Private India photography tours, designed and guided by local experts, for no-compromise photographers.

India’s 1.3 billion people and millennia of cultural evolution put this country firmly at the top of the list of Seriously Good Places to Shoot. You could visit this country ten times in ten years and come away with startlingly different images each time — together with a renewed resolve to go back the following season.

‘Been there, done that’ doesn’t hold here. This is no one-dimensional monoculture, nor is it merely the classic duality of traditional-rural/modern-urban…

Much of this is because the Indian experience is uniquely rich and varied. ‘Been there, done that’ doesn’t hold here. This is no one-dimensional monoculture, nor is it merely the classic duality of traditional-rural/modern-urban that one sees in some rapidly developing nations.

India is an explorer’s nirvana of over 2,000 distinct ethnic groups. Amongst these are 84 million tribal people — indigenous groups whose lifestyles are rich with visual opportunities. Some of these groups are changing not at all — such as the notoriously fierce and isolated pre-Neolithic Sentinelese islanders, to whom even Travelshooters cannot introduce you. Other tribal groups, fortunately friendly, reasonably accessible and happily out of step with 21st-century change, remain scattered across the deserts, jungles, plains and towering Himalayan landscapes of this vast nation.

Such tribes are amazing — an endless variety of faces, modes of dress and decoration, home-styles and villages — but tribal shooting is just one of the many delicacies on our Indian menu. The social, cultural and lifestyle diversity of India means we can have you shooting an elders’ opium session with retired head-hunters (no, not the recruiter type) one day, photographing naked Naga sadhus the next, witnessing ancient monastic make-up and dance rituals on the third day and capturing Himalayan Pashmina-herder family moments a day or two later.

Alternatively, you could nominate a couple of themes you’d like to explore in depth, as many of our private clients do. Vanishing lifestyles, disappearing crafts and trades, religious life and rituals, womenfolk and their costumes, village life. This more considered pace makes time for the repeat visits, the emerging rapport between shooter and subject, the just-so juxtaposition of light and opportunity, the luck that comes from preparation and patience.

Embedding yourself into these authentic, unspoilt shooting contexts is no tour-bus jaunt. Although a great deal of serious shooting is within easy reach of a comfortable hotel, some of the places we’ll take you are so free from happy-snapping tour groups that there are no hotels at all. Instead, you might stay in the spacious home of a local dignitary or landowner of our acquaintance, and roll out each morning with private jeep, fixer-guide and driver into tiny hamlets where a tour party of more than two or three would simply send the locals scuttling for cover.

What kind of India photography tour would you like us to shape around you?