Shamika & Sumedh’s Joyful Maharashtrian Wedding at Keshavbaug, Pune

Some weddings stay with you because of the photographs. Some because of the people. Shamika & Sumedh’s wedding was one that changed the way I looked at photographing weddings.

I remember meeting Sumedh early one morning at Le Petit Amour over a cup of coffee. We met a couple of times after that, including with the entire family over tea, and eventually things fell into place. The entire family has been exceptionally kind to me — and remarkably, even four years after the wedding, they still are whenever we meet. (Yes, I am a real late blogger!)

And then there was Shamika. Being a photographer’s daughter, Shamika has quite literally grown up in front of a camera. She was completely at ease being photographed, and honestly, photographing her was a bliss.We could probably have spent an entire day photographing just her and called it a successful wedding shoot. :)) But what made this wedding so special wasn’t just how easy the couple was to photograph. It was how much they seemed to genuinely enjoy being together and being around their people. There was happiness everywhere. Their parents were completely involved, their friends were having an absolute blast, and the entire family seemed to have that wonderful combination of excitement, emotion and slightly controlled chaos that makes Indian weddings so much fun.

And Shamika and Sumedh? They were mostly in their own little world. Laughing. Smiling. Teasing each other. Enjoying every bit of what was happening around them. There was no sense that they were simply going through a list of wedding events. They were actually living the days. From the cocktail at Tipsy Ducking, which turned into a fantastic party with their closest bunch of friends, to an epic sangeet where everyone seemed determined to have as much fun as possible, and finally to the beautiful and serene Maharashtrian wedding at Keshavbaug, every celebration had its own personality.

The cocktail was loud and wonderfully chaotic. The sangeet was full of energy, dancing and people who clearly hadn’t come to sit quietly in their chairs. And the wedding at Keshavbaug brought everything down to a beautiful, calmer rhythm — families together, rituals unfolding, parents getting emotional and the two of them soaking it all in. There were plenty of laughs. Plenty of crazy moments. A lot of love. And just a few seconds where the smiles gave way to teary eyes. Those are the moments I remember most. Because somewhere between photographing the rituals, the portraits, the friends dancing and the parents getting emotional, I realised that the real story wasn’t the wedding itself.

It was the people. It was how Sumedh looked at Shamika. How Shamika reacted to her friends. How their parents watched them. How their closest friends celebrated them. And how, despite everything happening around them, these two somehow kept finding their way back into their own little bubble. Four years later, when I look back at this wedding, I don’t just see a collection of photographs.

Location: Keshavbaug, Pune
Makeup – Blaze (Chaitra & Aishwarya Deo)

Some weddings stay with you because of the photographs. Some stay with you because of the people. And then there are a few weddings that quietly change the way you look at your own work. For me, Shamika & Sumedh’s wedding was one of those. Looking back, I feel this wedding was a bit of a milestone in my journey as a wedding photographer. It was around this time that I started changing the way I looked at weddings — not just photographing what was happening in front of me, but trying to understand the people, spend time with the couple, listen to what they wanted and, perhaps more importantly, notice the things they didn’t necessarily say. Shamika and Sumedh have been a bit of a buoy for me through that journey. They have genuinely been one of those couples who helped me grow directly and indirectly, both in my work and in the way I approached photographing weddings.