Photowalk at Safdarjung’s Tomb

Yesterday morning I went for a photowalk at Safdarjung’s Tomb, where I was joined by fellow photogs, Siddharth Chauhan and Yogesh Joshi.

Thankfully the weather yesterday morning was quite clear and bright in Delhi, after incessant monsoon rains for past several weeks, which had hampered my prospects of fully testing and exploiting, Tokina 11-16 f2.8 II lens, which I had bought recently.

While a cloud or two would have added to the overall dynamism of the photographs (they did make a brief and light appearance) and might have helped me produce images somewhere near my best works till date (1 and 2), I did really enjoy the photo walk yesterday and came back with some good photographs of Safdarjung’s Tomb.

Here are some of the photographs I took yesterday.

Shooting with a wide angle lens was both fun and riddled with challenges, forcing me to not only pay close attention on composition, but also shoot mostly vertically to avoid getting too much of foreground in the image.

Yesterday was also the first time I was shooting with both my DSLRs, with Tokina AT-X 116 PRO DX II AF 11-16mm f/2.8 lens mounted on one body and Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS lens mounted on the other.

While initially I shot with the Tokina mounted on my 60D and 55-250 on the 1000D, I eventually switched the lenses so as to take full advantage of 60D’s AF and fast burst speed, in order to photograph birds.

Great thing was, shooting with two DSLRs wasn’t as cumbersome as I had imagined it to be, and it was actually quite fun and made my backpack quite a bit lighter to carry as well. Of course I am eventually planning to add aftermarket straps (shoulder or dual DSLR one) to make it even easier to carry and shoot with both my DSLRs.

At the end of the day, Safdarjung’s Tomb remains one of my favorite monuments in Delhi to photograph and spend time at and I did eventually learned a bit about the history of it as well, when Koshy sir made me aware of the interesting fact that it was built by pillaging the tomb of “Abdul Rahim Khan-e-Khanan, the commander in chief of Akbar and the great scholar and Bhakti movement poet, “Rahim”.” And that “Safdarjung was the Prime Minister under the weak Mughal Emperor Ahmed Shah. He was also the Governor of Oudh. His son declared himself an Independent Nawab of Oudh after the death of Safdarjung. It was this son who stripped the red sandstone and marble claddings from the Tomb of Rahim and the Emperor did not have the guts to say anything! Safdarjung obtained his first official position by bribing Nadir Shah Rupees 2 crores in those days!”

While it is extremely sad to know that a monument was built using stones pillaged from another monument, it does not take away the fact that Safdarjung’s Tomb is one of the most beautiful Tombs in Delhi and a place I love to visit again and again.