New York Film Academy Photography School student Rutvik Katuri’s final project for his Photo I class is currently the cover of Imirage, a monthly magazine that applauds relevant and visually stunning features on art, design, writing, film, music, photography, style and other creative genres.
The Indian festival of Holi, which celebrates colors and love, inspired Katuri’s project. “It’s a play of analogous and complementary colors,” said Katuri about the work on his cover image. “Technically it was just a simple one light setup with a beauty dish and capturing the images with a simple macro lens. To me it was more about picking the right colors and figuring out what were the right designs that fit the face. We started out by adding red around one eye and we let the design go wherever it took us, but we kept in mind that it has to be symmetric on both the sides.”
Growing up in the southern part of Hyderabad, India, Katuri’s interest in photography began as a hobby but slowly grew into a passion after shadowing local event and wedding photographers. He grew even fonder of the art after discovering the work of fashion photographers like Emily Soto and Lindsey Adler. From there, Katuri moved to New York City, where he is currently enrolled as a photography student at NYFA.
“NYFA has definitely improved my skills in terms of getting the light setup quicker as well as with working on post-production in Photoshop,” says Katuri. “To give you a little bit of perspective, it used to take me 30 minutes to get a simple setup with one light. Now I take about 30 minutes for a complex four-light setup. Same goes for my post-production — it has cut my time in half.”
Katuri is now heading more into studio fashion and beauty photography, and will be expanding to on-location fashion photography.
Two projects that he is currently working on are entitled “Futuristic Fashion” and “Symmetry.”