fujifilmxindia

Hi, this is Naieem here. I am a wedding photographer based in Kerala.
My story might seem familiar to a lot of you guys out there. Its an usual engineer turned photographer kinda story. Cliche stuff right? Though it might seem very usual these days, trust me it wasn’t at all easy for me.
I’ve had this weird obsession/habit of trying to see and observe day to day things as light and shadows, right from my school days. Back then I used to do graphite drawings and oil paintings. Later on I started taking this habit seriously and started doing commissioned graphite/charcoal portraits for others. I kept doing this for quite long and at a point I even made a website offering this portrait drawing service online.
Slowly I started trying my hands on photography. I started doing travel photography with a compact camera I owned back then. I have always thought of photography as an extension to doing paintings. That’s when ‘it’ happened. A cousin of mine came home for vacation with a big sized, “never before seen”, kind of camera. He told me it had a detachable front part, called a lens. I honestly thought he was trying to fool me! I went home and started searching online and to my pleasant surprise I understood he wasn’t lying. That piqued my interest in the system. During that time, I sold off my mobile phone and I purchased a DSLR camera and started doing photography as a hobby. I started doing street and travel photography and started shooting bugs, insects, birds, cats, flowers and what not!
Right after college, I joined a leading Indian IT company and later decided to quit my job as I just couldn’t handle the work pressure any longer. I wanted be free of all the work related stress and hence I thought starting a wedding planning company(Band Baja Bharath hongover may be?!) could be the answer to all my problems! I started a wedding planning company along with a few friends and for a time pass I started shooting weddings! That’s how the journey started.
In 2019, I happened to do the Metanoia wedding photography workshop by the world famous husband-wife photographer duo, TwoMann and that has been a turning point in my career. Since then, the way I see things and the way I connect with my clients have changed.
The biggest creative high for me is when a client calls me right after seeing his wedding pictures to say that he/she made the right choice by choosing me to document their big day. Today, it all feels like a dream. Having shot over 500 weddings now, I literally feel like I was born to be doing this. As John Keats said, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”.