Company Overview Khaldoun Keilani is a Damascus based professional photographer whose personal and commissioned work combine to make a varied and creative body of work. Since 2003 Khaldoun has been working with a number of social and environmentally-themed organizations, as well covering celebrity assignments, Khaldoun has photographed a wide segment of Eastern society. Description Khaldoun's did
not start by picking up a camera, but instead began through his love for capturing subjects thru his eyes. A keen amateur shooter, he worked briefly for a start-up company before realizing that life in an office was not for him. He soon started to take on freelance work of his own. His big break into photography came about when a friend had organized a press shoot, and was let down by the photographer. Khaldoun stepped in to cover the job, and more work soon followed. Khaldoun's has worked in a different categories such as Fashion, Lifestyle/ Documentary, Photojournalism / Nature, Wildlife / Fine Art and more, and has a different background photos for each category based on his own imagination. Why did you decide to become a photographer? I had always liked photography and practiced it (like a lot of people) as a hobby. I sat down once and tried to come up with a life-changing plan! I thought why not try doing photography - be creative, meet different people, see different things, it seemed to solve my dilemma. So I bagged my way through; the adage “fake it until you make it” definitely applied to me. I found that I really liked the work and people liked my pictures, so in a way it was an experiment that worked. For a long time I kept thinking it was all going to come crumbling down and if it did, But I’ve been a working photographer for 10 years now. How do you come up with ideas, and what do you use as inspiration for your images? I suppose it is like many other creative processes - you assimilate pictures and images that are around you, see what other people are doing, get a feel for what is on trend, mix it up with your own input, and produce images that are unique to you. In terms of more creative or personal work, I find riding the bus or just walking to be a really creative time, Ideas just pop in my head, I’m not sure why - maybe because the surface thinking is distracted. I think it is really important to see other people’s work, analyze it, get input from the environment around you, keep your eyes open all the time and keep looking at the world, and then it’s hard not to come up with ideas. The difficult thing is finding the time and facilities to do anything with them. What do you enjoy about the digital process, and do you think digital has changed the way you shoot? The digital process has fundamentally changed photography, no two ways about it; it has made it faster, cheaper, more versatile, less elitist (open to more people), and more reliable. I know when I’ve got a shot and don’t have to wonder if I managed to capture it or not (e.g. did she blink?), I’m not worrying about changing film or how much I’m shooting, I just shoot away (in some ways this does makes you lazy though). But digital has also increased expectations put on commercial photographers. Clients want more pictures, quicker and better than ever before. They also think that Photoshop can somehow perform amazing surgery on an individual. I’m constantly explaining that a “slim” or “not-so-ugly” button doesn’t exist in Photoshop. Retouching takes more time than they think.
