Photographing pandals

Two windows. Chaturthi and Panchami, when everything is finished and nobody has arrived — this is when a pandal can be photographed as the object it is. And any morning between six and nine, when the same is true for an hour or two.

On Ashtami night you are photographing a crowd, which is a legitimate and rather good subject, but it is not the same photograph. Decide which one you came for.

A wide lens. Pandals are large, interiors are tight, and you will never get the distance you want. Something in the 16–35mm range on full frame does most of the work; a fast 35mm covers the rest.

No tripod. It is impractical in a crowd, it will not be allowed inside most pandals, and it makes you the person blocking the queue. Brace against a pole and raise the ISO; modern sensors handle this scene better than a tripod solves it.

A camera strap you can wear across the body, and a bag small enough to keep in front of you. You are going to be pressed on all sides for several hours.

Step out of the flow before you stop. Standing still in a moving queue to compose a shot is how people get hurt and how volunteers get annoyed, in that order.

Shoot the queue, the volunteers, the food stalls, the lighting arches over the road. The pandal is the least interesting photograph in the neighbourhood by the third night; the people around it are not.

Ask before photographing a person's face close up. Nearly everyone says yes and the picture is better for the exchange.

The great lighting installations of Chandannagar-style work — arches over whole streets, animated sequences — are best photographed at blue hour, roughly twenty minutes after sunset, when there is still sky to balance against the bulbs. An hour later the sky is black and the contrast is brutal.