Every year, our school holds this event called ‘Bal Mela’ where we invite underprivileged children from nearby village schools and have creative workshops and things for them to do. All the workshops and the activities were planned and carried out by the school students. In this event, I volunteered as a photographer to capture the whole event. I did this as photography is my hobby and I am good at it. I had participated in this event last year as an activity in-charge so I couldn’t enjoy the whole event seeing all the activities happening at the event. Being a photographer, it was my job to capture everything happening at the event, so it gave me a perfect opportunity to see the whole event and help anywhere I could, doing stuff other than clicking photos.

By participating as a photographer, I could identify my own strengths and develop areas for growth in the field of photography. I had never ever yet done event photography where I was supposed to capture what was happening at that moment for people who weren’t there to see it and relive the event. Here I identified my strengths as a photographer as I never really took any classes or learned from anyone. Photography is a hobby which I intend to never leave even in later parts of my life and to do this, knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses is important as I would later on know what I need to work on to become a good overall photographer. I observed that I am not very good at photographing moving objects like people running at the sports activities in the event. But I understood that my framing of an image was very good as to what should come in the picture and what should not.

I developed some new skills as I said that capturing moving objects was something new for me, and I had to learn how to do that quickly as the event was not going to happen again and there were only two photographers so we had to bring out our best so that there are enough good pictures of the event. So I met with the second photographer and asked him about his photos and he clicked some really good ones so I asked him how did he click and that is when I got to learn about some new techniques and settings in the camera through which clicking moving objects were easier. Plus, as I said that I got to help everywhere, I also got to learn some new skills when I helped. Like in the spray painting section, I got to learn some new styles of painting using spray cans and various techniques involved with it.

I recognized the benefits of working together as we were a team of two photographers and had approximately 5-6 venues to cover and capture. We had discussed at the start of the event as to how will we go about the event and what all things we need to capture. We planned that for half of the duration of the event, one of us will be capturing half of the venues and then in the next half of the event’s duration, we will switch the venues and click there. This way we could get the best pictures of all of the venues, all of the activities and all of the people enjoying the workshops.

The children that were invited in the event were underprivileged and having restricted access to these kinds of workshops, activities, resources, and proper people to teach them and make them aware of various stuff that was a part of the Bal Mela. In this way, we engaged with an issue of global significance as the children had restricted access, and us having knowledge about all that we do, it is our duty to share what we learn to make this world a better place. And we did this by teaching what we know to those who don’t and can’t because of unavoidable circumstances.

I am a person who loves spreading happiness and seeing people happy makes me happy and through my job as photographing the event, I could capture the happiness that was reflecting on the children’s face and that made me happy seeing so many happy faces. Also helping other student volunteers was also a part of the event I enjoyed thoroughly. The event went very smoothly and could be considered as successful.