Her work
has appeared
in BBC Wildlife,
The Guardian, Mongabay, Sanctuary Asia,
Saevus and Times of India, among other titles.
She has also presented the Nature For Future
series on Discovery Channel India.
In 2020, Aishwarya was awarded a Highly
Commended in the Wildlife Photographer of the
Year competition – the first Indian woman to
have done so.
Visit http://www.aishwaryasridhar.com.she recalls, ‘and it looked as if there were
waves of light flashing across it. It wasn’t
like planet Earth – I felt as if I’d entered
some magical world.’
Setting up
Initially, she set up her tripod and attached
her 100-400mm lens to her Canon EOS-1D
X Mark II, but the first images she shot
didn’t give her the effect she was after. ‘I
started looking around for elements that
would add the wow factor,’ she explains.
‘I looked up and, seeing the blanket of
stars, I realised that the fireflies were like
stars on Earth.’ As such, she decided to
marry the two in the same frame.
‘I changed to a 16-35mm wideangle,’ she
says, ‘and began to shoot a sequence of
images. The winning image from the
competition is a stitch of 24 frames, each
one a 24-second exposure. Fortunately, the
wind had completely dropped. If there’d
been a breeze, the tree wouldn’t have been
sharp enough.’
Working in such darkness, she couldn’t
be absolutely sure that she had the image
she wanted, so she took a number of
different frames from a variety of angles. ‘It
was very time-consuming,’ she recalls. ‘And
it was trial and error, as it was hard to tell if
the tree was even in focus. But when
I came home and processed the images,
I realised that one frame had come out
exactly as I’d hoped. In all the others, the
star trail isn’t as clear.’
Aishwarya describes this ethereal, magical
image as an ‘ode to smaller creatures’,
concluding, ‘There is a threat to the
fireflies’ space, and their population is
decreasing because of light pollution and
habitat loss. But they are all equal, and I try
to bring that across in my photography.’
It’s safe to say, she has certainly
succeeded in her mission.