Photography became my hobby when I was very young. A friend of my father Mr Shetty, who was working in Dubai gave an automatic canon camera as a gift. I was about 15 years old then. I learned to take photos on my own, without any training or guidance from anyone. Soon I became an official marriage photographer to all my relatives. My relatives were mostly farmers and could not afford a photographer. They used to give money for a roll of colour film, and I need to take all the essential photographs with a single roll, i.e., 36 photos. They used to like me a lot, and I almost agreed to take photos on demand as most of the marriages were in summer during my academic vacation period. I started becoming a good photographer too in the process. Sometimes, I used to take black and white photographs also, as the camera roll and developing cost was cheaper. I took the help of my friend Mr Mustafa to improve photography skills. Also experimented along the Musi River and Osmania University campus taking landscape photos. Photography gradually became my voluntary service for people requesting me to take photographs on different occasions. For documenting the environmental problems, I have used the pictures very effectively in decision making.

I started using the digital camera from 2000 onwards. Digital cameras are more convenient and less costly compared to traditional photography using camera rolls. The storage, editing, retrieval, and sharing became very easy with digital cameras. Now I use a mobile phone with a camera very efficiently. Sometimes I have used the IPAD and Samsung Notebook for taking the pictures.

Once, I was working in an office which was on the outskirts of the city, so daily I was travelling across the city as my residence was on the other end of the city. I used to commute by car covering parts of the new and old parts of the city. I took this as an opportunity to take pictures for one month (December 2015) and made a book with photographs covering the diversity of Hyderabad city. This book is titled ‘Hamara Hyderabad.’

Photography has changed rapidly in recent times from roll cameras to digital cameras, and now the mobile phone and drone cameras for photographs. Mobile phones are more convenient to take pictures as they don’t distract the subject. They are improving very fast and very cheap too. I also got very interested in aerial photography and had been taking photos using the drones.

All the recent photographs have metadata, such as the GPS location, date, time, details of the instrument used to take the picture, aperture, etc., which are very useful for research, analysis, and authenticity.

From the age of 15 years taken more than one lakh pictures. Uploaded all of them to Google Picasa photo album. I have used them as pictures in my book, in the PowerPoint presentations, the posters, websites, blogs, etc. Declared all of them as Open Knowledge for anyone to use them. They are also useful for me to recollect and refresh my memory of space and time. They are the moments in my life which became immortal, through digital storage and sharing. Thankful to google for giving access to free storage of the digital media.

I also took several video clippings and recorded audio of my lectures. The audio files of more than 500 hours are in digital format. Most of the videos taken by me are uploaded on YouTube. One day with artificial intelligence, these media files, the browsing history, all the documents created, could be fed into a robot to create a similarly thinking person and one could continue to contribute for the betterment of the society beyond the life. If good media is intentionally shared and made available on the open source it will make the world a better place.