DIWALI AT HOME
The diyas, the doorway, the rangoli, the puja and the family, in the light the evening actually has.
HOME › DIWALI AND HOLI
Lamps, colour, and two evenings a phone cannot handle.
Diwali is the hardest evening of the year to photograph and Holi is the hardest day. Both are the ones most worth getting right.
A Diwali room is lit by small warm flames with bright points scattered through it, which is exactly the situation that defeats a phone. You end up with orange blur, faces lost in shadow, and a rangoli that took four hours to make reduced to a smudge on the floor. Holi is the opposite problem, fast and outdoors and covered in powder that most photographers would rather not walk into.
Meanwhile every photographer in New Jersey is advertising autumn foliage and holiday cards. The families and companies who put a fortnight into Diwali, and the communities who fill a car park at Holi, are barely spoken to at all.
Iselin has the highest share of Indian residents of anywhere in the United States, and Oak Tree Road is the largest South Asian commercial corridor in the country.
Around it sit Edison at roughly a third Indian, Woodbridge, Piscataway and South Brunswick, and Middlesex County as a whole holds by far the largest Indian population of any county in the state. Carteret has one of the highest per capita Sikh populations anywhere in the country, with gurdwaras a few hundred yards apart. Somerset County carries the oldest Sikh institutions in New Jersey, through Bridgewater, Hillsborough and Bound Brook.
Jersey City is the other centre, particularly around Journal Square, which holds some of the largest outdoor celebrations in the state.
Middlesex and Somerset carry no travel fee at all. Hudson, Morris and everywhere else have a flat published figure charged once for the visit, listed on the pricing page.
The diyas, the doorway, the rangoli, the puja and the family, in the light the evening actually has.
Banquet halls and hotel ballrooms anywhere in the state, covered from arrival to the end of the night.
Speeches, food and dancing. Companies host these properly now and almost none are photographed.
Private parties, temple celebrations and the large public melas. The most photogenic day of the year.
Nine nights of movement and colour, or any single one of them.
Pandals, arti and the gatherings around them, across Middlesex and Somerset.
At home and at community celebrations, through to the visarjan.
The sadya and the pookalam, which the Malayali community here does at real scale.
Nagar Kirtan processions, Akhand Path and gurdwara celebrations, following whatever the gurdwara asks.
Everything else on this site carries a printed price. These two genuinely cannot.
A quiet Diwali evening at home and a three hundred person corporate Diwali in a hotel ballroom are not remotely the same job, and neither is a family Holi party against a public mela with a thousand people in it. Printing one number for all of that would mean taking it back the moment I heard the details.
What decides it, in roughly this order:
Everything else stays as it is elsewhere on the site. Middlesex and Somerset carry no travel charge at all, and the rest of the state is a flat published figure. Photographs arrive within five to seven business days. A deposit of half secures the evening, with the remainder payable once the photographs are ready. The licence never expires. And nothing is added for Holi, despite what the colour does to equipment.
Unlike a wedding, there is no second date to move to.
Nearly every Diwali booking lands on a handful of evenings, and once those are taken they are gone until the following year. Two to three months ahead is sensible, and if you have several events across that week it is far better to send me all the dates at once than to come back for each one separately.
There is one of me. No assistants, no second shooter, no team turning up in a van. That suits almost every booking on this page and it does not suit an event running in two rooms at the same moment. If that is your evening, I will tell you rather than take it.
The dates, the venue, roughly how many people and where you are. A fixed price comes back within a few hours, and half up front holds the evening.
Every ceremony covered, from mehndi through to anand karaj, booked by the day.
The other half of the calendar, from iftar gatherings through to the Eid melas.
The published side of the business, for a straightforward family set with nothing else happening.
The largest Indian population of any county in the state, and no travel charge.
Bridgewater and Hillsborough, also with no travel fee.
Tap four answers and the enquiry writes itself.