Photography at Curry Away Features American Landscapes

Shahid Durrani is pairing his shared loves of photography and hiking with an ongoing display of natural scenes and landscapes at Curry Away in Edgewood.

Originally from Pakistan, Durrani spent 11 years working in Seattle as a software developer until a new job opportunity brought him to Pittsburgh. He resides in Upper St. Clair and works in Squirrel Hill, where he met one of the owners of Curry Away.

“He is a friend and a colleague and he liked my pictures, so that’s how that happened,” Durrani said.

Durrani’s photographs depict the many different landscapes found across America, whether it’s the mountains of the west coast or the many waterfalls of the Northeast.

“I have been doing photography for ages,” he said. “Maybe at 14 years old I said, I need a hobby, so I picked up photography and got the film and all the equipment. I did it quite a bit and all of this fully manual with no automatic work. I have always done it fully manually.”

Manual control allows Durrani to control exposure, depth of field and other aspects of the artform that are lost in automatic digital photography, he said.

“I hike a lot - a LOT and I have loved hiking since I was a kid,” Durrani said. “Thankfully, they go together. A successful hike has to have nice pictures, too, otherwise I am not happy.”

Durrani said he loves to capture the many discoveries he makes while hiking in the region.

“I always enjoy taking photographs and finding the graphical things - texture and patterns - in nature, and you see it everywhere,” he said. “You see it in those leaves and in the bushes and that’s what I really enjoy getting pictures of. It’s more art that way than descriptive.”

His goal remains the same no matter the scene.

“With nature photography, the main thing you want to do is show the essence of a place,” Durrani said.

His photographs have been up at the Edgewood restaurant since its opening about two years ago. Durrani has taken photographs at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Slippery Rock, Ohiopyle and West Virginia. While he sometimes misses the mountains of the west coast, he loves the nature he can find right here.

“The east coast has waterfalls that are extremely photogenic,” he said. “If that is the thing to see here, that is what I will photograph.”

Durrani’s work can be found at http://galiwalker.zenfolio.com. For more information call him at 425-894-1374.