The mysterious charm of shooting with a Twin-Lens Reflex, Inspired by Vivian Maier

My life started in a small town in the east of The Netherlands, and I still live and work there.

Although I think that if I could jump back in time again, I would have tried to make a living out of photography, but nowadays, my occupation is as a dental technician. Dancing Classical Ballet was from childhood into adulthood one of my favourite things to do.

But when I got older, I finished dancing and started doing Yoga. Also, my love and passion for photography started to develop into a significant part of my life. Slowly, this connection to photography transformed from shooting holiday photos and family pictures into a different, more artistic, approach to the craft. Reading books about famous photographers and their vision for the art reshaped the way I perceived photography. A new world of styles and especially the atmosphere of digital against analog photos opened up to me.

To explore this new passion, I bought myself the Sony A6000 system camera. I was really fond of this mirrorless digital camera that I extended with a pair of lenses, the Sony 50mm F1.8 for making nice portraits, and a Sony 20mm F2.8 for wide-angled shots and creative modelling photography. This camera was the first serious start in my search of finding what kind of style would interest me most; landscape, street photography, people, I tried it all. Eventually, I rarely left my house without my camera and photographing people was a style I liked the most.

Then, one day I saw a documentary about the life and work of Vivian Maier, which inspired me immensely. I felt a great curiosity for her twin-lens reflex camera (TLR) she was wearing all the time to capture the society around her. So, I decided that I wanted to have that camera and started to see if I could find a beautiful and good working TLR.