Picking tea in the High Range

[Manfred M]

The hills above the town of Munnar, Kerala, India are known as the High Range. Tea has been grown here since the late 1800s. The land here has slopes of from 30° to 45°. The tea is picked by hand, usually by women. They wear long aprons to protect themselves from leeches and snakes found in the tea bushes that are around 1m / 3ft high. These women also carry a long stick that they use to rap on the tea bushes before they begin picking to scare off the snakes and dislodge the leeches hanging on the leaves.

They only pick the two new top leaves and the bud.

[Shadowman]

Nicely composed.

[Cantab]

An interesting photo, especially for an avid tea drinker. Picking tea sounds like hard and probably poorly paid work. What is the temperature like at harvesting time?

[Manfred M]

An interesting photo, especially for an avid tea drinker. Picking tea sounds like hard and probably poorly paid work. What is the temperature like at harvesting time?

Harvesting takes place from around 08:00 to around 17:00. Temperatures will hit the low 30s at this time of year.

[IzzieK]

I hope you got in touch with Nandakumar while you are there. It would have been an interesting meeting between the two of you. Anyway, this is a wonderful shot but your commentary about snakes and leeches is a bit scary...what is your setting here? Just curious. (I am working on hyperfocal distance calculation at the moment hence I asked..)

[Manfred M]

I hope you got in touch with Nandakumar while you are there. It would have been an interesting meeting between the two of you. Anyway, this is a wonderful shot but your commentary about snakes and leeches is a bit scary...what is your setting here? Just curious. (I am working on hyperfocal distance calculation at the moment hence I asked..)

I was at 140mm on my 2x sensor camera, so the figure was quite far away. I wanted to achieve two things in this shot.

Firstly I wanted to show what tea bushes look like and the picker provides a sense of scale. The bushes are around 80cm / 2-1/2 ft high and a person standing there helps convey that.

The second thing I wanted to convey is something about the tea pickers job and how much physical and poorly paid labour goes into the product. When all is said and done, tea is an inexpensive drink purely because it is so inexpensive to produce.

[Ndukes]

Love it!