KOCHI: The desert — endless heaps of sand, oppressive heat, occasional mirages, and the camels meandering across the dunes. But beyond these postcard clichés, lies a hidden world. When he first moved to the UAE as an interior designer, Anish Karingattil always associated the desert with the beautiful imageries he had seen in Hollywood films.
But instead of just rearranging furniture, he soon found himself rearranging his view of the desert — discovering its secret beauty through the lens of his camera, one tiny critter at a time. Growing up in the small village of Valapad in Thrissur, Anish was a person who could spend hours watching butterflies flutter by and fireflies light up the night. But back then, photography was not even on his radar.
It was not until a good friend handed him a camera and said, “You’ve got to try this,” that Anish got hooked. In 2008, he bought his first DSLR camera, after long days of designing interiors, he would head home, camera in hand, and teach himself the ropes by snapping shots and figuring it out — because who needs training when you have determination? “The main reason I started exploring the desert was that it felt like an uncharted territory. The desert has two different vibes — during the day, it’s a calm beauty, but at night that beauty intensifies, and so does the danger.
Almost 95 per cent of the creatures you see at night are packing venom,” he says. It is this risk factor that attracted Anish. He soon started e.