Your photographer for your vintage artistic wedding portrait photoshoot. Analog film, Polaroid, retro camera photography… You found it!

Netherlands-based photographer Geert de Jong uses vintage cameras and lenses from bygone eras to create pure art. Whether it’s for your wedding day, your corporate portrait shoot, or your baby photo session. He single-handedly converted his beloved “Mrs. Mamiya,” a vintage Mamiya C220 twin-lens reflex camera, from analog to digital. The result: original, characterful, and museum-quality images that never succumb to nostalgia, but exude a timeless charm.

Many of the images he shoots are difficult to date: photos from last week could easily have been taken decades ago. And that timelessness remains beautiful even in the future. You see influences from all periods of photography: often  chiaroscuro , sometimes even distinctly  noir .

 Original, characterful and museum-like images that never succumb to nostalgia, but do exude a timeless charm.

He draws his inspiration from the moment and photographs manually, with skill and expertise, from his intuition. It’s a bit like the photo takes itself, the camera controls itself, and Geert only has to walk around and press the shutter button.

The photos often have a raw edge or an unusual composition that leaves something to be desired. It’s as if the image, the story the photo tells, extends beyond the edges of the (usually vertical) frame. A tranquil glimpse into a fluid environment.

Geert works discreetly without disrupting your party or wedding day, is pleasant and sociable, and gets along well with just about everyone. This makes him easy to trust. Many of his photos convey a distinctly sensual femininity, but never voyeuristic. For example, you can easily let him in on your makeup or while you’re putting on your dress.

Geert speaks of his cameras as if they were women. In his opinion, photography is feminine in nature. It’s a creative, visual medium that surprises, moves, tells stories, amazes, and inspires.
The “masculine” qualities of photography (straight lines and angles, thinking within a framework, the craft of optical sharpness, the logic of aperture and shutter) are always at the service of the feminine, creative nature. In short: Although Geert is a craftsman, he prefers a characterful photo that’s just not quite sharp, rather than a technically perfect but soulless image.

Incidentally, the camera’s technical sharpness is phenomenal: Mrs. Mamiya’s Hasselblad digital back delivers 50-megapixel images that can be effortlessly enlarged to wall-sized sizes. Where the image is sharp, the definition is breathtaking. Geert virtually omits noise reduction during the editing process, allowing the individual pixels (particularly the noise at higher ISO values) to unfold like a pointillist painting. While Anton Corbijn embraces the grain of his film material, Geert lets the noise of his sensor work for him.

Before a photoshoot, it’s difficult to determine what the resulting image will be. The process isn’t entirely predictable and takes on a life of its own. Directing your focus to what you want to see, submitting requests beforehand, is virtually pointless. The image emerges spontaneously, in an uninhibited interplay of the moment, light, and karma. This photography is only partially controllable or influenced: Geerts camera doesn’t adhere to expectations. In the controlled environment of a photo studio, for example, she underperforms. And even though Geert is a master with flash, this camera prefers nothing more than “available light.” The light as it presents itself in the situation, without additives. And preferably daylight.

Mrs. Mamiya isn’t the only camera Geert uses. Trained at the (then almost entirely analog) Apeldoorn Photography School and later the art academy, Geert worked with just about every conceivable camera format during his student days. Pinhole, 35mm 135 film, medium and large format, Polaroid, color, black and white, or slides: it was all the same to him. The rule of thumb is: if it works, Geert can shoot with it.
You could let him take photos with your grandfather’s camera!

Geert also works with a “regular” Canon full-frame camera, which he fits with vintage lenses from any era. For example, an antique lens from Paris, complete with bellows.

His contemporary Mint Instantflex camera produces beautiful, Polaroid-like, instant photos in Fujifilm Instax credit card format, many examples of which are also on display here. Geert also enjoys working with a vintage (but far from rare) Russian FED-2 rangefinder camera (a Leica imitation) that uses classic 35mm film. The negatives produced by this camera are scanned at approximately 6 megapixels, which may seem small by today’s standards. But with the simple film Geert uses, it’s enough to discern the detail of the individual film grains.

Scroll through the examples. If they appeal to you, there’s only one thing to do:
send me a message!
Geert would love to meet with you to discuss your wedding plans.