2020-November-05

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What’s Your Secret Passion?

BY HELEN GALL

You might have a secret passion for an activity, object, or concept. Perhaps it’s barely a secret, or you’re still deciding what passion you want to follow. That’s OK!

The important thing is to discover your passions and follow them. It will impact your life and work in all the best ways.

Just hearing other people talk about their secret passions outside of work is interesting and often motivating. We get to work with so many amazing people at Cisco, but we don’t always get the opportunity to learn about their personal passions.

With that in mind, we went on the hunt for people with unique secret passions and quickly found Kedar Karmarkar.

A Keen Eye for His Passion in the Sky

By day, Kedar is a Principal Technical Marketing Engineer (TME) — and he loves it.

Outside of work, he has a secret passion that most are surprised to learn about: Kedar is a published aviation photographer.

More specifically, he loves to photograph military aircraft and warbirds in their natural environment, the sky.

Kedar Karmarkar: “I had a picture of a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon with the pilot’s name on it. He gifted it to the squadron when he rotated out. The pilot and his wife sent me a thank you card, along with a Squadron patch with 1000 Hrs on it to indicate the number of hours the pilot had. Small things like these make me immensely proud of having taken the shot.”

Photography was initially a hobby that Kedar started when he moved to the United States from India in 1999. The accessibility and affordability of photography equipment in the U.S. made it possible for him to pursue his interest. And unlike in India, there were air shows in the States.

Kedar has always had an affinity for “things with wings.” He grew up fixated on the Commando comics that were filled with stories of fighter pilots. His family supported his passion by gifting him books and taking him to old newspaper shops to search voraciously for anything on military aviation.

As Kedar describes it, he had “a bug for fighters taking to the sky and turning and burning with the jet engines on afterburners.”

As fate would have it, when he arrived in the U.S., his apartment was on the flight path of Moffett Field in the San Francisco Bay Area. A couple months later, he attended an airshow where he touched the fighters on display and talked to the pilots and crew. It solidified Kedar’s passion for military aviation photography.

Lessons Our Passions Teach Us

Kedar’s secret passion has taught him many things that he’s applied across all aspects of his life. He learned that he had to get out of his comfort zone to learn and grow. And never stop experimenting.

The extreme situations Kedar faced to get killer shots taught him that passion and determination can motivate you to push yourself (even physically) more than you thought possible.

And the unpredictability of photographing aircraft in the sky taught Kedar to be flexible and make the most out of every situation.

Kedar: “This is another of my favorites. Taken in pitch dark of the night — a nightmare for the lens and camera to focus properly, and then come up with a noise-free image. This is a shot of the B-1B Lancer supersonic bomber — a.k.a. the Bone from the 9th Bomb Squadron 'Bats' from Dyess AFB, Texas — taking off from Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, Nevada. TheDrive.com ran an article on it.”

Kedar: “This is an air-to-air shot of a MiG-17F owned and flown by Jason Somes, a pilot out of Camarillo, California, flying over the runway of the airport. We dragged him in the slot position, and I shot it out of the Beech Baron being flown by another great photographer, Scott Slocum. It was an idea I had that we executed on, and it actually made the cover shot of a web magazine.”

Imaginative Ways to Solve Customer Issues

Kedar found that the different ways to take in the world of aviation photography forces you to use your imagination and “hack” your way out of tricky situations.

He learned that some of those hacks can turn into real solutions. This is especially true when you include people who know more than you in the process.