Around the world in a day

Thanks to photo studios, youngsters in Delhi are travelling miles and getting pictures edited with their favourite backgrounds, making it appear like they have visited monuments and destinations all over the world.
When Boman Irani’s character Lucky Singh in the film Lage Raho Munna Bhai, gets his photographer to edit his photo to look like he’s shaking hands with George Bush, many of us might have had to suppress a chuckle or two.The backdrop there was the White House in Washington, in the beginning, and then, when Singh is reminded that he has never visited the US, the shrewd businessman quipped, “Bush toh India aaya hoga… peeche se White House hata ke apna farm house laga de.” Well, many of Delhi’s photo studios have had to deal with similar requests, if not more weird ones.
Facebook's the word
For that unique display picture on Facebook, youngsters are willing to shell out money to photo editing studios. Says Mukesh Goyal of Rohini-based WebShree, “Requests of this sort are extremely common - most of the orders that we get are from youngsters who want to use these pictures to impress people on Facebook. We’ve got people placed in front of numerous world-famous monuments – from the Eiffel Tower to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and so on. Different youngsters have different demands, and we try and cater to them as much as we can. By now, they are almost an everyday activity.”
However some might not agree to that. Pradeep Bajaj of Bajaj Photo World in Lajpat Nagar says, “We don’t get these requests very often but when we do, we ask them why they need the background of their photos to be changed to display famous foreign places. The answer that we get is mostly for their profile photos on Facebook.”
Rahul Kumar Thakur, a software professional, has been all around the world or so, one garners from his display pictures on Facebook. “I keep putting up background-edited pictures once in three months or so. The point is to make it look believable – if one changes their profile pictures frequently, the entire process is bound to fall flat since people will realise the truth. For a working professional, frequent trips all around the world would be unbelievable!”
Delhi is in the wishlist too
The long list of to–display monuments in order to impress folks includes Delhi, too. Ishwar Chand, of Gaurav Studios in Civil Lines, speaks of a weird request that he had received about a month back. “There was this guy, who had just got a job and moved to Delhi, and originally hailed from a village in Uttar Pradesh. He came to us, handed us a photo, in which he was posing in front of his workplace, and asked us to change the background to India Gate. We were quite surprised, since India Gate is not exactly the monument people in Delhi want to insert into their photos; I mean, one could just go and get himself clicked in front of it! But then, the guy said that he was running out of time and had to go back home that very evening, and needed something to impress his family and neighbours back in the village with,”
says Chand.
Proper 'background' checks are done
It is not just the background of the photograph to be edited which is taken care of by studios; the background of the person making them go through the process is also under the scanner. When studios take on the work of editing people’s photos, they almost always get the person’s intentions verified. An innocuous post on Facebook is not their concern, but other, graver matters are. Mukesh Goyal says, “Before getting down to editing a photograph, we always ask the customer why they are getting the photo edited. There have been incidents when we have received requests of removing an entire group of people from a photo and retaining only the customer and a person he wanted to keep in the picture. We did not want to risk misuse of the photograph, and so verified the person’s background carefully.”
Propose before the Eiffel Tower
Like they say, everything is fair in love and war– one does not know where to stop when it comes to impressing their would/could-be better halves. Anuj Dutt, who runs a studio at Kashmere Gate, says, “We usually don’t entertain bizarre requests, but once in a while, we have a close one asking us for a favour and we can’t turn them down. A friend’s friend, who wanted to surprise his girlfriend by proposing to her in front of the Eiffel Tower, came to us with probably the weirdest of requests that I’ve ever received. He had a photograph of his girlfriend – a side shot, in which she was standing – and he wanted us to place him on the photo and put the Eiffel behind them. Since he didn’t have a ‘Will-you-marry-me’-ish kneeling proposal photo, we made him go on his knees with a fake ring and clicked one in the studio, there itself. This was then superimposed on the other photo, and it was made to look as if he was actually proposing to his girlfriend.”
What comes in, stays in…
Identities of these ‘globe-trotters’ are never disclosed and the photographers take special care in ensuring their clients of the same. “We keep the confidentiality of the entire process in mind when these customers come to us. We do not disclose the names of our clients, and make sure we only take up orders which don’t appear too fishy,” says Anuj Dutt.
Agrees Mukesh Goyal and says, “We make our customers sign a confidentiality clause so that they don’t reveal that it is our work. But then, making this agreement only serves the customer’s purpose since it is they who actually benefit from it.”