Sun sand sea and shutterbugs

Youngsters, adventure and photography--Can you ask for a better combo deal which combines meeting new people, travelling to exotic locations and nurturing your passion of being a photographer? That's what the Hyderabad Digital Photography Club (HDPC) aims to achieve through its initiative.

Earlier this week, the club decided to invite its members to explore the secret beaches of Goa and engage in some glamour photography apart from visiting world heritage centres. What a perfect dream. The club members were thoroughly enthused by the outing and here's a first person account of their experience

How it all began
We were a group of 18. Some are working and some business and some are studying. We all had the same and single interest that is photography. That lead to this beautiful photography trip to secret beaches of Goa.

It all happened when our group founder and organiser Ram Nagesh created a group on Facebook called Hyderabad Digital Photography Club (HDPC) which has almost 15,000 members and followers on it.

We made a call on photography tour/workshop to Goa. It's a model shoot, why wouldn't we be excited? Girls, bikini and glamour are the best one could ask for in Goa.

The trip
We booked a bus from Hyderabad and started our journey to Goa on Friday March 11 and boy it was a stretchy one especially when you are travelling by bus 16 hours straight 7pm -11am. After this long and tiresome journey we finally reached Panjim. Then another minivan picked us up for our final destination--The Love Temple in Arambol Beach.

Love Temple is great. It's simply the mixture of yoga, ancient methods of massage and simple and pure love. The place itself has so much of liveliness that it completely changed our mood the minute we stepped out to explore it. We settled on the beach at around 2 for lunch, dipping in the sea and sipping on beer.

Then at around 4 we moved towards the sweet lake that's located near the sea. The water is actually not salty but neither sweet but good enough to be called a 'Sweet Lake'. Then at 5 pm we trekked out to see the Banyan Baba who stays up in the hill. The 20 minute hike was mesmerising and appealing for us Indians but for foreigners it's a feast.

We saw around 2 dozens of foreigners. Since it was close to sunset, we set back to the love temple. On the way we saw a market where foreigners were selling various ornaments on the beach. As the sun set slowly into the beach, we enjoyed those golden hours clicking some images and called it a day.

Day 2
This day was most anticipated as we scheduled the Glamour Shoot. All photographers and five models had gathered at the beach by 6 according to the guidelines given by Ram. We drank some coffee and started our shoot before sunrise. It started at Love Temple and then went to Sweet Lake which is approximately a km from Love Temple.

The best part was that there was another girl who saw us shooting and she said she was interested in posing. All the models were asked to pose according to their profile commands. It was so good that our shoot time was only from 6 am to 9 am but we pushed it till noon and output of this quality time was marvelous.

Ram Nagesh Thota briefed the group on the basic skills of glamour photography and also guided models for posing in various postures. This helped the members of club to explore and experiment with natural lighting and shooting.

The final destination
Our next stop was to explore water sports, Churches and Museums. We moved to the famous St. Francis Xavier Church in Old Goa. Sadly there were some internal problems because of which the museum got shut down early that day. Around 4 pm, since none of us had lunch, we went out to eat and buying some wine and gift ornaments for our loved ones.

By 5 pm, we set our bags and minds to move to our homeland Hyderabad. This is our story. This trip provided yet another platform for what HDPC stands for, to bring passionate photographers across to connect, interact, share and explore further in their pursuit of photography. This was very evident in the way the members were able to impart their knowledge to others and everyone together were able to have an enriching experience.