Exploring beauty through photographs

New Delhi: From the morning stillness of Kashmir`s Dal Lake to a night in Cambridge, beauty lies in detail for Khushi Mishra.

A corporate lawyer by profession, the nature enthusiast likes to capture mother earth in her various moods with her camera and the 28-year-old has put together her first solo exhibition of 28 photographs. Khushi says her romance with the camera started when she was just a child as her father, an avid photographer himself, encouraged her to take pictures. "We always had a camera lying around and I started clicking photographs from a very early age. So when I wanted to take a break professionally that`s what attracted me and applied for a course at Light and Life academy in Ooty," Khushi told reporters. The young photographer loves colours and most of her photographs are compositions of colours, shapes and angles. "You cannot be snobbish with pictures. I use black and white when I feel that I can spot the deepness and the sharpness of angles but I cannot photograph Jantar-Mantar in black because the red is such a beautiful colour," she says. Khushi, however, decided to use black and white to portray the stillness of time at Jama Masjid. "I took that photograph last year early in the morning. The construction work was going on and there were not many people around. I had pigeons for company. The photo looks old because of the building. You feel like time stands still there," she adds. Sometimes it is pure chance to spot beauty. One of her favourite photographs is of feet decorated with anklets. "It was by pure chance that I spotted this picture. I was in the academy doing work with children when I spotted this four-year-old girl. I followed her. She was drinking water from a tap and instinctively lifted her dress to expose the beautiful anklets," she added. Lyricist-poet Javed Akhtar, who inaugurated the photo exhibition last evening praised Khushi for having an eye for detail. "We all walk through life half asleep and sometimes miss the most obvious objects of beauty. These photographs are beautiful because Khushi`s eyes spotted them. Otherwise, we pass through open and half open doors every day. It is the wonder of her eyes," Akhtar said. Akhar was especially captivated by a photograph, which depicts a chinar leaf that remains afloat in a pool of water while other leaves have sunk to the bottom. PTI