Hobbies are great fun. There are very many hobbies for one to pick which suits one's taste, pocket and environment. Philately, Numismatics, match-box label collecting, photography, Classic book collection so on and so forth. It is the bounded duty of the parents to inculcate a creative hobby among the children at right age, so that the children pick up the hobby, ride on it and make use of the advantages that the hobby provides in furtherance of their knowledge. I was associated with a person who took to photography as his hobby.

I had known a friend who was an entrepreneur in a garment industry, took to photography as a hobby. He with the help of his wife concentrated on wild life photography, only to become an internationally acclaimed wildlife photographer in 5 years. His clientele for wildlife photographs included National Geographical society, McMillan Publishers, LIFE, TIME and other international publishers Besides photography, he had a wonderful collection of Cameras and lenses including most expensive ones. Have you ever heard of an exhibition of cameras by an individual, amateur phonographer? I had the privilege of conducting this exhibition at Bangalore ONE MAN CAMERA SHOW. His dedication, enthusiasm, hard work got him interested in the hobby which brought him laurels and millions in cash from all over the world. In journalist's circle, his name was the talk of the town.

In fact he was President of a city's famous and oldest ready-made garment factory which had more than 2000 workers. Besides looking after the factory's day to day activities, he got interested in photography. Started with one camera NIKON SLR, he went about taking pictures, studying the technical aspects of it like light, shade, timing, background and overall composition of the picture.

After doing a stint as ammeter photographer, taking pictures of buildings and portraits, he switched over to wildlife photography. He and his wife used to visit the forest and after taking the permission from Forest Department, would climb a tree and watch for 3 to 4 hours to capture a scene of a tiger coming to a pond to drink water and looking for prey, how it attacks the deer or cow, eating of raw meat after killing the prey etc. all these are captured in two cameras (36 + 36 = 72 pictures) and he would send the film roll to the company which manufactured the film, so that the best results could be obtained. As soon as the negatives with test prints are ready, my friend readily gets the clients, mostly it is foreign publishers of books and periodicals. He used to get between $200 to $500 per picture from these publishers for his quality pictures. Likewise, slowly and steadily he concentrated on various aspects of photography, improving the quality day by day and became popular.

He started earning more money in photography than his garment factory could give. He started teaching young photographers in the matters related to wild life photography. He was awarded with international awards at Saloons, besides honour by local governments and organizations.

The point which I am driving home is, if one dedicates to a hobby with sincerity and hard work, there is always a reward. A hobby can turn out to be profession. Let one of the hobby bites you for good.

Learn more about this author, Sadananda Holla.
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