This reception he received motivated him to give up his position at the bank, and set sail for India to work as a professional photographer; arriving in Calcutta early in 1863.

Leaving Lahore on 17 March, he journeyed north-east to Kangra and from there, via Byjnath, Holta, Dharmsala and Dalhousie, to Chamba.

The return journey took in the Sind Valley, Baramula, Murree, Delhi and Cawnpore (now Kanpur) before arriving in Lucknow on Christmas Eve 1864.

Bourne's third and last major trip was perhaps his most ambitious; consisting of a six-month journey in the Himalayas with the goal of reaching and photographing the source of the Ganges.

His return journey took in Agra, Mussoorie, Roorkee, Meerut and Naini Tal, and he arrived back in Simla, again in time for Christmas!

He wrote extensively about his travels in the Himalayas (one of the very few photographers in India to do so), in a long series of letters, which appeared in The British Journal of Photography, between 1863 and 1870.

[9] In 1867 he went briefly back to England, in order to marry Mary Tolley, daughter of a wealthy Nottingham businessman; and they both returned to India again later that year, where he continued to travel around the country, producing some 500 more fine images.

[citation needed] Some time shortly after his return to England, he sold off his interests in Bourne and Shepherd studios, and from then on, had nothing more to do with commercial photography; however his archive of some 2,200 glass plate negatives remained with the studio, and were constantly re-printed and sold over the following 140 years, until their eventual destruction in a Calcutta fire on 6 February 1991.

Bourne is justly regarded as one of the finest landscape and travel photographers of 19th-century India; combining a fine eye for composition with high technical expertise.