This is something deep from my dusty archives. At Ohio University, where I studied visual communications for a year, we were asked to illustrate a concept. I took the legend behind the Buddha and his transformation from stately prince to the high priest of a new ideology – perhaps even a religion – as my concept. Given that Buddhist art is already so beautifully, how do you go about illustrating that?

I found an Indian ornament lying around in my apartment; a puppet of a man wearing a sparkling turban riding on a legless horse. I used his face alone and intentionally lit him in the background to appear overbearing, ominous and perhaps even violent. Notice the direction of the light. It’s from below. Ever see this technique in a horror flick?

Several years back, my mother sent me a handpainted scroll from Bhutan depicting the Buddha. If you can believe it, the six Buddhas in the bottom are all from that same image. Ideally there should be eight of them to symbolize the eight-fold path in Buddhist theology, but I couldn’t get them all to fit (this time).

The images were shot on film, scanned at a high resolution and then brought into Photoshop where there was quite a bit of manipulating (something I wouldn’t ever do to an editorial image). Each of the Buddhas were sent through a bunch of Photoshop filters. Each filter tweaks the image to a specification that I was happy to see on my screen. I really wasn’t sure what they would look like before I got started and I was pleasantly surprised by what the results looked like in the end.

The exercise was a grand departure from what I usually do – wedding photojournalism. It was really a time to experiment and have fun. I am not really sure I have conveyed the principal premise of the image clearly. Let’s just call this a work in progress, shall we?