Madurai Airport is a Tourist Place
This has become like an impromptu tourist place.
In Madurai, people gather here just to watch flight landing or takeoff. In most of the cities, you don’t get such view, as the airport is always away from city, you can’t just take your family to flight runway edge wall and witness the epic sunset along with flight landing while eating popcorn and tea. But it’s possible here :)
So, we decided to join this cult and wanted to see the flight landing as close as possible. Not just watch, also take the best photographs of it. Then, I checked this flight timings and figured out that, there are flights landing at 4:00PM, 4:15PM, 5:30PM and 6:00PM so on. So, I thought, If I am there at 4, I should get some good chances of clicking it.
I have always heard, people come to watch it. But that was my first time, seeing this scene in person. I saw people gathering to witness this scene. As I mentioned above, it’s not easy to get such scene in big cities, as the airport is always far from city and heavily secured. You can’t just stand close to an airport wall and pretend I am here to see flight. But, here in Madurai, you can.
I saw the light.
I saw the light and I realised it’s the flight. I took my camera out of bag, settings ready and started clicking. I have this back button focus. So, I had to focus — click, focus — click. And I feel, I got good number of shots.
My focus is not to just get the clean shots of plane, also to catch scenes along with disturbing foreground, which could make a good street photograph.
It’s over, people have left. Next plane is going to take lot of time. So, I and my friend decided to check nearby village road towards Kusavankundu, as my friend’s hometown is around that area and he knew there are some pleasant scenes are present there.
In the empty straight road, we stopped at this village ‘Konarpatti’, which is densely covered with trees. I tried to frame the town with trees and interesting subjects.
We all know Madurai is famous for Jasmine flower. But, have you seen Jasmine garden?
While we stopped here and clicking things around, these 4 gentlemen approached us and initiated the conversation. They tried to understand, why do we click? do we keep these photographs or delete? where do we show? are these college works? I could not help them understand, it’s passion. It was not easy to explain what is passion to them.
I came to know, their only job is goat shepherding and their only ‘talk of the town ‘ right now was the upcoming Jallikattu on January.
They did not know Instagram. Also, they did not have phone numbers to accept these photographs. Also, they were not ready to. That looked strange to me.
10 steps ahead, we saw this group of sheep and stopped to click some. Again, this same gang approached us and they said it’s their sheep only and showed all possible stunts.
No one wears mask here. Not complaining though.
These sheep really enjoyed playing with these kids. As they raise hands, this sheep observes it, tries to hit and the kid stops it. And the sheep enjoyed doing it again and again.
After having these good number of photographs, we started returning from that place. The roads was completely filled with many farms, some of them were covered with electricity, which explains they could be farming important corps or expensive ones.
Welcome to vsnu blog, where you can weird angle bird photographs.
The typical village shot — bunch of sheep crossing the road. I tried to frame a bird as well.
Time is 5:45PM — and as planned, we reached the airport, but to the other side to get a different view of plane landing. When we came, we saw these 2 dudes grabbed the seats before us — with smiling faces. damn!
There were around 10 to 15 people behind me. Some were families, some were ones, who were travelling in the highway and stopped for the break. As it’s getting dark, the flight runway light was on. Once all the lights are on, people got alerted, whispering around with the excitement of the plane. But, it did not. We could not see any plane and mistake many blinking lights on road.
Drum roll please.
All of sudden, a bright light and a whooshing sound. Thanks to my new camera bag — I picked out my camera in 1.3 seconds like a gun slinger and shot these photographs.
Money shot: Panning photograph of a flight — I never thought, I could make a photograph like this, when I woke up that day.
Show is over, people!
Once it started getting dark, people left. Forget how silly is to watch a plane landing on 2020. What’s important is to enjoy those little moments.
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