Sydney photographer Shekhar Jay
There are moments in a photographer’s life that quietly redefine everything. For Jay, a clinical research project manager by day and a portrait photographer by devotion, one such moment came through a hotel room lens in Sydney, with Bollywood icon Kajol on the other side of it.
When Jay heard through a friend that Kajol was flying to Australia for a store launch across Sydney and Melbourne, he did what most fans wouldn’t. Through another contact based in Mumbai, he reached out to her agency and put himself forward. The shoot was commissioned, and a pharma professional from Vizag found himself behind the lens with one of Hindi cinema’s most enduring leading ladies.
“She’s been around for so many years,” Jay says. “I’ve been a big fan since my college days.”
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Kajol, he found, is no-nonsense. She knew exactly what kind of shots she needed, which angles suited her, and she had no interest in pretence. “She will call a spade a spade,” he says. For some, that directness might feel like pressure. For Jay it was something richer. “She gave me creative freedom, but she also knew what she wanted. She’d say, top angle, tell me the angles. She wanted 100 percent. And honestly, so did I.”
The shoot unfolded differently across the two cities. Sydney leaned warmer, the images carrying a golden softness. Melbourne required more working through, test shots first, adjusting colour and contrast, finding the mood within the space of her hotel room. It was the kind of collaboration that good portrait photography demands, two people reading the light and each other at the same time.
And then there were her eyes.
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“Her eyes speak volumes,” Jay says, and the plainness of the phrase carries more than elaboration would. For someone who has spent years studying faces through a lens and built a quiet second life out of understanding what a portrait can hold, that is not a small observation. She is a perfectionist, he says. She wants everything to be right. So does he. By the end, she was happy with the results.
When Jay arrived in Australia in 2002 from Vizag, photography was already a deep passion. His subject of choice – people, faces, the stories that live just beneath the surface of a gaze.
“Although I am not being able to devote too much time to it,” he admits, “I breathe and dream about it always.”
His instrument of choice is the Sony A7R5, paired with prime lenses and an 85mm at f/1.4, that signature shallow focus that makes portrait photography feel almost cinematic.
For a clinical researcher who fits photography into the margins of a demanding career, landing a commissioned shoot with Kajol is about as good as it gets. The networking paid off, the images were delivered, and the subject was happy.
Not a bad result for a weekend photographer from Vizag.
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