What camera etc. do you use?

I currently use a Canon 5D. The lenses I use most are the EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM and the EF 50mm f/1.4 USM. Additionally I usually carry a Canon G10 around in my bag. My primary software consists of Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop CS3 and Kekus LensFix.

When did you start taking photos?

When I was around 14 years old I got my first camera and started taking photographs. Oddly there are some interesting conceptual ideas in the photos I took at the time. Had I discovered the work of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston at that time I might have pursued photography at an earlier age. When I was at university I got myself an SLR, but since film photography was an expensive hobby I didn't really pursue it. All of this changed when I got my first 2 megapixel digital pocket camera which allowed me to experiment and to take as many photos as I wished and to embark on a journey of discovery which lasts until this day.

There's this enduring myth about "starting out as a child" both in the arts, science and business, but there are also artists who started at a later age, in photography Herb Ritts and Sebastião Salgado, both of whom trained as an economist. As long as you remain open to new experiences and continue to experiment, age doesn't matter.

How would you position your work?

I'd say that if you were to draw a triangle with photographers such as Edward Burtynsky at one point, Steve McCurry at another and Stephen Shore and William Eggleston at the third point, my work would be somewhere in-between. Street photographers such as Steve McCurry and Alex Webb photograph mostly people, whereas I'm more drawn towards urban environments and traces of human presence. Stephen Shore and William Eggleston have an eye for the ordinary. William Eggleston furthermore likes to bring it out using seemingly random camera angles without focusing on a subject. My work is more filtered through my subjective vision. Photographers such as Edward Burtynsky and Greg Girard photograph almost exclusively large scale urban and man-made environments, whereas I am interested in the small scale and also include people and portraits. Apart from that I also do series whereby any single photo may not be of any particular interest, but the series tells a story.

There are so many stories to tell. Indeed it sometimes surprises me that some photographers can just walk past something that I think would make a great photo. That's what's great about photography.

I'd love to one day do more staged portraits.

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