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Akanksha Verma and Arushi Lakra, the founders of LensEyeZia, on their journey through the wonderful world of candid wedding photography
Meet Akanksha Verma and Arushi, who are making a difference by supporting one family at a time, as women wedding photographers at LensEyeZia, specialising in candid photography.
Over the years, the team at LensEyeZia has shot 200+ weddings, in India and abroad. As a team of Young Women Photographers (60% girls team), growing their business came with a big struggle at every step.
Akanksha Verma is a woman with photography ideas running through her veins! Armed with a professional camera, a diploma in photography, and a post graduate diploma in photography, Akanksha started freelance candid photography just by herself.
Soon, her childhood friend Arushi (MBA in Marketing and Digital Marketing) joined forces, and they kicked off LensEyeZia in 2017. Their target was to bag 20 projects in the first year, but they ended up doing 40! Their work started getting published. And that’s when they knew that candid wedding photography was their true calling.
As the lead photographer, Akansha is really the brains and the soul of the company and her affair with lights and cameras started at age 19. She believes wedding photography is a way of storytelling. For years, she has been leading the team in capturing these precious moments with utmost perfection. Anyone who knows Akansha, knows that details and playing creatively with lights is her one true love.
On the other hand, Arushi Lakra, co-founder of LensEyeZia productions, is a woman who always has a plan! She believes in finding solutions to every problem, and that’s a rare quality to have. A talented professional, who’s always a step ahead with her artistic vision in marketing. The backbone of the company, she’s known to connect easily with couples and to create new photography ideas from their love stories.
Akansha started photographing at the age of 19 in 2014. And meanwhile Arushi was studying MBA and Digital Marketing. Her marketing skills added value to my creative journey, and we formally started by candid wedding photography in 2017. Initially, it was by the name Capture & Frames and later we changed it to Lenseyezia as it is known today.
“Initially, instead of focusing on our high-quality services, people judged us and rejected our work because of our age and gender. But none of that stopped us from climbing up the ladder and pursuing our passion!”
“My message to everyone is to always remember to stick to one thing and do it whole heartedly. Whatever you do, do it with passion and let nothing stop you. Also, empower others, whenever and wherever it is possible for you.”
When we started in 2017, we had set ourselves a target of 20 projects, but ended up doing 40! Since then we’ve only been beating our own estimates, till last year when this pandemic struck.
From what started as freelance photography with shooting baby, fashion, food, events and preweddings, we’re now a full time team of 20+ inhouse team members and have covered 200+ weddings in India and abroad. We have offices in Delhi and Goa. Today 40% of our clients come through word of mouth, and 60% social media.
As wedding photographers, the LensEyeZia team has always believed in the magic of moments. Moments that bring us together, moments that create bonds, and moments that make us feel loved. And what’s a better way to capture breathtaking moments than capturing a wedding through candid wedding photography! A wedding is such a beautiful celebration of emotions, from a father’s little girl finding a partner, to a couple finding that perfect match. What’s not to love about beautiful Indian weddings and our customs!
We feel there are 2 ways to help the needy. One way is to give fish to someone who’s poor and hungry so that he’s happy and satisfied that day. Another approach is to teach them how to fish so that they can fend for themselves in future. We believe in the second approach.
While you and I might be from affluent and what we consider ‘normal’ backgrounds, not everyone around us is so lucky or privileged. Very early in our business, we were sure that we want to actively seek out and empower the less fortunate by giving them suitable employment opportunities in our own business.
The very first candidate for whom we did this was someone whose parents had to leave everything behind and flee Kashmir. And they could never really find financial stability here. Her family was known to someone from our team so we decided to take up her cause. We went and met her family and saw how their struggle was real and difficult. Two girls trying to sustain and support all expenses including their higher education, food, daily necessities and parent’s health and medication isn’t an easy task. Today, we’re happy to say that she’s an integral part of our team and single-handedly supporting her family too.
Another candidate came to us through a recruitment advertisement. He’s from Manipur and his father had passed away when he was small, leaving behind all responsibilities on him and his elder sister. Since he wasn’t personally known to us, our agency ran a background check and after that we went and personally met his family. He’s now happily employed and is able to support his family like he wants to.
These are just two examples of the kind of positive impact we try to make everytime we recruit someone new into our team.
We’ve won two awards from Art and Exhibition. We had an exhibition on the topic “Intimacy between Couples” for which we won recognition. We also won an award in RK Films Festival.
In future, we want to grow our team in terms of numbers and technology. We are also planning to have one international setup in a location like Dubai, Canada, USA or Thailand.
We believe in holding a camera to capture time and transform it into memories!
Our vision is not just to capture pictures, but to create lifetime bonds. Now, that’s a commitment right? Always having this thought in our heart, when we begin to create memories for a family, we always try to make the couple and the family comfortable. So, you can expect us to silently pivot our way with our cameras, while you are busy enjoying your most important life moments.
Header image source here.
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