Stuti Sakhalkar Dasgupta
Stuti Sakhalkar Dasgupta from The Cheesecake Project

The internet is a beautiful place, that is only if you choose to consume the right things and filter the wrong ones. Amidst a sea of peppery Bollywood gossip and many controversial stories, Team MissMalini constantly tries to dish out stuff that inspires, and posts that make everyone’s hearts happy. A while ago, I had done a couple of photo diaries on Instagram’s cutest and most stylish twin and triplet babies. To add to my quota of happy blogs, I caught hold of one of my most favourite wedding photographers Stuti Sakhalkar Dasgupta from The Cheesecake Project and got her to pick some of the most romantic couple pictures clicked by her. Here you go.

When I asked the super talented Stuti to talk about her journey and tell me where it all began, here’s what she said:

“It all began when a friend asked me to photograph his sister’s wedding. It was as simple as that. I had been attached to the camera at the hip since college, some 8-9 years ago and I loved making portraits. By then I’d done a gazillion portraits for my friends and double the number of self portraits, experimenting on the self first. That very first experience was so much fun and filled me with so much joy that I literally gatecrashed my second wedding shoot. Somebody on Twitter suggested I came along for his friend’s wedding with a camera and I did! It’s unreal because back then, I shot alongside my newly made twitter friend and a big name in the wedding photography industry. And that wedding was fun too! The more I kept posting online, as I always had, the more friends of friends of friends started writing in asking me to photograph their weddings. And it’s been just that ever since. I was doing TV at the time when all these wedding shoots started to pour in. It was tough deciding between my two great loves. My parents were so incredibly supportive and knew how much I loved to shoot and backed me up big time and I jumped right in. It’s been a beautiful four years now and I’ve made so many friends and even more memories of people in love 🙂

Photographing weddings, despite being the business of photography, will always be something very personal to me. The fact that a girl let’s me into her personal space, opens her heart to me, narrates how she fell in love with her soon to be, cries, holds herself strong and goes through a rollercoaster of emotions and still wants me by her side to capture her most vulnerable and private moments means a great big deal to me. And it’s not just the bride. The parents too 🙂 I still remember this one wedding where I had grown so attached to the bride’s mother that I had to make eyes at her and strictly ask her not to cry for the nth time in the day. I’ve consoled crying fathers, brothers and sisters, I’ve giggled through some absolute R rated conversations between the bride, her friends and me, we’ve even taken the Groom aside for a “Portrait session” when he’s wanted to sneak in a quick smoke!

It seems like the coolest job in the world and it most certainly is one of the most fun things I’ve done but it’s also very, very taxing – physically, mentally and emotionally and yet extremely satisfying :)”

Way to go, girl! <3