Wedding photographers do not have summers. We have "season," and season eats June alive: nine years of other people's most important days, twelve-hour shoots, four thousand photographs a weekend of joy that was never mine to keep.
Then last year two clients postponed, one eloped, bless them, and I found myself holding the rarest object of my career: an empty June.
I did the thing I have watched from banquet-hall windows for a decade. I went up. Gulaba road-head, dawn start, up through the birch to the grass shoulders that run toward Bhrigu, where the ridgelines above four thousand metres lie in rows to the horizon like the sea caught mid-swell.
I carried the camera out of professional superstition. For the first hour I shot everything: the light coming lateral and gold through the birches, wild thyme underfoot releasing its kitchen smell at every step, sheep bells arriving on the wind two valleys before their sheep. Habit is a strong flash; it fires whether you need it or not.
Then somewhere past the first tarn, I did something I have not done since I was nineteen. I put the camera in the bag, and left it there, and started humming.
I don't know what the song was. Something my mother hums while cleaning, half bhajan, half film tune from before my birth. The wind took it, mixed it with the bells, and gave it back improved. A Gaddi shepherd on the far slope raised one hand, not a wave exactly, more an acknowledgment between two professionals both currently off duty.
I ate lunch on a rock and watched the light change for two hours, the exact luxury I sell in every album and never buy. Clouds built at two, as the chai-seller at Gulaba had promised, and I came down warm, thyme-smelling, with eleven photographs and one song stuck exactly where songs should stick.
Here is what nine years of weddings taught me, confirmed at altitude: joy photographs poorly when it's yours. It's meant to go through the body, not the lens. The mountains in high summer are a standing appointment for exactly that transfer.
Go mid-June through September, leave at dawn, be down by the afternoon build-up. Bring the camera if you must. Then betray it.
