Master Wildlife Photography class in Periyar Tiger Reserve

We’ve referred to the concept of Biophilia on these pages before, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A love of or empathy with the natural world, esp. when seen as a human instinct”—in other words, it’s an innate human desire to seek out nature.

This concept was played out last weekend when a group of photographers gathered at Cardamom County at the edge of the Periyar Tiger Reserve to attend a Master Class with Sudhir Shivaram, a renowned wildlife photographer in India. The fact that the majority of the participants have “day jobs” in the worlds of IT, engineering and medicine make the word Biophilia all the more relevant.

Sudhir is deeply committed to the cause of wildlife conservation and in addition to teaching the technical details of nature photography he also discussed the ethical practices of photographing subjects in the wild. Many of these points were immediately applied in the field when the group came across rare birds and dramatic events.

The workshop was an excellent promoter of green evangelism, organized in collaboration with Pixetra Photography Club, Saevus Wildlife Magazine and RAXA Collective.