Reading biographies of the greatest photo-influencers, I sometimes feel how serendipity began my love affair with camera.
Cut to growing up in a family of creative and academic wizards, the artistic bone was running strong under the skin but the innate habit of performing in school always surfaced. I was academically excellent and everyone including me felt that I would carve a career in management. Passing my 12th with flying colors, I never in my dreams thought that I would drop the year after having realized my love for fashion and arts into reality.
I knew, I was running against the gravity and giving up an easy ticket to the best of colleges was one of the toughest decisions of my life. I got through NIFT Delhi with AIR 16 and fascinated to walk the ramp like the Rohit Bals and Manish Arora, soon to realize that my real strength lies in communicating art/ design through a different medium of expression. I started experimenting and photography being an underplayed subject of Fashion communication course where every student wanted to be a graphic geek or a visual merchandiser. My first personal DSLR was the mighty Nikon D60 and luckily a professor spotted my talent of capturing fashion and art. She encouraged me to hone it ahead with freelancing which steered me to spend sleepless nights in researching and learning my equipment’s online. I make no pretence of having a long photographic lineage or even having decades of experience. But I don’t think it is necessary, this or rather art and design are few professions where your work speaks for itself. Photography was just an avocation that I converted to vocation.
Exactly seven years ago, during my third year of college, I embarked upon this journey to never look back and initiate practicing the same professionally. By the end of my fourth year, without any help from my folks, I successfully had a small studio in place and thereby, the inception of my company. The struggle was in CAPSLOCK. Having no godfather in the industry or having assisted no photographer, I learnt it all by myself and I am glad it happened because I made tons and tons of mistakes. All this enabled me to imbibe the real knowledge, work out my own style/technique and package my talent, in my own exclusive way.
Today, I boast of having shot for the finest of brands, companies and magazines and its just the beginning.