Happy Camper

A Former Techie Who Now Makes a Living Shooting Time-lapse Videos of the Himalayas, Tells Us How He Found His Spiritual Home and Why He Loves the Springs of Spiti

- Garima Gupta

I was walking to catch the early morning prayers at the monastery in Komic, the highest motorable village in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, when I caught sight of a sun-burnt backpacker washing his utensils in the spring outside the monastery. In the distance was his one-man tent with some camping equipment strewn around. The night before, the temperature had dropped to 2°C and howling, cold winds shook the village. Coming straight from my warm, blanket strewn cocoon, my first question to him was incredulous: “Did you really spend the night out in this pasture?” The answer was phlegmatic: “It was warm enough in my tent and sleeping bag. I’m used to this.” We began chatting as 39-year-old Saravana Kumar rolled up his camp with practiced, economical movements. He was on a two month-long one-man expedition through the region, shouldering camping and camera equipment to capture high-definition time-lapse footage of the majestic Spiti landscape.

Kumar, a former engineer, has been travelling and shooting full-time since 2010, making time-lapse videos while trekking in the Himalayas and selling the footage to photo outlets and video libraries. He has been there thrice and spends a few months at a time, trying to capture the different landscapes across seasons. He travels with a tent, a high-altitude sleeping bag, an 11-inch MacBook, a stove and some utensils, his Canon 5D Mark II and Panasonic GX85 cameras, Carl Zeiss lenses and tripod, power banks, extra batteries and back-up hard drives.