A 35 mm Affair
My name is Shareef Murtuza and I’m a professional photographer and motorcycle enthusiast from the South Indian city of Hyderabad. I’ve been shooting (with a camera, of course) for more than a decade now, but only started doing so professionally in 2013. The major focus (pun intended) of my work is on street photography and portraits, but I’ve covered everything from weddings to fashion shows trying to make a living.
I first picked up photography as an interest in the mid-2000’s, a little after digital cameras had become inexpensive enough be a household gadget. Back then, film photography did not seem like it was worth the effort. The instant gratification that digital camera screens provided was much better than the printed photos from a roll that was, sometimes, developed months after it was shot. To expect anything else from an impatient teenager would be a folly. A DSLR I acquired around that time ensured that the film cameras my dad had collected over the years were left in a dusty attic, waiting for a renaissance that may never have arrived if I hadn’t gone to Canada in 2015, pursuing a Master’s Degree.
Living in a new country meant that I had tons of moments to capture on my trusty Nikon D7000. This, of course, proved more difficult than I initially imagined, considering I had to find time between my classes, part time gigs and the little sleep I could eke out after those. I hadn’t really given film cameras much thought in India because they’d become an expensive hobby after the advent of digital cameras, with film and equipment being scarce and costing an arm and a leg. Occasional browsing of local classified apps and other stores told me that it wasn’t so in Canada. There was an abundance (compared to India again) of film gear, which made me want to try it at least once. If it didn’t work out, I always had my Nikon to fall back on.
It wasn’t long before I realized that going in blind was a really bad idea. I did what most of us do when we come across something we’re not really familiar with. I Googled it. I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of rolls, developers, dark rooms and chemistry. It looked a lot more complicated than I’d anticipated and I was beginning to doubt if this was something I wanted to do. The shooting part looked simple enough, but the rest, not so much.
It was around this time that someone (I honestly don’t remember who, but thank god for them) recommended the Toronto School of Photography. Google tells me they’re still located in North York and it’s a place I’d recommend highly to anyone in Toronto who’s even remotely interested in any kind of photography.
I enrolled myself for a course on film photography and was surprised to find four others in the same class. I’d expected to be the only one there and seeing other people who were also taking their first steps with film gave me a huge confidence boost. The course lasted about a week and I’m still not sure if I’ve understood everything our instuctor was trying to teach us. Pretty soon after the course was done, I bought my first film camera, an Olympus OM10 with a 50mm f2 lens, from Kijiji (a local classifieds app). I also got my hands on some film the same day, a fairly inexpensive roll of Fujicolor C200.
The streets of Toronto were my home for the next two days (quite literally) while I looked for those perfect shots anywhere I could find them, all the way from my apartment in North York to the busy streets of Downtown. They’re probably some of my most memorable days in Canada. In a world of digital cameras, smartphones and photoshopped images, there was a beauty in shooting with an almost 40-year-old camera, not knowing exactly what the end result would be, that’s stuck with me to this day.
The photos from my first roll were nowhere close to perfect, as you can see from some of shots I’ve added here.
