PHOENIX PHOTOGRAPHY

STARRY SINGALILA

Singalila National Park – the Tonglu-Sandakphu-Phalut route, in West Bengal,situated around India-Nepal border is famous among trekkers and travellers due to it’s heavenly beauty. World’s top mountain peaks, Mt. Everest, Mt. Kanchanjungha, Mt. Makalu, Mt. Lhotse and other famous Himalayan Peaks are seen from here. The entire area is surrounded by beautiful Himalayan layers. 

The altitude of these area is around 3000 mt. to 4000 mt. Due to the hight altitude, low light pollution and thin air and being class 2 and 1 Bortle Scale, most of the places here offer excellent view of night sky. At this hight altitude all basic facilities of city life are missing, like no internet, no shopping mall, limited electricity and water, limited or no supply of cooking gas. So life is not easy here and due to that this areas is less populated and as a result it offers heavenly virgin beauty of the earth. On a clear moonless night, the Himalayan layers, surrounding peaks under starry sky just looks so amazing. In fact, the Milky Way galaxy can be seen from naked eye from places like Sandakphu, Aal or Chondu. 

In early Nov 2020, I visited this place to capture landscapes and astro-landscapes. I stopped at Tonglu, Sandakphu and Chondu. This photo series is to showcase the beauty of night in all these places. Since it was November all the shots were captured after evening. And the core was visible only for small window of time. In some of the photographs (at Tonglu), I got low clouds which actually add dramatic effect to the photographs. 

The purpose of this photo series is to inspire others to enjoy the starry night at the high altitude of Himalayas and make people realise what beauty we can witness with limited/less/no air pollution and light pollution. Some of the photographs showing a photographer standing in the wild with camera and tripod and shooting. Some are showing the life in high altitude like a hut or camps and some showing the beauty of Himalayan layers and peaks at night.

The photo series

About Rajat Malakar

Rajat is an IT professional working in IBM India, as an Application Architect.
And he is a hobbyist travel and landscape photographer. He enjoyed a lot in the high altitude Himalayas. His works has been published in platforms like ViewBugs, 500px. His work also got published in online photography group magazine and he recently received multiple awards in an exhibition organised by a photography group.
He started learning astro landscape photography in 2018 out of curiosity. Since then he has gone through a number of online study/tutorial on astro landscape photography and practiced & learnt few different techniques for shooting Milky Way, Star Trail and Starry Landscapes. Now his works get recognised by most of the International and National photography groups. By now, he has conducted 2 workshops in eastern Himalayas and the participants are extremely happy with the learning.
Rajat has created an AI Based chat BOT which is integrated with Facebook messenger app in order to guide new astro photography lovers.