My ten best shots
I’ve been a photographer for 40 years. After my
apprenticeship in Germany I moved
to Amsterdam. From those early days I have a Food Still Life I cherish particularly. I like to use candles in still lives, but I
think it is important to use the candle-light as a light source - otherwise,
why would you have a lit candle in the picture?
After Amsterdam I travelled
to India, in a Land Rover - there and back in about a year.
One of my best
pictures is from Afghanistan, of a
butcher.
One more shot from that Asia trip is from Nepal, of traffic in downtown Kathmandu. The year is 1973.
When I came back I lived in
Copenhagen for five years. From that time I have my first internationally
successful advertising shot, for Tuborg
beer. This picture took me a week to finish. It is lit by daylight - but I
had that sunlight only for an hour at midday. So I cooled down a couple of
dozen beers, shot about six or eight 5x7” plates, had them processed and came
back to the shoot the next day - until I got that particular light. The funny
thing was, a month later I was travelling on Bali and I was climbing a
mountain, an active volcano. It was humid and stifling. The ground I was
walking on was hot. I didn’t bring enough water and I was thirsty. And all I
could think about was the dozens of bottles of ice-cold Tuborg beer I had
emptied down the drain four weeks earlier!
On Bali I took a picture of
the painter I Gusti Nyoman Lempad; he was
about 115 years old.
My very best shot was
taken with a snap-shot camera of my two boys as they watch their sister being born;
I was holding their mother with
my right arm and took this picture with my left hand.
The next one is of Yani
& Radjin spear fishing in the
Kalang river - near Bellingen in Australia - on the property
where we lived for
a few years, and where Saskia was born (no fish were hurt in the production of
this image.)
These are some of my first digital images and the 'critters' were added digitally.
When digital photography
came around in the late 1990s I begun PHOTOART. I really like the portraits
from the
… but should you ask what my favourite picture of all time is, it’s the one of Radjin and Yani at Saskia’s birth.