I began my time with the Mississauga News by shooting the real estate listings. It was a job which none of the other staff photographers wanted but one which allowed me to prove my worth to the newspaper. I have always been one to realize that sometimes you "have to do what you have to do" to get your foot in the door and I was never one to shy away from dreary work if it meant a potential payoff somewhere down the road. Fortunately for me shooting the real estate listings only lasted a few months as during the time I was shooting real estate I was also constantly offering the photo editor "Fred Loek" freelance images that I'd shot of fires, car crashes and ambulance activity. I had purchased and carried a police scanner with me at all times while driving around Mississauga so I could listen in on emergency radio traffic. If I heard an emergency incident somewhere in the area and I was close enough to it I'd drive there to get shots of whatever was happening. Fred Loek was impressed with my eagerness and determination, and more importantly, he was also impressed with the quality of the images that I brought him. It didn't take long before he started offering me a few of the easy assignments in the regular news section that the regular staff didn't want because they usually involved working times nobody else wanted to work. Once again, I was up to the challenge. He liked what I'd shot of those jobs and he quickly upped my assignment count and also gave me some of the more important stories that the paper required. Toward the end of my time with The Mississauga News I had my own column of images entitled "Steve Tambosso....Focus" which was whatever community event or other interesting news story they assigned me. Shooting for the Mississauga News was a fun job, but it didn't pay very much so I left the paper in 1985. I decided to switch career goals entirely and pursued a career in firefighting which I was fortunate to be hired with the Markham Fire Department in August of 1986. I continued to shoot professionally in other areas of photography all through my thirty year career on the force.
© Steve Tambosso - "The Wandering Fireman"
