Mansi Chauhan

You have watched it happen. A brand you had never heard of is suddenly everywhere. Their reel is on your feed, then your friend sends it to you, and within a couple of weeks it feels like the whole city knows them. And the easy thing to think is, they got lucky. I have spent nine years on the other side of that camera, filming the content that does this, and I can tell you the luck is mostly built. When a brand seems to come out of nowhere on Instagram reels, there is almost always a reason...

In a real shop, your product has help. There is a person standing next to it who can answer a question, point out a detail, hand it over so a customer can feel the weight of it, and quietly nudge them toward yes. Online, your product has none of that. There is no one to explain it, no one to reassure the buyer, no one to close. There is only the photo. That single image, or that set of images on a listing, has to do every single thing a good salesperson would have done in person, silently, in...

The email was four lines long and I read it twice. Date, Tuesday 20 May. Event time, 6:30 to 9:30. Call time from 6:00. Location, Fairmont Dubai, The Summit. A member networking event, general event photography, was I available. Most enquiries I receive as an event photographer in Dubai are one line long. How much do you charge. No date, no venue, no sense of what the evening actually is. A message like that tells me the person has not planned their event yet. This one told me the opposite,...