E-Paper
A walk on the wild side
Wild angle Animal watching is second nature for lensman Aditya Singh. Neyaz Farooquee writes.
His love for nature drew him to the Ranthambhore National Park. An avid nature photographer, wildlife blogger and lodge owner ,Aditya 'Dicky' Singh is one of the leading tiger specialists in the country. A former civil servant, he has been shooting for nearly a decade and has been to India's major wildlife refuges, building up an impressive library of over 10,000 tiger images.
Over the last one and a half decades, Aditya has worked with some of the biggest names in wildlife photography such as Andy Rouse and Theo Allofs.
After quitting bureaucracy, Aditya moved to Ranthambhore to pursue his interest in wildlife protection.
Shooting in Ranthambhore is not an easy task, he says. Take the case of the Spotted owl, pictured here on top. "The light was harsh, the space less and above all, the birds are very agile. Clicking them can be the result of your persistence and good fortune."
Aditya has assisted some of the best film crews in the world on projects such as Danger in Tiger Paradise, a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary on the life of a tigress and her litter, Hunter and the Hunted a National Geographic film on the man-eating tigers of Sundarbans and a documentary for Japanese channel NHK.
During the rainy season, shooting in Ranthambhore becomes even more troublesome. "That's when I visit other countries which offers better conditions for shooting," he says. On one of his forays outside India, Singh captured tigers mating in Sri Lanka.
A regular contributor to travel and wildlife magazines, he has been a part of Kids for Tigers, one of the world's largest awareness programmes for schoolchildren that helps develop them into naturalists and tiger ambassadors since 2003. He also helped track and capture man-eating leopards in Chittor district in 2005.
