About Jürgen Banda-Hansmann

Most people arrive expecting something close to a passport photo with better lighting. That's fine. It tells me where we're starting from.

I show you how to stand. I'll demonstrate the posture I'm after and ask you to mirror it. I explain what your body language is communicating and what small adjustments do: where to put your weight, what to do with your hands, how much a slight shift in your chin changes the way an image reads. Most people have the basics working within the first few minutes.

I don't ask people to smile. Not everyone looks their best when they do, and a forced smile reads as one. What I do instead is make fun of myself, tell a bad joke, or find something to laugh about together. When someone genuinely laughs, the camera is fast enough to catch it. That expression is worth ten posed ones.

What hasn't changed in eighteen years is that most people are not comfortable in front of a camera when they walk in. I've made peace with that. It's the normal starting point. Over the years I've spent a lot of time reading about body language and psychology, and it shows up in the work. The technical side is a given. Getting someone to actually relax is the harder skill, and the more interesting one.

I met my wife in Cape Town in 1991. We spent seven years in a long-distance relationship before I moved here permanently when we married in 1998.

My family here has roots in this city that go far deeper than mine, and more than 25 years of being part of that has given me a way of seeing people and Cape Town that I could not have gotten any other way.

What still gets me, after all of this time, is the moment a client sees something in the images they were not expecting. Not just the quality, but a version of themselves they did not know they were projecting. A sense of authority, or a warmth they assumed did not show up on camera. That happens more often than you would think.

I learned to pay attention to the small things on a shoot: whether a collar is sitting right, whether the jacket fits at the shoulder, whether the hair needs one adjustment before we start. None of that is in the brief. It is just what you do when you care about how it comes out.