Amanda Thomsen Photography
Alternative wedding and portrait photographer

This might sound like a cliche, but as a photographer you really get to do all kinds of assignments and photograph all kinds of people. No assignment is similar to the last one and you get to meet many different people. This job was definitely new for me. A couple of months before I left for Kenya, I had been contacted by the German Architectural Magazine AD  to capture an event in Copenhagen. It was the opening of the temporary Ilse Crawford shop at The Apartment in Christianshavn.

It was a bit of a challenge since I not only had photograph lots of people but also get all their names: without their names the magazine could not use the pictures. Anyway, it was easier than I had dreaded but there were many more people than they had expected so I had very little space and time to capture everybody eating, drinking, chatting… Close to the end of the evening I was still snapping along and I was trying to get some good shots of a family sitting in the kitchen enjoying the lovely food. Suddenly the lady says, “wait a minute I want my daughter to be in the picture too!” She calls out: “Helena, Helena, come here and have a picture taken with your parents!” And then it happened… Helena, the daughter, was THE Helena Christensen .. The top model, the girl that I had seen on millions of magazines covers when I was a young girl. The girl who dated Michael Hutchence from INXS. The beautiful girl in the Chris Isaak video .. and well yeah, I was really paralyzed! Suddently I felt like a teenageer that has seen her big idol and just froze a little. WOW! She was still so beautiful and she was just in front of me, we had eye contact and I had my camera and I “shot” her… I didn’t really have time to think much, or see through the lens… I just pointed and shot and prayed for the picture to be good enough… Cause this lady Helena only gave me a second of a smile before she was interrupted by some of her friends…

Anyway, I never knew I would be that excited! But then again, there are so many jobs I do where I get overly happy and excited that after I feel a bit embarrassed… But this is what makes me love being a photographer so much. It is not to photograph famous people (I do this very rarely anyway) or the traveling, but I love to have an excuse to meet all sorts of people and experience all sorts of things .. Now in Kenya, I am a bit on standby taking care of my little adorable son, but I can feel my eagerness to photograph and meet new people… It is still there and ready to come to action soon!