For Sydney-based Shyamal Bhatia the city landscape is a canvas for his creative compositions.
He loves to see everything through his lens and has an inherent knack for making the ordinary look strikingly ingenious.
And one such optical incident that occurred on an ordinary day paved the way for his work to be showcased at the famed BerlinBlue Art Gallery in Germany.
Mr Bhatia says he was walking through the city’s bustling inner lanes when his eye fell upon a building foyer at Martin Place in the heart of Sydney's CBD.
“It’s actually the overhead lighting of the foyer hanging downwards. When I was looking at it, I sort of thought it would make a very lovely black and white photograph because of the texture of the lights”- Shyamal Bhatia
When the shot turned out to be exactly how he had envisaged, he entered it into an international photography competition hosted by Guru Shots- a platform that handpicks photos of talented photographers and showcases them across prominent art centres around the world.
Speaking to SBS Punjabi, Mr Bhatia said, he had forgotten all about it until he received an email informing him about his selection.
The selected photograph will now be displayed at the contemporary art gallery in Berlin from June 21st to 24th.
Using only his phone, Mr Bhatia clicks away images that redefine the metropolis in a new light.
“It’s more what I see rather than the tool that I use to get my images the way I want”, says Mr Bhatia.
In a world full of color, the chartered accountant turned IT professional, originally from Mumbai in India, chooses to snap most of his images in black and white - a medium which he says is very close to his heart.
“I have always been fond of black and white, probably born in the wrong era, should have been born twenty years earlier”, adds Mr Bhatia.
“From a photography perspective, I have been influenced by Ansel Adams. I love the shades of black and white that he brings into his photography. I have also been hugely influenced by movies of Guru Dutt and Alfred Hitchcock”-Shyamal Bhatia
To an ordinary eye, his pictures might lack color, but there is no denying the fact that he captures every day scenes in a way that makes even a routine sight look strangely interesting.
