I’m currently typing this article, and water is coming out of my eyes. But that’s not because I’m crying tears of joy; to be honest, I haven’t done that in a few weeks. Instead, water is coming out of my eyes because of how intense the process of using my contact lenses is. If you’ve followed this site for a while, you know about how I was one of the testers of a product that Sony created for the low-vision photographer. And you might’ve been one of the people protesting our changes to reviews due to my mission to make photography accessible to everyone. What some of you might not know is that the Editor in Chief of one of the world’s largest and longest-standing photography publications has been legally blind for almost half my life. And only this year, in 2025, did I really finally start to get my vision back. Here’s how it’s affecting my photography.
Lead image by Nathan Kellum-Pathe. Used with permission.
How I Became Legally Blind
The story of how I became legally blind is a bit of a sad one — and I sometimes look back to my past self and actively converse with the side of myself that did his best to ensure that I survived to get to this stage of my life. First off, you should know that legal blindness means that even with corrective lenses, you can’t be corrected to 20/20 vision. In fact, I believe the parameter might be that you can’t see 20/40 or 20/50. And the truth is that I couldn’t do that with glasses. But there will be more on that later.
When I was 14, I remember sometimes struggling to look at the blackboard. I went to a Catholic school, and they sat us in alphabetical order. My last name, which is Gampat, is a fascinating one when it comes to this. It typically means that I’m either in the back or in the front. When I sat in the front, my grades were often better. But when I’d be further back, I’d struggle to see the blackboard. I told my mother this, and she never believed me. “You’re too young to not be able to see,” is what she said. My mother, honestly, was the cause of many major problems in my life. It’s only much later that her siblings and even mine really acknowledged that she was a very troubled person, though I stated this for many years. She’s the impetus behind why I founded the Phoblographer — to build something that would take care of me and others while I escaped from her and the abusive household I grew up in.
I struggled to sometimes see the chalkboard for two years until my father told my mother to take my sister and I to the eye doctor because his insurance was going to run out. It took an older Jewish eye doctor to somehow reason with her and make her realize that she was the reason why I was going blind. I told the doctor that I was struggling to see the blackboard and that I’d tell my mom that I couldn’t see the television, but that she’d say that I was too young for this to be happening. The doctor straight-up blamed her for my vision problems.
My vision continued to get worse, and it took a major plunge into no return in my early 20s. A little while after I founded the Phoblographer, I started to work for B&H Photo in the social media department. I realized how toxic that workplace was and ended up working in several different departments. The stress would strain my eyes, and I’d often need breaks away from my screen. Quite literally, I could feel my eyes change shape from an extreme astigmatism. When I went to the eye doctor, he gave me a terrible prescription that I couldn’t get used to after a week.
When I quit B&H Photo, I dove into running the Phoblographer full-time and freelancing for men’s lifestyle and other photo publications. It worked well until taxes came around. My first year I owed around $20k and $5k in quarterlies. Essentially, as a small business owner with an LLC, I had to hand over around 50% of my profits every year. The profits, which are what I’m supposed to live off of, were cut in half — and that caused even more stress on my eyes.
Eventually, my glasses broke, and I had to get new ones. A much better doctor told me that I had a condition called keratoconus. It’s an extreme astigmatism of the eye, more or less. No, Lasik can’t fix it. She told me that I was legally blind.
Why Glasses Don’t Necessarily Work
I remember last year when a woman at my yoga studio told me that because I had glasses, I could see perfectly. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. My keratoconus is so extreme that glasses can’t correct my vision to 20/20. More importantly, my vision pretty much changes second to second because of the irregular shape of the front of my eye.
Just because someone is wearing glasses doesn’t mean that they can still see perfectly. The same goes for folks with hearing aids. And I truly wish that people understood this. But more often than not, I end up being an advocate for photographers who have very low vision.
Over the past two years, I’ve met around three other people with my condition. It’s rare, and apparently, it’s in somewhere around 14% of the world’s population. All of them had different experiences from me as mine was the most extreme.
What worked for me was a very long process.
Now or Nothing: The Two Surgeries That Changed My Life
I moved back to Queens, NY, in 2020 and met the wonderful optometrist I currently have. She recommended that I go to the College of Optometry in Manhattan. They recommended that I work with an eye surgeon a few blocks from their office. I opted to get two surgeries, one for each eye. The surgery is called corneal crosslinking. Basically, they gave me valuum, numbed my eye, clamped it out, brushed liquid collagen on it for a while like Bob Ross was painting happy trees on a canvas, gave me riboflavin drops, and then baked my eye under UV light for around a half hour. The recovery was pretty easy once they took out what’s called a contact band-aid lens. I could see the next day, but I had to be careful about too much light exposure. The recovery took around a month, and our managing editor did most of the tasks of running the site while I was gone.
The second surgery, which was on the left eye, was one of the most painful experiences of my life. It was mostly because of the recovery process and the doctor not wanting to remove the contact band-aid lens when I asked them to. Eventually, they caved and did it. Then the pain subsided.
When I had recovered enough, I had consultations for scleral lenses, which are hard pieces of glass that are so large that they go over the whites of your eyes. I hated those things, so I went back to my surgeon’s office and asked about hybrid lenses. Hybrid lenses are hard in the middle and soft on the outside. These are the lenses I ended up settling on.
This took place between September 11th and December 14th, 2024. But I’ve only had the final variant (yes, there were multiple variants) of the hybrid lenses for less than a month.
I should probably state at this point that this article is being published on February 15th, 2025. Today, I turn 38 years old. And I am one of the last surviving publishers of an independent photography publication. For most of our time, we’ve specialized in telling stories about both the tech world and the art world. For the foreseeable future (pun intended), we’re taking a break from the art world because of several abuses to the site that have happened in the past year. From two photojournalists being incredibly awful to our managing editor for no good reason, a company trolling us and saying that we owed them several thousands of dollars in a claim that we were using their client’s photos illegally (we weren’t), to a photographer sending his personal army after us because he believed that another was infringing on his copyright, to another photographer saying that we couldn’t publish his images because the NYTimes bought an exclusive first rights deal with him.
I’ve dealt with a ton of stuff: being consistently called fat by a famous YouTuber, shamed for being low vision by the now Editor in Chief of another large photo publication, having our stories ripped without credit by other large photography publications and YouTubers, near bankruptcy, etc. But believe it or not, I’ve never thought of quitting running my site.
Photography with Super Senses
My new contact lenses are quite a trip. I’m going to put the following into bullet points for you to process:
- The lenses allow me to see 20/18, which is better than 20/20.
- While I have them in, my other senses are still very strong. Because my vision has been so low for most of my life, my other senses work so much harder. In a dark bar, I can hear and follow three conversations at once. I’m a former whiskey-tasting host who can lead people through subtleties in flavor profiles. I blend my own beard oils to help me concentrate when doing yoga or meditating. And I’m very big on textures and how they interact with the skin. When the contacts go in, I get tons of other information from my eyes that I haven’t had before.
- When the contacts are in, they require a ton more brain power. I find myself losing balance at times, struggling to open bottles or grip things with as much strength as I’ve had before, walking slower than my typical New York pace, and needing to control my muscles a whole lot more.
- I did some bird photography for an upcoming lens. It was insanely amazing to tap into both my new super vision and my already incredible super hearing. I spotted a hawk from two blocks away and photographed it.
- I see everyone’s pores. Just yesterday, I was watching a commercial on the television and said to myself, “Good lord, why couldn’t the camera guys use some Glimmerglass?” I’ve said that modern cameras deliver too many details a while ago, and I still stand by that. Of course, it has affected how I want to approach portraiture. Let me tell you, skin-smoothing from some cameras is sorely needed.
- Street photography has become so much more fascinating. Without my contacts in and while wearing my glasses, I could sense when something was going to happen. But with my contacts in, I’m more about looking at what’s happening rather than anticipating. I’m combining this with my Vipassana certification, and I’m going to turn it into a street photography meditation workshop later this year. This will not be designed totally around technique but more about harnessing your inner powers and being your best self at all times so you make better photos.
- I’ve always known that you can photograph stars in NYC, but I’ve usually set a camera to Live Composite and just shot. Now, I can clearly see them while shooting. It reminds me of my childhood in Queens when there wasn’t as much light pollution as there is now.
- Product photography has become really fascinating as I combine lens filters with flash and natural lighting. If the natural light is too bright, I often want to work on it to create a dreamy look in combination with my techniques.
- Viewfinders are much better to look through now. I’ve had to recalibrate all of them.
- Looking through old-school film viewfinders is such a trippy but great experience. It’s still tough to get things in focus at times, though. Now I realize that it’s sometimes a calibration issue. It’s made me want to buy a digital back for my Hasselblad 501C so badly and just shoot it using an optical viewfinder.
- It’s made me realize more than ever that cameras haven’t been able to get great autofocus on people of color in low light for over a decade. And that’s only now being addressed because the site has been so vocal about it.
- I love old-school digital. There’s a look about it and a soul to it that modern digital lacks. If you’ve shot Fujifilm, you have to be able to see this with the older X series cameras vs the new ones. Even with Canon, I can see this.
Running the Phoblographer
The biggest difference with running the Phoblographer now is that when I edit articles or read through contracts with advertisers, I’m much more thorough and careful. I’m usually done with all my tasks by 1:30 p.m. each day, and I start working between 7 and 8 a.m. But I can’t have my contacts in for a very long period of time or they start to bother me, they create sensory issues, or they just get uncomfortable. I’ve already had to go to the ER twice to get them removed. You’re not often taught what to do when it comes to vision and eye care, let alone working with special contact lenses. And it’s not like I know anyone with my particular flavor of the condition.
I’m often hydrating my eyes, so sometimes I look like I’m crying. It’s fascinating—the center of my contacts is amethyst-colored. It so happens that amethyst is also my birthstone. So this is the chapter of my life that I’m referring to as the Tears of the Amethyst.
But as good as my eyes are, I can’t see the future. And I’ve got no idea how this major change will rewire my brain.
Still, though, at least when I’ve got these contacts in, you all can welcome me back to a world of great eyesight. I strongly suggest that every photographer get their eyes checked often and use hydration drops as much as they can.