Vikram Nekkanti

My story doesn't begin with a childhood DSLR. It begins on a bicycle in 2013 — pre-dawn roads, long climbs, and the Tour of Nilgiris, where I watched hundreds of riders take on mountains. In 2015 I bought an action camera, not to make films, but because I didn't want those mornings to disappear.

Years of career followed. Amazon, a business of my own, then Cognizant. Photography stayed a hobby until February 2024, when we married — and our wedding photographs simply never arrived. Weeks turned into months. Months turned into almost a year of my wife asking the same question: any update?

One evening I finally said it out loud: enough — I'll learn this myself, and our memories will never sit in someone else's hands again. Then, scrolling through old photos, something more unsettling landed. Entire stretches of my life had quietly faded. Birthdays, trips, ordinary evenings. Had I really lived them if I could barely remember them?

So I learnt on the people I love most. Every walk became a sequence, every dinner a documentary. A first maternity session in November 2025. Then, on 6 February 2026, our son arrived — and photography stopped being a hobby. It became a way of holding onto time.

Between shoots you'll find me flying drones, riding, reading about aviation and AI, testing new gear I absolutely did not need, and drinking more coffee than I should. Cameras, apparently, reproduce when left unattended. My wife has accepted this entirely reasonable behaviour. Mostly.