Wasim Ahmad: Storyteller in Pictures

Wasim Ahmad: Storyteller in pictures from Newhouse School J-Camp on Vimeo.

By Tonielle Moore

Wasim Ahmad likes telling stories through his pictures.

“You can tell a whole story by showing the look in someone’s eyes,” Ahmad said.

Ahmad, a 27-year-old graduate student at Syracuse University, is majoring in journalism and photography at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He is a teaching assistant for video, graphics and photography. This summer he is a teaching assistant for J-Camp, a new program for 10 city high school students.

Ahmad is a native of Long Island and attended Sanford H. Calhoun High School in Merrick. That’s where his English teacher introduced him to writing for the school newspaper. In college he continued his interest by working on the student newspaper at Binghamton University.

He graduated from Binghamton University, where he majored in English in the Harpur School of Arts and Sciences. After two years on his college paper, he interned and was eventually hired at Binghamton’s Press & Sun-Bulletin as a copy editor and Web editor.

One of the most interesting stories he covered, he said, was about an IBM plant that was causing pollution. A chemical, Trichloroethylene, was being dumped into the ground. Businesses were closing because nobody wanted to be near the chemical.

“It was important telling the story because it brought a problem to light that people needed to hear,” Ahmad said.

After graduating from college, Ahmad took a copy-editing job in St. Cloud, Minn., for a year and then returned to Binghamton. His photography career started there.

He started shooting videos when he was handed a camera and told to start shooting for the Web. He was pressed into service because the paper was short staffed.

Shooting video changed his career. He kept shooting to become a better shooter, Ahmad said.

One of the first videos he made was covering the flooding of the Southern Tier of New York. After covering that story he gained a passion for photography and online journalism.

“Videos and still photos can convey power, feelings and emotions,” Ahmad said.

After working in Binghamton, he moved to the Naples Daily News in Florida where he became the Web editor.

He decided to go back to school for a master’s degree, he said, because he felt that he was “practicing photography without a license” and wanted to perfect his skills.

After a year at Newhouse, he is now expanding his photography skills to include shooting a music video for a band, The Grand Concourse, from the Bronx. It shows the band performing on a rooftop and in Rockefeller State Park in Westchester County, with special effects to show a difference between dreamland and reality.

He now hopes to teach college journalism, Ahmad said, so he can teach his students to find the joy in telling people stories too.

Ahmad offers this advice for anyone with a passion for journalism or photography: “Keep writing and you will become a better writer,” he said. “And keep shooting and you will become a better shooter.”

-30-