The earliest images in wildlife photographer and filmmaker Abhinandan Sharma’s memory aren’t from a camera at all — they’re from the passenger seat of a cycle winding through Rajasthan’s Keoladeo National Park.

For him, the Bharatpur jungle was less a forest and more a familiar backyard. The real spectacle wasn’t the birds, but his uncle — the quiet man who seemed to converse with wildlife through a camera lens.

Growing up in that landscape, Abhinandan wasn’t yet the photographer he would become. He was simply a child absorbing the rhythms of a world where photography wasn’t art — it was inheritance.

“Back then, my family didn’t have an understanding of archiving or preserving photographs,” Abhinandan tells The Better India. “They didn’t see photography as an art form — it was documentation, livelihood, and a reason to go into the forest every day.”

For four generations now, the Sharma family has raised their cameras to the skies — documenting the flight of migratory birds, royal hunts, and the changing landscapes of the park.

The tradition began with his great-grandfather, Nanthan Lal Sharma, who transitioned from running a printing press to becoming a court photographer for the Maharaja of Bharatpur.

“He was one of the members of the ‘navratna’ (nine gems), accompanying the Maharaja to hunting parties with British officials. He documented everything — from Holi festivals and royal weddings to the trophy shots of hunted ducks,” Abhinandan shares.

Over time, his lens drifted outdoors — towards the marshes, the fog-softened grasslands, the silhouettes of monuments, and tall trees settling into the still water. The few surviving glass plates and contact prints show a man trying to understand a landscape even before conservation entered the public vocabulary.

A group photo of delegates with hunted ducks during a trophy shoot in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, captured in the 1930s by Nanthan Lal Sharma.

What began as a family occupation in the early 1910s quietly evolved into ‘Sharma Studios’, an important space that preserved the visual history of Bharatpur over the decades.

However, the defining shift came through Nanthan’s son Dinesh Chandra Sharma, who inherited both the studio and the instinct to look outward.

Known in the family for taking his camera on every trip — whether to hills, forests, or distant towns — he built an informal visual diary of the places he travelled through. By the 1970s, after hunting was banned, he was spending more time inside Keoladeo itself, developing five to seven-foot wildlife prints in the darkroom.

His photographs played a crucial role in creating awareness about Bharatpur’s biodiversity and contributed to the larger conservation push that eventually led to it becoming a national park in 1982.

Then came Naveen Sharma, whose eye moved easily between ceremonial grandeur and the delicate rhythms of the wild. He would shoot elaborate royal weddings one week and wading birds the next — spoonbills lifting off in synchronised arcs, painted storks tending to their nests, bar-headed geese gathering on the water,........

© The Better India