Kalyan Varma is well-known in wildlife and photography circles in Bangalore. Having started as a software developer, he is now into wildlife and photography on a professional basis. Kalyan won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award in 2005, and has various other awards to his credit; in fact, he showed his photographs to the then President Dr Abdul Kalam, when he visited B R Hills.

Many of us look every day, at the calendar that is issued annually for the FOSS.in (Free and Open Source Software) event,
with Kalyan’s photographs. At the JLR office and JLR properties, too, one can find some of his photographs. His website is

www.kalyanvarma.net

By popular demand, he is conducting a photography workshop. Here’s the schedule:

Dates : May 10th and May 11th 2008 (Saturday and Sunday)
Location : Kormangala, Bangalore

A full-day classroom session on Day 1. A field outing on the morning
of Day 2 and classroom session for the rest of the day on the 2nd day.
Lunch is included on both the days.

For more details, here’s the link:

http://kalyanvarma.net/photography/workshop

Please contact

kalyan at rtns.org

to register for the workshop or if you need any more information.

Here are a couple of images of his: here

and

here

I saw in the Deccan Herald that Magnitude Gallery in Jayanagar was having a “Wildlife of India” exhibition, so I decided to visit it

Mr Ramesh Magar, the owner of the gallery, spoke to me and explained that rather than lease out the space to various artists, he was trying a new model at Magnitude.

“We have eight artists who are employed by us,” he says, “And this frees them from the difficulties of earning their living only as and when they sell their art; we pay them a regular salary.” He has initiated “Rang De India”, a series of themes at the gallery. The last one was “Utsav”, which was on various festivals; the present one is “Junglee”, on wildlife; the next one proposed will be “Vanita”, on women. He says he asks the artists to produce painting on these themes, and then displays and sells them.

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