Real Wedding · bangalore

Karthik & Sneha

Bangalore → Amita Rasa, Nandi Hills, Chikkaballapura

A 28-acre stone estate at the foot of the Nandi Hills, booked for one wedding and one wedding only, and a 200-guest November day that produced some of the most photographically extraordinary images our team has created near Bangalore.

Amita Rasa sits on a 28-acre estate at the foothills of Nandi Hills, near Chikkaballapura and about 55 km from the airport. It is built in the traditional stone architecture of the region, and it hosts one event at a time, so a family that books it gets the whole property: the Mantapa, the Kalyani amphitheatre, the Baagh and Aangan spaces, and the hills standing behind all of them. It does not announce itself. You drive out of the city, turn in, and the estate is simply there.

Karthik and Sneha's 200-guest wedding used the full estate: a morning ceremony at the Mantapa, a mehendi in the Kalyani amphitheatre, and a reception in the Baagh as the November light shifted from gold to amber. The mandap was deliberately built light, a hand-tied floral canopy on four slim uprights, so that nothing in the frame competed with the stone behind it.

The estate set our production team a lighting problem they enjoyed. Out at the foothills the morning light moves fast and there is no ballroom ceiling to control it. Rather than fight it with fill lighting, we set the ceremony timing to the most dramatic natural moment, roughly 10:30am, when the sun angle gives you the longest shadows and the brightest highlights at once.

Sneha, who is a botanist, walked through the estate the morning after the wedding before anyone else was awake. She told us she went back to the garden where they had eaten dinner and stood there for twenty minutes. 'I wanted to remember what it felt like before it became the place I got married,' she said. 'Now it will always be both things.'

The Wedding, in Frames

The Team

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