About me
My name is Torben Jensen. I live in Viborg in Denmark and I’m from the decade when a quick boy was wearing a bow tie when he went to the photographer.
I have been photographing for many years, but I was really caught when, in 1989, with a compact camera in my chest pocket, I cycled around Switzerland with my children. Of course these were ordinary nature-holiday pictures, but I already then focused on the composition.
My first experience with digital photography was in 1991 with a Canon ION camera. But with 0.2 megapixels and very poor light intake, the usability was limited.
When I bought my first SLR camera (Canon EOS 500) just before a bike ride around Corsica in 1996, I acknowledged my destiny – photography.
After many cheap (and poorly) developed films in a discount photo shop, I finally got my first Digital SLR – Canon EOS 300D in 2004 just before a trip to Greece. It was at 5 megapixels and very slow. But at that point, my clients moaned over my apology; “Wait a minute – my camera saves the pictures”.
I have photographed many genres. In my jobs I have mostly worked with product and company-portrait photography. A bit boring – so in my spare time I went for completely different genres. In the beginning it was mostly natural landscapes and later it became macro photography – especially dragonflies and other insects. I was so captivated by photographing dragonflies that I traveled to Greece, Bulgaria, France, Andorra and Spain – solely for photographing – and in particular dragonflies.
In Barcelona I got captivated by the spanish architect Antoni Gaudí and photographed his buildings in Barcelona and traveled north to photograph a garden and his cottage in Comillas.
Later I discovered Santiago Calatrava in Valencia. He is well known in Scandinavia for Turning Torso in Malmö. This started my interrest in photographing architecture.
After investing in studio lighting, I got caught by model and portrait photography. First in a photo-studio and later on location both urban and in nature.
After teaching layout for many years I have been focusing on the composition. Whether you are shooting with a mobile phone or with a super-professional camera, it is often the composition that reveals you as a “amateur-snapshooter” or “a real photographer”.
Of course, I use both Capture One and Photoshop, but as tools for correcting an otherwise good photo. “The picture is crisp, the light is perfect and the composition is tight.” – but the light has caught an accidental hair or dust, or the model has accidentally developed a pimple the day before shooting, or there is a small clump of mascara under one eye “.
In other words: I spend most of my time taking the picture and spend as little time as possible correcting errors