24 July,2011 09:03 AM IST | | Yoshita Sengupta
A college student with a sizeable Twitter following is busy with a photo-documentation project that he says is a take off on Project 365
When they say Twitter has given social networking a new, exclusive feel, they aren't wrong. The medium has spawned a generation of social celebrities whose worth is judged by the number of followers they have or the number of times their tweets have been quoted in articles. Roycin D'souza (@roycind) with 1,579 followers (and counting) and over 33,000 tweets is one among them.
This picture is of day three and the photographer's favourite shot. On
June 2 when Roycin had no pictures to upload, he rushed to Ghetto
u00a0restaurant near Haji Ali hoping to meet a friend who he knew would agree
u00a0for the shoot. And his friend, as expected was in the pub when Roycin
walked in
The 20 year-old belongs to a unique breed of Twitterati that follows their passion, and do what they do because they want to. In D'souza's case, it is photography. And combining his love for social networking and clicking photographs is his latest project, #TwitterAday365.
"This is my version of Project 365. #TwitterAday365 is about shooting portraits of people I have been following on Twitter. The idea is to associate a face with the handles I have been following for a year. I know these people, interact with them frequently, and have met a few," he says.
The first picture of the project, this was shot on May 31. Roycin left work
and texted his friend to pose for him and she agreed immediately.
The picture is a favourite among pet lovers
Photography website Photojojo(.com) suggests documenting your life by taking a photo every day for a year, and posting it on a platform like like Flickr. They call it Project 365. D'souza's project began on June 1 this year. A day earlier, D'souza tweeted the idea of giving a face to some of the names he had been following, and was flooded with 'go ahead' responses instantly.
The reactions he has received in the last one month have oscillated from brilliant to creepy. While friends on and off Twitter are supportive of the initiative, there are those who "randomly follow me, asking me to shoot them."
Every portrait he uploads is uploaded to his Flickr, Facebook and Twitter account. The final year BCom student at MMK College, D'souza is a self-taught artist with no formal training in photography. "I started doing off-camera flash photography recently. Meeting so many people, and talking to them gives me a lot of exposure," he says.
Shooting gigs is his specialty, something he has been pursuing for a year, armed with a borrowed Nikon D-40, following India's leading, and promising bands.
This May, when he turned 20, D'souza bought his first camera -- a Nikon D 7000. An expensive proposition, the birthday gift cost him a neat Rs 60,000 (for the body) plus more than Rs 25,000 for two lenses. Added to this another Rs 20,000 for 'equipment'.
The funds to follow his passion come from the gigs he shoots and more recently from his daytime job as a digital media analyst. Funding apart, coordinating and planning #TwitterAday365 has been hectic: scheduling shoots to making sure people are available. "I keep a four-day buffer. There are days when I am able to schedule two or three shoots, and some when I don't land anything."
And to ensure the project is a success, he has a back-up plan. "I meet between 30 and 40 people on my Twitter account; they are good friends. When I am in dire need of a face, I can call one of them and say I need to shoot them today, and know they will take out the time."
He is confident that #TwitterAday365 will take off in a bigger way soon. "It will pick up once I click and photos of people who are really famous on Twitter. I have a list of people I want to photograph. I will DM (direct message) them, fix shoots and schedule them on Google calendar so they get an automatic reminder," he rattles off a plan.
Till then, he is content with his predictable day: lugging around two cameras, three lenses, two flash, mini tripod, two radio triggers.. all to shoot his Twitter pals. That's life, as Roycin D'souza knows it.
