I hope you all have a famous monument in your cities, towns, countries etc. This monument must be the centre of attraction for foreign tourists and these monuments earn good profit for the government and share the historical information to the next generation. These monuments also attract beginner and hobbyist photographers. This photography experiment also improves your level of photography. But when to say NO To Monument Photography. This article is about those eye-opening points of monument photography.

The monuments are too old and also maintained by the government’s rules and regulations and the govt spent lots of money to maintain all those monuments. But despite those expenditures sometimes Govt fail to maintain the historical heritage, most of the monuments are dying every day and nobody is there to take this call to maintain these monuments at a better level for the current and next generation.

Here, I would like to recommend to you all, if anybody of you have a plan to shoot the monument, must go through this article and follow some important tips to save your time, energy and photoshoot.

Let’s discuss a few important tips when you should say No to shooting monuments.

• Must pre-visit the location to recce
• Must observe that is there are any broken walls, broken plasters, mix-match of the wall’s colour etc
• Is there any broken window glasses
• Is there proper maintenance of greenery, trees, plants etc
• Please check the paint of the walls
• Please check the light condition if you have to shoot in night
• Check if the fountains of the mountain really work.
• Repairing work must not be going on otherwise you will be disturbed by the labours and may find lots of construction raw materials here and there.
• The monument must be neat and clean even roof, floor etc.

I know It is difficult to check and everything for a perfect photoshoot but If you are looking for better photographs then you will have to take this pain in advance and I am sure this pain is better than spoiling your photographs. Otherwise, the moment you sit for post-processing and you feel like scrapping your entire photographs. because sometimes you do not even observe the broken things but when you view the photographs on the big screen then your camera will reveal all the scary secrets of the photoshoot.

I have gone through this phase when I spent all day covering monuments but when start post-processing than I wanted to kill myself for shooting pathetic photographs. It is better when you find any monument that is not maintained at all then Not shooting those monuments is a blessing. See the above-posted images (top) you may find a problem with the photographs.

Keep experimenting, Have a wonderful and happy photography life to you all.
Photographer and Blogger Prasenjeet Gautam (www.prasenjeetgautam.com) has captured the above image. INDIA