Jasper Johal’s photography has been published in magazines around the world

Jasper’s First Camera:

I was born in a small, obscure town in India, deep in the heartland. As a young teenager I met a boy at school whose family had immigrated from Iran. We became good friends.

One day I got an excited call from him, “Jasper, wanna buy a camera?” Turned out his uncle from the old country was visiting them. This elderly man had been sightseeing around India but was running low on funds now, and wanted to sell his camera.

I jumped at the chance. I had been drawing and painting since I was a child. The thought of trying my hand at photography was exciting. I pulled out the old chai tin can in which I had been saving my rupees, and pedalled off on my rickety one-speed across town.

Arrived to find the Persian uncle didn’t speak a word of Hindi, Punjabi or English, the three languages I was familiar with. I myself didn’t know any Farsi. But with my friend acting as translator, and a little bit of polite haggling, a price was agreed upon.

The camera in question was a Russian model, called Lubitel 2, a cheap knockoff of the much better constructed German TLR (Twin Lens Reflex) named Rolleiflex. Instruction manual was missing, but since I couldn’t read Russian, it was a moot point.

Uncle tried his best to show me how things worked. This involved considerable gesticulation and him speaking v-e-r-y slowly in Farsi (why do people think speaking slowly will somehow make a language intelligible to someone who doesn’t know it!).

The only useful thing I learned from the exaggerated “show and tell” was how to load a roll of film. Thank God! Because figuring that out on my own would have been well-nigh impossible. That camera took a paper backed roll of “120 size” film, that had to be spooled from one roller to another!

The rest I had to figure out on my own by trial and error. Lots of errors! There was nothing automatic about that camera. Internet hadn’t been born yet; so I had to mail order books to figure out things like setting proper exposure, shutter speed and aperture.

But bicycling back that day, I was a very happy 13 year old. I remember thinking, what a wonderful interconnected world! An Indian boy had just purchased a Russian camera from a Persian man. A few years later that Indian boy flew literally halfway around the planet to the US and became a professional photographer.

Jasper Johal has now been working as a professional photographer in the US for over two decades. His photography has appeared on the covers of magazines around the world (US, UK, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, and Australia).

Jasper has created 100s of full page ads for clothing companies, dozens of oversize banners and graphics for trade shows, massive instore fashion photos, and countless catalogs.

He has created photographs for a dizzying array of businesses over the years, such as high end audio speakers (Harmon Kardon), motion picture cameras (Panavision), jewelry (Energy Muse), and many more that he has forgotten about.

But after all these years, he is just as excited about creating beautiful photographs as he was that day when he was 13 years old, bicycling home after purchasing his first camera.