Less is more, and that certainly applies to travel photography. Looking at tourists taking pictures, you will always see people taking a step backwards – just to get that beautiful church or that interesting tree on the image as well. I think the secret is to do exactly the opposite: skip the church and the tree and focus on what the image is really about: take a step forward. You might even want to take another step: close ups that only show a detail can sometimes tell so much more about a place than the whole thing.

While on a long trip to the Antarctic I visited quite a few penguin rookery’s, and shot many images with loads of penguins together. But one morning, on yet another beach loaded with king penguins on South Georgia, I sat down for about half an hour to see if that would lead to different results. This little fellow came really close because he was so curious. And I almost automatically shot this image of his feet. Only later, after the trip, I began to realise that this image, with not even half the bird on it, was in fact the most powerful penguin-image I had taken!