The best way to travel, especially if you want to get good photographs, is to travel like a local. Traveling like a local is how you are going to really connect with people, to get to know them and capture amazing moments of their everyday lives. Its all about the human connection.
I am so excited to welcome Annapurna Mellor to the CulturallyOurs podcast.
Anna is a award winning travel photographer who has been published in major publications like Nat Geo Traveller, Lonely Planet, Canon and many more. Anna’s work is amazing but for me what really stands out are her people portraits. There is a connection – I feel like I am standing right next to her and actually seeing that interaction between the subject and the photographer. Perhaps it is in the relaxed manner of her subjects or the fact that they are smiling with their eyes but to me that means that Anna has made the effort to get to know them before taking that shot. This speaks to so much of the character of the photographer.
What really stuck me when chatting with Anna was her mindset and attitude while traveling and working in different parts of the world – her willingness to experience a people and a place for herself the way locals do. Be it living in a homestay, eating at a local restaurant or even getting up at 4.00am to go to a fish market to understand how people live and work.
We also talked about balance which is such an integral part of life – especially for someone who is on the road so much. Anna shared that for her, the biggest sort of balance is finding and spending time doing the things she loves, which is photographing and traveling. Those things feed her soul. And also balancing that to spending time with people that she loves, who are at home. And sometimes people may not understand her desire to go to some remote part of the Himalayas to look for a particular picture or they might not share same interests as her. So it’s balancing those two paths in her life that she is focusing on the most.
Anna was a delight to speak with and we bonded over our mutual love for India. Anna is actually named after the famous Annapurna mountain range in Northern India. I know you are going to enjoy getting to know Anna on this episode of CulturallyOurs.
{Photos by Annapurna Mellor}
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