India: A Lo-Fi Photo Tour

Flour Man, Mumbai.

I’m very much attached to my retro-styled Fujifilm mirrorless camera, I really am. I love its faux-leather black trim, the nostalgic click of its silver dials, even the way the battery cover slips back into place sends me shooting back to my childhood. But sometimes… sometimes, if I’m in a hurry, I still find myself whipping out my 5th generation iPod Touch to take a snap. It’s not much good in low light, it’s grainy, it only has 5 megapixels, but occasionally it gets it right on the money.

I use an app called Kitcam to take all my iPod photos. Chances are you haven’t heard of Kitcam, because it’s no longer available in the app store, but it has some killer filters and was the first retro photo app I ever used that let you apply them retrospectively. Hipstamatic does this now, but it never used to.

So, in August 2016 I visited Mumbai, and Pench National Park in central India. It was monsoon season, and I was taken there by Disney to write a feature about their live-action Jungle Book film. But, as is often the case, the most special part of the trip wasn’t any of the pre-planned excursions, the lovely accommodation, the exquisite food, the Indian wine, or even seeing a tiger (and that’s a whole other story). No, it was the morning we took an unscheduled visit to a nearby village and were invited into a local guy’s house, where there was no electricity and the floor was made of hardened mud and cow dung. We met his children, helped them to pump water from the village well, and joined him chopping wood and grinding spices that were picked from his garden.

Some, although not all, of these pictures are from that day. I hope you enjoy them…