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Simon and Nora
@thelightfulduo
Landscape photographers based in the Netherlands
We are Simon and Nora, two italian photographers, currently living in the Netherlands. We met in our home town of Pistoia, Tuscany, in 2014 when Simon was just returning from a 2,5 years experience in Australia. Neither of us has never really been fond of a sedentary way of living and have always been in love with travelling, and that is what really connected us. So after three months knowing each other, we decided to get out of our comfort zone and move to Amsterdam. It was a random move, to be honest.
"Simon had been there and fell in love with the city - so much that we decided to go live there."
"Since then our passion for travelling kept growing. We arrived at this point where we decided to pack our backs and head to New Zealand."
But not just to travel, the idea was to live there for a while. We chose New Zealand because Nora really wanted to go to Australia but Simon had already been there, so we looked at different options, we’ve even considered moving to Canada, but then we heard all these amazing stories about New Zealand, saw incredible photos online, and to be honest – who wouldn’t visit the country where The Lord of the Rings was shot? So we finally made our decision.
We just wanted to experience it and see how the situation would develop. Since the very first moment we felt completely integrated into the Kiwi society and found a job immediately, even with a good career perspective. People from New Zealand are very welcoming and extremely polite, we really enjoyed their company and the country itself was absolutely breathtaking. Nevertheless, we missed Europe too much to stay there forever. We ended up staying for 10 months and finished our time there by traveling across the whole country for a month for one last goodbye. That was really the moment where our passion for photography started to take off.
Although Photography has always been a passion of Simon, and Nora went to Art school, we never really took it seriously until we bought our first camera in Auckland and rented a Van for this goodbye trip, so to say. That trip changed our lives. We travelled in a lot of different countries like Norway, Bali, Australia and pretty much every country around Europe, but our road trip around New Zealand was the one that definitely had the biggest impact on us. It was very special because it was spontaneous: we drove where we wanted to drive, we stopped where we wanted to stop, made decisions on the go…
"This allowed us to live in the moment, something that we never really did before..."
We used to make short city trips to the main capitals or have a classic holiday at the beach, not experiencing what else the country we were visiting had to offer. We went to main tourist attractions, booked hotels and lived a not very adventurous life. However, in New Zealand we learnt how to set a camp, to survive in the wild, to enjoy nature to the fullest, to travel with less comfort, exploring these incredible landscapes…
"But most of all, we realized what we really wanted to do with our lives."
Travelling around the world, trying to take incredible photos of every place we visited. We didn’t have the knowledge nor the equipment to take incredible shots at that time and we are still learning everyday something new, but it was a start! At the end everything starts with realization – without becoming aware you can’t take the first steps. We decided to create the account Thelightfulduo to put our work out there, to share feelings of wonder, to inspire people to travel more and discover new places that are not necessarily industrialized or popular. Our goal is to motivate people to become more adventurous, while doing what we love.
When we moved back to the Netherlands after New Zealand, we wanted to combine business with pleasure and decided to start offering photographic experiences in Amsterdam. While guiding tourists through the city, taking them to the places we love the most, and personally connecting with them we got a little of this feeling of travelling even when we were at home. It allows us to meet so many people from so many different cultures and that is probably the biggest reward we could ever get providing such an experience. Beside all this, we are still very much focused on learning and developing new skills on landscape photography, continuing to travel to beautiful destinations and trying to capture their essence.
Being on the road for two years will enable us to really invest time in finding the perfect conditions and light in places where we would normally spend two or three days. It’s a long term project and we really hope that we can make it happen over the course of the next few years.
"Our motivation is great - travel and photography mean freedom to us, and nothing can beat that."
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