Hans Hendriksen is a Dutch travel photographer based in the Netherlands. His personal homepage www.hanshendriksen.net shows travel photo galleries from 30 countries on 4 continents and should be considered as selections of the author's most memorable images.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER:

Travel photographer Hans Hendriksen (1957) from The Netherlands became addicted to travel from the moment he made his first flight to Mallorca at the age of 15. His occupation is senior adviser rail at engineering company Sweco Netherlands. In an interview Hans explaned his passion for travel:

"Besides letting myself be continuously surprise about other cultures and people, travelling is for me the best way to discover my own identity and keep an open-mind attitude. Travel experiences always increase my tolerance and confirm my most essential values in life: one should be lucky enough to be able to learn every day, discover unknown places and people and follow the path of your deepest passions".

In 1991 he began to take pictures while travelling using a Minolta Dynax 8000i. From that period he travels through Asia, South- and Middle America or Africa every year. Soon travel photography became his deepest passion in life. He learned himself better travel photography by continuously trying to raise his target quality level. As a result of this, in his opinion your last work should always be your best. Hans prefers to shoot colourful daily-life scenes. After shooting travel photos for 15 years, he decided to start-up his own travel photography company. On this site, which includes 34 photo galleries from countries on 4 continents, you find a selection of the most unique moments he witnessed during his world-wide travels. Hans characterises his work as follows:

"I'm a great admirer of the famous French photographer Henry Cartier-Bresson and think I use a similar style. Like him I'm always searching for contrasts and try to capture 'The Decisive Moment'. I also like to put some humour in my photographs and will never cut in the original composition. In my opinion Cartier-Bresson gave the best definition of photography. He described photography as the virtual point where eyes, heart and brains meet. For me travelling feels like watching adventure movies from which I pick out the special moments intuitively. I take the best photographs almost unconscious, like being in a state of trance. It often happened that I "woke up" after shooting impressive moments and kept asking myself: did this really took place?".

Nowadays there is a lot discussion about manipulation of digital images. Although Hans Hendriksen uses digital equipment since december 2007, he still uses traditional methods. In his opinion each travel photograph must be identical to what he saw through the viewfinder the moment he shot the frame. The only Photoshop tools he uses are basic corrections for contract & brightness, saturation and colour balance for the entire image. In rare cases he allows a marginal crop or rotation. He will however never crop more than 5% from the original composition. Images scanned from damaged photo negatives are cleaned using the smutch or clone tool and sometimes using the dust & scratches tool. In his point of view, use of any other Photoshop tool or filter should be called "visual art" and not "travel photography". Hans Hendriksen is convinced that the direct link to the witnessed reality is essential for his travel photography. Some people will find this rather an old-fashioned or even idealistic principle but it is his basic rule he will never break, no matter how his collegues work or will working.