Speakers
This year’s lineup of over 60 speakers, returning vets and newbies alike, are here to deliver an incredible experience for all ShutterFesters!
Shutterfest 2027 Speaker Lineup
Abhi Sarkar
Specialty: Multi-cultural weddings, lighting, posing and re-inventing yourself.
My name is Abhi — a first-generation immigrant, father to a three-year-old daughter, retired neuroscientist, and a wedding and portrait photographer. I came to this country with nothing but curiosity, earned my PhD here, and somewhere in all of that, I discovered that the most important thing to study was never cells — it was people. I capture emotion first and art second, because I know what it means to be far from home, to build a life from scratch, and to understand just how sacred it is when families come together across cultures, across oceans, across everything that separates them. I specialize in luxury South Asian, multicultural, and fusion weddings, and fine art portraiture in studio for moms-to-be and families.
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Abhi Sarkar’s Classes:
One Flash, Any Culture: A 60-Second Lighting Setup for Every Client You’ll Ever Shoot
Class Description:
Most lighting education teaches you one setup for one look — and quietly assumes all your clients look the same. They don’t. And if you’ve ever watched a technique fall apart on a darker skin tone, or lost a richly colored garment to a ratio that worked perfectly five minutes ago, you already know that the gap between what we’re taught and what we actually face at real events can be humbling.
This class is my answer to that gap. One flash. One modifier. One system — adaptable enough to work across skin tones, garment colors, cultural contexts, and the beautiful unpredictability of venues that were never designed with photographers in mind. And deployable in under sixty seconds when the moment won’t wait for you to think. In this live demo, you’ll watch the same setup shift in real time across models with different skin tones — same modifier, different power ratios and color temperature decisions, and you’ll see exactly what changed and why. We’ll work through a dim mandap-style interior, a mixed ambient outdoor setup, and a high-contrast garment scenario, so that by the time you leave, your eye is already trained for all of it.
Every client you will ever shoot deserves light that was built for them. This is how you do that.
What to Bring to Class:
You should know how to fire a flash — that’s it. You don’t need to be an off-camera lighting expert, and you definitely don’t need experience shooting multicultural weddings. What you do need is a willingness to look at light differently than you have before, because this class is going to challenge the idea that one ratio works for every person standing in front of your camera. Bring your flash if you have one, bring your curiosity, and if you’ve ever felt unsure about how to light a client who didn’t look like the models in the tutorials you learned from — bring that feeling too. That’s exactly where we’re starting.