Fredi Magazine Special Digital Edition 2017 | Page 23

THE PHOTOGRAPHER 'S
SOCIAL NETWORK
HERE’S THE THING: Everybody with an
Instagram account thinks they can take a decent
photo. See something nice. Point. Shoot. Apply
a filter. Accumulate likes. All those double taps
offer a standard metric by which we judge our
prettiest selves, the objects of our attention, our
skill with a camera and, of course, our popular-
ity. Because we all want to be popular, don't we?
Anyone who claims they don’t care is probably
a) already popular or b) not telling the truth.
Which is why it’s refreshing
that Sanjay Chauhan (30.9K
Instagram followers) doesn’t
pretend he doesn’t care.
“I’d be lying to you if I said I
didn’t care about numbers,” are
his exact words. The 25-year-old
Toronto-based photographer is
the founder of Instagram’s “Im-
ages of Canada” account (212K
followers) which has become in-
credibly successful of late (of the
dozens of accounts dedicated to
showcasing our country’s natural
beauty, the only one that appears
to have more followers is Explore
Canada – 962K – and that’s run
by the national tourism agency).
Centennial College in Toronto. At the time, he
had just turned 18 and had only a few family
friends in the city. After his two-year program,
he got a job at a firm in Vaughan, where he
lived for a while, but eventually decided to
return to the city. He now works at an archi-
tectural firm in Toronto’s west side, near High
Park, designing 3D computer models for large
institutional buildings such as banks, libraries
and transit stations. Like photography, he
found that his architectural design work of-
fered a blend of the creative
and technical at which
he excelled.
“ Yo u c o u l d
l o o k at i t
t w o ways :
d o yo u
wa n t t o
g e t fa m o u s
o r d o yo u
wa n t t o b e
r e a l ly g o o d
at w h at
yo u d o ? ”
He bought his first camera
when he graduated: a
DSLR, which is an acronym
for Digital Single-Lens
Reflex. Now, full disclosure,
before I wrote this, I had no
idea what a DSLR was but I
have been informed that they
are not your average point-
and-shoot cameras. They’re
expensive, extremely techni-
cal and they can be very
intimidating if you’ve never
used one before.
Sanjay had also never used
one before. The first time he
did, he was walking along
Queen Street West in Toronto
one night and saw the elec-
tronic dance duo LMFAO
– SANJAY CHAUHAN
performing. When he cracked
“You could look at it two
open the package he was
ways: do you want to get fa-
surprised to see that he would
mous or do you want to be really good at what
have to attach the lens to the body of the cam-
you do?” he asks. “Because if you just want to
era himself. He did not know how. Fortunately,
blow up on social media, there are other easier
someone in the crowd was able to help.
ways,” he points out. “And if you do it that
None of the images turned out. The lighting
way, you need to ask yourself if that’s really
was off, the focus had been out-of-whack, and
what you wanted…”
the camera hadn’t been set to adjust for either
Sanjay wanted something different, and what he
of these things. Still, Sanjay threw himself into
got was far more valuable than millions of ‘likes.’
his new hobby. He spent the majority of his time
watching online tutorials, visiting photography
SANJAY GREW UP in India and immigrated
blogs and Facebook accounts.
to Canada by himself to study architecture at
So if this is indeed a numbers
game, Sanjay is winning. But, he
also admits there’s something arbi-
trary about this approach. It’s easy
to measure success in likes and
followers, but it’s rarely fulfilling.
fredi digital 2017 •
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