Finding My Way Back to the Streets: A Photowalk Through Worli Koliwada

There are times when photography quietly slips into the background of life. Not because you stop loving it, but because life gets busy. Work, responsibilities, family and everything else that demands your attention somehow leave less and less room for the camera. Before you realize it, weeks turn into months, and months into more than a year.

That is more or less where I found myself.

Street photography, the genre I probably love the most, had taken a backseat for far too long. I was still carrying a camera occasionally, still looking at photographs, still noticing interesting faces, light and little moments around me, but I wasn’t really out there photographing.

I had been wanting to change that for a while. But wanting to do something and actually making time for it are two different things.

Then came the opportunity to join a photowalk organised by Fujifilm X Academy to Worli Koliwada. I didn’t think too much about it. I just decided that this time I would step out, put everything else aside for a day and dedicate some proper time to the thing I love doing the most.

And honestly, it felt good to make that decision.

Worli Koliwada turned out to be a pretty good place to find my way back to street photography. Mumbai has these little pockets where the character of the city changes completely within a few hundred metres. Worli Koliwada is one of them.

The narrow lanes, old houses, fishing boats, nets, colours, people sitting outside their homes and children running around; there was something to notice almost everywhere. You don’t necessarily have to go looking for photographs there. You just have to slow down and pay attention.

And I had to remind myself how to do that again.

After being away from street photography for so long, I was a little rusty. You see a moment, hesitate for a second and it’s gone. You notice something interesting only after you’ve walked past it. You get a frame that you thought was going to be great and later realise it wasn’t.

But that’s part of it.

Eventually, you start getting back into the rhythm. You walk, you observe, you wait. You start anticipating things. And every once in a while, everything comes together for that one frame.

That’s what I have always loved about street photography. You don’t create the moment. You don’t ask someone to stand there or repeat something. You are just there, watching life happen, hoping that for a brief moment everything falls into place.

The other thing I really enjoyed about the walk was being around other photographers again.

There were quite a few familiar faces, but also plenty of new people I hadn’t met before. Being in a group of photographers is always interesting because everyone sees the same place differently.

You would stop somewhere and notice one photographer looking at a particular doorway, while someone else was waiting for a person to enter the frame. Another photographer might be looking at the light, the shadows or simply the geometry of the surroundings.

I found myself doing something I often enjoy on photowalks, looking at how other photographers were seeing and composing the same scene.

Sometimes you learn more by watching someone frame a photograph than by being told how to take one. Where they stand, what they leave out, what they wait for, how long they hold the camera before pressing the shutter & these little things say a lot about how differently each photographer approaches a scene.

And of course, there is also the simple pleasure of talking photography with people who don’t need an explanation about why you suddenly stopped in the middle of a lane because the light looked interesting.

Worli Koliwada also gave me that familiar feeling of photographing Mumbai. The contrast is hard to miss. The modern city is right there, but inside the Koliwada, life has its own pace and character. Fishing boats and nets sit alongside old homes, narrow lanes and everyday routines that have been part of this neighbourhood for generations.

But more than anything I photographed that day, I think what stayed with me was the feeling of being out with a camera again.

It had been more than a year since I had consciously dedicated an entire day to street photography. Not a quick walk with a camera. Not a shoot squeezed between other commitments. A proper day where photography was the reason I was out.

And I realised how much I had missed it.

There was no pressure to create a series. No client waiting for photographs. No deadline. No particular goal. I wasn’t even thinking too much about whether the photographs would work for Instagram.I was just photographing because I wanted to. Maybe that’s something I had forgotten somewhere along the way.

Photography doesn’t always need to have a purpose. Sometimes you just need to pick up the camera and walk. You need to give yourself permission to miss a few shots, make a few bad photographs, get distracted, talk to other photographers and simply enjoy being behind the camera.

For me, this photowalk wasn’t some grand comeback to photography. It was much simpler than that. It was a reminder.

A reminder that street photography is still the kind of photography that makes me want to walk for hours without knowing what I might find. That feeling of discovering a frame in an ordinary place, meeting people along the way, seeing how someone else interprets the same scene, and occasionally coming back with an image that makes you stop and look at it twice. I had missed all of that.

Maybe I don’t need to force photography back into my life with some big plan or a new project. Maybe I just need to make time for it again.

One walk at a time.

One neighbourhood at a time.

One frame at a time.

And this time, I don’t want to wait another year to do it again.