“Travel the world and leave nothing but footprints, that's my rule to live by. With my landscape and travel photography, I try to show people that we live in a wonderful world that we have to protect and enjoy.”
Tom Franklin De Waart
Tom Franklin De Waart
Tom is probably from one of the freest countries in the world; the Netherlands. Born in a small countryside town where the standard is not a life full of travel and adventure, he decided to go the unusual route of life and went to study in the UK and the USA, that’s where the passion for traveling started.
Now he is based out of Hong Kong as an international airline pilot, flying all over the world with his camera glued to his hand. He started off with a GoPro but soon realized that if he wanted to show the real vastness of a landscape or capture beautiful wildlife he had to buy a DSLR, so he did. Making the mistakes and learning from them is how he progressed into a semi-professional photographer. Just by putting in the time of researching beautiful places and teaching myself through videos online. After that, you just got to invest money in traveling to places that you want to capture and use that jetlag to your advantage by shooting early sunrises and late sunsets.
''Traveling the world and photographing is like a biography of my own life, however, I am not the one in the photo. It shows the world how I see it.'' He hopes to motivate other people as well to capture beautiful moments in this way, instead of pulling out the good old selfie stick, putting more focus on nature.
Tom is a big fan of Nikon products. Having used the Nikon D750 for a long time he just upgraded to a Nikon D850. Because of using the Nikkor lenses and the quality of photos they have produced Tom has worked together with Nikon on multiple occasions. Being featured in the past in Malaysia, Singapore, India and Hong Kong, recently he was the representing photographer for his camera type in the whole Asia and Pacific region.