We are Preeti and Prashant Chacko, a multi award winning husband-and-wife duo who work together as @composingthewild. We think of ourselves as storytellers in the wild rather than wildlife photographers in the conventional sense. We would like our images to feel less like records of a sighting and more like moments worth lingering over.

The fun fact most people find surprising is that we shoot side by side and almost always come away with completely different photographs. Preeti is drawn to gentleness and intimacy, to the quiet bonds between mothers and young and the moments that require more patience than technique. Prashant is drawn to drama — theatrical light, bold atmospheres, the frame that feels like a film still. Together, our work is not a contest of perspectives but a conversation.

We work almost exclusively in black and white, because removing colour forces the story to carry the image on its own — light, form, gesture and emotion without distraction. We reach for colour only when colour itself becomes part of the story, and not before.

We think of wild animals as characters rather than subjects — each one with a personality, a history and a story that people can recognise something of themselves in. This is, in many ways, the oldest artistic impulse there is. The first art ever made, on cave walls forty thousand years ago, was of animals. We are simply trying to continue that conversation with modern tools and our own particular points of view.