The one that got away – Prasanna Welangoda
A.S.H. Smyth interviews the marketing manager and fledgling food photographer on the greatest shot he never got... and one he did
Prasanna Welangoda got into photography in 2012, when he borrowed his aunt’s ‘ancient tank of a camera’ to go on holiday. He took his first portrait later that year, in Negombo: an old lady smoking a beedi (‘to this day one of my favourite shots’) – and after that began to see the world a little differently.
Self-taught, he trained on the job, consciously moving himself through different genres, from fashion projects, to landscapes, to weddings, to shooting architecture as part of his PR job for Jetwing hotels (‘I haven’t shot sports yet; but I would love to shoot some MMA’).
A committed geek, his portrait work at comic cons in both Sri Lanka and Australia was featured three years running by gaming website Kotaku. And having moved to Queensland nearly two years back, his socialmedia work in hospitality marketing has since seen him add food photography to his portfolio.
The one that got away
‘We were driving towards this attraction called the Natural Bridge, which is in a national park along the Gold Coast in Queensland. We were about an hour and a half outside Brisbane, around 9:30 in the morning, and we’re chatting, and I just glance to the side and think “Hell’s bells... Look at this!”
It’s this lake – Advancetown Lake – and it is perfectly calm, because there is a dam at one end. And it’s got these white, dead trees coming out of the water: it’s filled with them. You drive along the entire shore, but it’s surrounded by forest, there’s no place to park. I saw this boat-ramp, and I went down there to see if there was any possible location to set up for a future photograph: the view even from there is crazy, a complete panorama waiting to happen.
There is a saying that the best camera is the one you have on you. But I don’t take my camera around with me all the time, and on this particular trip I didn’t expect to take any photos at all. It was a family outing, a tiny hike, some lunch. I’d never been to this place, and never imagined that there’d be a shot like this waiting.
But now I have this image in my mind, and I wanna get it out!
The shot I have in my head is just the trees, the glassstill water... and hopefully a sunset, reflecting off the surface. I even have an app that tells me where the sunset will be! For the moment, I’m just imagining it. But I am absolutely going to go back there and get this shot.
My plan is to go to one of the points along the bank that you can access, and hike around until I get to the perfect location. I don’t even know if that’s something you’re allowed to do. This place is hardly the outback – not even halfway out back – but I don’t know anything about the wildlife, and I truly do not want to mess with the snakes here. Still, if you don’t hear from me, you’ll know what happened.’
The shot that he got
‘At the Brisbane Showgrounds every year they hold this massive agricultural festival called the ‘Ekka’. That’s short for ‘exhibition’, but really it’s called the Royal Queensland Show, and it’s been going on for about 150 years.
I’ve made friends with some of the guys at Canon Australia, and one of them always stays at the hotel I work for, specifically to shoot the nightly fireworks from a particular room. I’d been to the rooftop once – it isn’t open to guests – and there’s an amazing view. So I suggested that we do something together.
Canon wanted to do their first ever fireworks photography workshop – a subject where you could get really technical: long shutter speeds for the nice, dynamic trails, or stuff where you just freeze the action, but that is super-hard because it’s gotta be so quick. They had everybody, from beginner to advanced, and I had the oldest equipment there! But I did get to play with Canon’s latest model at the time.
We used the kids’ fireworks show as a test, to lock in settings, etc. And then while the big fireworks were going off in the centre of the stadium, there was a rider on horseback carrying a flaming torch, doing laps. The maximum that my shutter speed would stretch to is 30 seconds, but this guy took longer than that to go around, so I got the flame in every quadrant, and then I had a shot of the fireworks, and another one of the ferris wheel – and the result here is a composite of all of that.
When you think about a landscape, you imagine it as unmoving. But this way you have that motion trapped within the image, like those maps of the planetary orbits.’