It is this time of year when GQ India celebrates their Men of the Year with honorary issues and awards.

The Actor of the Year award for 2019 went to Ayushmann Khurrana and I had the pleasure of photographing him for this issue. This is my second GQ cover with Ayushmann

Also every year GQ picks a theme for the awards and a color scheme. This year as enviromental issues are being very much the point of focus they decided to go with a marine/sea theme and work around water-concept and make aqua their key color.

We wanted bright light images and some nice motion. Rahul Vijay who is the new Fashion Director, brought selections with great prints, textures and volumes and I wanted to show all that.

I used a beauty dish and my key light, a 90×120 Broncolor softbox as my fill light and a  back light with a simple reflector as my separation light. For the pool shot, I used a Broncolor para 88 umbrella as my key light and a long strip softbox on the side as a fill.

Photo Assistants: Ankit Sharma and Snehashish Roy

The Behind-the-Scenes video was shot and edited by Rose Tommy