A Journey of Light & Trust

How It Started

The Backs of Magazines

I was born partially sighted — 25% vision in my left eye, none in my right. I could make out a headline or a billboard if I got close enough, but never a paragraph of text. My father kept subscriptions to Time, National Geographic, Forbes, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. I never read a single article in any of them.

What stopped me every time was the imagery — the landscapes on the covers, and the full-page ads on the back for watches, perfumes, and brands most people around me had never heard of. I didn't know it yet, but I was studying commercial photography years before I ever picked up a camera.

School was ordinary. My grades were nothing special — I passed, most years, barely. But I never felt shut out. I had good friends and teachers who looked past the report card.

A Camera That Let Me See

Photography found me almost by accident, in 2006, in college. I'd bought a 4-megapixel Olympus point-and-shoot, and I noticed something: if I took a photo and zoomed into it on my desktop monitor, I could see details in the world I'd never been able to see with my own eyes. The camera and the screen together gave me a kind of vision I didn't otherwise have. I got obsessed — shooting the street every day, uploading to Flickr every night.

In 2008, one of those street photographs was picked up by Penguin Books India for the cover of a travelogue called Beyond the Border. That's the moment photography stopped being a hobby.

A Partnership, Before It Was Necessary

Hurma and I have been together since college. She could draw — real pencil-sketch talent — and ran her own small handmade jewelry brand on the side. At first, she just helped me quality-check and shortlist which photos were good enough to upload. Slowly, she started stepping onto my shoots as a food stylist. We decided to get married in 2015.

2016

In 2016, a routine visit to my retinal specialist turned into an immediate diagnosis: retinal detachment, requiring surgery right away. The surgery itself succeeded — but it opened the door to several years of complications and follow-up treatments, including a corneal transplant I still carry today.

Hurma and I both saw where this was heading before it fully arrived. So starting that same year, I began teaching her everything I knew about photography — lighting, composition, direction, everything I'd taught myself since 2006. Bit by bit, she took over the execution side of the work, while I stayed exactly where I'd always been most valuable: conceptualizing the shot before it exists.

Built for a Year No One Expected

When COVID reached Pakistan in 2020, the entire industry shifted online almost overnight — clients no longer expected in-person meetings before hiring a studio. We leaned into it. We started offering new premium clients a free sample shoot of a single product before they signed anything — proof of concept, and honestly, a conversion tool. We were confident that if a client saw the sample, they'd say yes.

And once they did — once we eventually met in person, and a client realized I was blind — it never became an issue. The trust was already built on the work itself.

Seeing Differently

I didn't know anything about accessibility technology until 2019. For over a decade before that, I'd built my own system: high-powered glasses, a small magnifier I carried everywhere, and every screen I owned — camera, phone, computer — set to a black background with oversized white text, so I could get close enough to read it.

When my condition made even that system unreliable, I found TalkBack, then Google Assistant, then steadily improving image and audio descriptions across every platform. Today, with what AI has made possible in just the last couple of years, I run this studio with more independence than I've ever had.