There are photographers whose photographs you admire, photographers whose equipment you find yourself looking at, and photographers who actually change the way you think about photography. For me, Thorsten Overgaard belongs firmly in that final category.
I first got into Leica in 2015 after discovering Thorsten’s work, and I can trace a surprisingly large part of my relationship with Leica back to discovering his work. Not because Thorsten convinced me that Leica cameras were technically superior to everything else, and certainly not because he persuaded me that owning expensive equipment somehow makes someone a better photographer. If anything, the lesson I took from him was almost the opposite.
He made photography seem simpler.
At the time, I was falling into the same trap that I think affects a lot of people who become seriously interested in cameras. Photography slowly starts becoming less about photographs and more about photographic equipment. You read reviews, compare specifications, look at autofocus tests, wonder about dynamic range and convince yourself that the next generation of camera might remove whatever invisible barrier currently exists between you and better photographs.
Manufacturers are very good at encouraging this. Every year there is another reason your current camera is supposedly inadequate. More autofocus points. More subject-detection modes. More programmable buttons. More frames per second. More menus containing more settings that we are told serious photographers ought to understand.
And yet none of those things necessarily makes you want to take more photographs.
That was what I gradually began to understand through Thorsten Overgaard.
His photography and writing reminded me that the important things were still remarkably basic. Light. Timing. Focus. Composition. People. Curiosity. Being somewhere and actually noticing what is happening.
The camera ought to facilitate those things rather than become the thing you are concentrating on.
That idea eventually led me towards Leica.
Not because Leica gave me more.
Because Leica allowed me to want less.
Rather than me trying to explain Thorsten’s philosophy entirely in words, this is a good place to hear it from the man himself.
Explore more of his videos at Magic of Light.
Who is Thorsten Overgaard?
Thorsten von Overgaard is a Danish-born photographer, writer and educator whose name has become closely associated with Leica photography, particularly the Leica M system, available-light photography, portraiture and street photography.
But even that description is slightly misleading.
Calling Thorsten a “Leica photographer” makes it sound as though the cameras are the point.
I don’t think they are.
What fascinates me about his work is that Leica seems to be the instrument through which he expresses a much older idea of photography. His world is one in which a photographer knows their camera, carries it, notices the light and reacts instinctively when something appears in front of them.
There is very little separation between life and photography.
That becomes obvious when you spend time on Overgaard.dk.
The website has existed since the 1990s and now feels almost like an accidental museum of the internet as well as a photographic archive. It contains an extraordinary amount of material: camera articles, lens reviews, photographic essays, portraits, travel photographs, technical explanations, pieces about famous photographers, discussions about colour and black-and-white photography, composition, printing, workflow and the stories behind individual pictures.
You can arrive because you searched Google for a Leica lens and, an hour later, find yourself reading about something far more interesting than lenses.
That, to me, is one of the great strengths of Thorsten’s site.
The equipment gets you through the door.
Photography is what remains.
Photography before the specification sheet
One of the things I increasingly dislike about the modern camera industry is the way photography gets discussed as though it were primarily an engineering problem.
We compare cameras using tables.
Camera A has this many megapixels. Camera B can shoot this many frames per second. Camera C recognises a bird from seventeen kilometres away. Camera D has twelve programmable buttons rather than nine.
None of those things is inherently bad. Modern cameras are astonishing achievements.
But the language around them can create the impression that photography itself is progressing at the same rate as the technology.
It isn’t.
A photograph can still fail because you were half a second late.
Because you didn’t notice the background.
Because the light was wrong.
Because the person in front of you didn’t trust you.
Because there was nothing emotionally interesting about what you photographed.
No firmware update fixes that.
That is one of the deeper things I took from reading Thorsten.
Technical knowledge matters, but ideally it becomes invisible. You learn the camera so well that operating it stops occupying your attention.
The technology disappears.
The photograph remains.
Why Thorsten Overgaard led me to Leica
This is probably the most significant influence Thorsten had on me.
He didn’t make me want Leica because Leica gave me more technology.
He helped me understand why having less technology between myself and the photograph could actually be desirable.
Before Leica, I was familiar with the conventional progression of digital cameras. More buttons, more menus, more modes and more functions. Cameras become more capable with each generation, but they can also become increasingly complicated.
Eventually I realised I didn’t particularly want photography to feel like operating a cockpit.
I didn’t want to think about dozens of settings every time I picked up a camera.
I wanted aperture.
Shutter speed.
ISO.
Focus.
Composition.
And whatever happened in front of me.
That was enough.
There is something almost countercultural about the Leica M in 2026.
It doesn’t try particularly hard to protect you from photography. You still have to focus. You still have to pay attention. You still have to make decisions.
For some people, those are shortcomings.
For me, they became part of the attraction.
And reading Thorsten helped make that attraction understandable.
He can be extraordinarily technical when he needs to be. Some of his articles dive deeply into lenses, focusing behaviour, colour rendering, digital sensors, exposure, white balance and photographic workflow.
But the technical information usually appears to serve a purpose.
Understand it.
Learn it.
Then stop thinking about it.
Go photograph.
Meeting Thorsten Overgaard at Leica in 2023
That is why briefly meeting Thorsten during my visit to Leica in 2023 meant something to me.
It wasn’t a lengthy meeting.
We didn’t spend hours discussing the philosophy of photography or debating the merits of different generations of Summilux lenses.
It was simply a brief encounter.
But sometimes those encounters matter because of everything that happened before them.
By that point I had already spent years reading Thorsten’s work. His approach had been one of the influences that made Leica interesting to me in the first place. He had helped me understand why simplicity could be a feature rather than a deficiency.
And then I found myself at Leica, standing in front of one of the people partly responsible for why I wanted to be there.
There was something pleasantly circular about it.
He probably couldn’t have known what that brief meeting represented to me.
But I remember it.
And looking back now, I think what Thorsten had actually influenced was something larger than my choice of camera brand.
He had helped change what I wanted from photography.
The liberation of not caring about every other camera
One of the unexpected benefits of moving towards Leica was that I gradually stopped caring so much about what every other manufacturer was doing.
That might sound ridiculous. Leica owners are hardly immune to obsessing over cameras. If anything, Leica can create an entirely new category of obsession involving vintage lenses, brass finishes, limited editions and arguments about rendering.
But for me personally, something changed.
I stopped feeling that I needed to chase every technological development.
Sony could release another autofocus system.
Canon could release another body.
Nikon could add another feature.
I could appreciate all of those things without feeling particularly tempted by them.
My Leica still did essentially what I wanted it to do.
That was enormously liberating.
The question stopped being, “What can this camera do?”
It became, “What can I photograph with the camera I already have?”
Those are very different questions.
The second one is much healthier.
Thorsten Overgaard and the idea of “Always Wear a Camera”
One phrase has become strongly associated with Thorsten:
Always Wear a Camera.
At first glance, it sounds like a slogan.
The more photography I do, however, the more I think it contains an enormous amount of truth.
Photography is largely a consequence of availability.
You can’t photograph something you never see.
You can’t see it photographically if you aren’t paying attention.
And even if you see it, you can’t photograph it if your camera is sitting at home.
The moments that make interesting street photographs rarely send appointments beforehand.
Light suddenly falls through a window.
Someone walks through the right part of a frame.
Two strangers interact.
A face appears.
Something strange happens.
Then it is gone.
Photography requires a peculiar combination of preparedness and receptiveness. You need to be ready, but you also need to be open enough to recognise something when it happens.
That is why the camera you enjoy carrying matters.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be the best camera.
It needs to be the camera that is actually there.
I think that is one reason Thorsten and Leica fit together so naturally.
The M isn’t really designed around sitting in a giant camera bag surrounded by fifteen lenses.
It makes much more sense with a lens attached, over your shoulder, while you walk.
The photograph is the point
This is also why I think it would be a mistake to look at Thorsten’s work and conclude that his philosophy is primarily about Leica.
Leica is undoubtedly an enormous part of it.
But the Leica is ultimately supposed to produce photographs.
That sounds absurdly obvious, yet camera culture frequently forgets it.
There is an entire industry built around photography in which photographs can almost become secondary. We can spend hours reading about lenses without making pictures with them. We can watch reviews of cameras we don’t own, comparing them to cameras we also don’t own.
We can become incredibly knowledgeable about photography equipment without necessarily becoming better photographers.
Thorsten’s best work, for me, acts as a corrective to that.
The camera matters.
But eventually you have to point it at something.
This is where Thorsten’s relationship with Leica becomes most interesting to me: not as a collection of specifications, but as a way of working.
Teaching people how to see
Thorsten’s teaching is an interesting extension of this philosophy.
He has run photography workshops around the world, generally in small groups, covering street photography, portraiture, available light, composition and workflow.
There is an important distinction here.
Learning how to operate a camera is relatively easy.
Learning how to photograph is not.
You can explain aperture, shutter speed and ISO in an afternoon.
It is much harder to teach someone how to approach a stranger, recognise interesting light, simplify a composition or know when a photograph is about to happen.
And perhaps hardest of all is developing some understanding of why you photograph.
What are you interested in?
What do you notice that another person might walk past?
What are you trying to communicate?
Those questions have very little to do with the price of the camera.
For people who can’t attend his workshops physically, Thorsten also operates the Overgaard Academy, where his photography teaching is available online.
Thorsten’s books are more interesting when they’re not about cameras
Thorsten has created an enormous number of books and guides, including detailed material on individual Leica cameras.
Those are undoubtedly useful if you own those cameras.
But the books that interest me most are the ones that deal with photography itself.
His photography book collection includes subjects such as Finding the Magic of Light, Freedom of Photographic Expression, Why Do I Photograph?, The Moment of Emotional Impact in Photography, Composition in Photography and The Portrait Book.
Even the titles reveal something.
They are questions of expression rather than specification.
And increasingly, those are the photographic questions I find myself interested in too.
I already know my camera is technically capable of making a good photograph.
The uncomfortable question is whether I am.
His approach to workflow makes sense too
The same thinking extends into post-production.
Thorsten has developed extensive Lightroom and Capture One training, including his Lightroom Survival Kit and Capture One Survival Kit.
The word survival makes me smile because modern photographic software can sometimes feel exactly like that.
The problem with digital photography isn’t that we lack tools.
We have too many.
It is possible to spend far more time processing photographs than taking them.
Masks, presets, profiles, layers, AI tools, noise reduction, sharpening, colour grading, local adjustments. There is almost nothing that cannot now be manipulated.
That power is useful.
But it can also create another distraction.
My own preference increasingly aligns with the simpler philosophy: make the photograph as good as possible when you press the shutter, develop a consistent workflow, make the adjustments that genuinely improve the picture and move on.
There are more photographs to take.
The products make more sense when you understand the philosophy
Only after understanding all of that do Thorsten’s physical products make much sense to me.
He sells distinctive ventilated lens shades and Leica accessories, camera bags, leather straps and various products carrying the “Always Wear a Camera” idea.
Viewed without context, it could simply look like another photographer selling merchandise.
Viewed as part of everything else, there is actually a fairly consistent thread.
The products largely revolve around making the camera something you carry and use.
The ventilated shades appeal to the traditional rangefinder aesthetic while being functional. The smaller bags and straps make sense in a philosophy based around travelling relatively lightly. Even “Always Wear a Camera” stops sounding like merchandise when you realise it is essentially his photographic philosophy condensed into four words.
Would I tell someone to buy everything?
Of course not.
Photography does not improve in proportion to the number of accessories you purchase.
But there are a few things I think are genuinely worth exploring.
What I recommend from Thorsten Overgaard
My first recommendation is free.
Read his website.
Before buying anything, go to Overgaard.dk and explore it properly.
Don’t only read the review for the camera you happen to own.
Follow the links.
Read about light.
Read one of the Story Behind That Picture articles.
Read his thoughts about photographers.
Look at the photographs.
That is where I think Thorsten’s real value lies.
For a Leica M or Q photographer, his camera-specific writing is also worth spending time with because he gets deeply into the practical peculiarities of actually using these cameras rather than simply listing their specifications.
If you want to spend money, I would personally look first at his photographic books rather than automatically buying an accessory. The books about light, composition and photographic expression interest me far more than another object for my camera bag.
If you are struggling with workflow, his Lightroom or Capture One material is another logical place to look.
And physically, I think the Overgaard ventilated lens shades are probably the most characteristically Thorsten product. They have a distinct visual identity, suit the Leica M aesthetic and are actually connected to using the camera.
His leather straps and smaller bags also make sense to me for the same reason.
But if someone asked me what the nicest way to support a photographer was, I wouldn’t choose a camera accessory at all.
I would buy photography.
Thorsten sells signed original prints, and I think there is something far more meaningful about owning an actual photograph made by a photographer you admire than adding yet another photographic gadget to a cupboard.
The picture is what all the gadgets were supposed to be for anyway.
Why Thorsten Overgaard is my photographic hero
I don’t call Thorsten Overgaard my photographic hero because I believe every opinion he has about photography must be correct.
Nor do I agree with the idea that there is one correct way to make photographs.
That would run against the very reason I admire him.
The influence is more personal than that.
Thorsten gave me permission to simplify.
He made me less interested in the endless technological arms race surrounding cameras.
He helped me understand why a camera with fewer distractions could actually give me more enjoyment.
He encouraged an idea of photography built around carrying a camera, observing people, noticing light and being ready when something interesting happens.
That eventually led me towards Leica.
And Leica, in turn, helped me enjoy photography differently.
I stopped caring quite so much about whether another camera had a better autofocus algorithm.
I stopped assuming that complexity meant sophistication.
I stopped believing that having more photographic options automatically produced more photographic freedom.
Sometimes freedom comes from removing options.
One camera.
One lens.
A walk.
See what happens.
That is probably the biggest thing Thorsten Overgaard taught me without ever actually teaching me personally.
When I briefly met him at Leica in 2023, he couldn’t possibly have known all of this.
To him, I was presumably another photographer saying hello.
To me, it was a small moment of meeting somebody who had influenced the direction of my photography long before we stood in the same room.
Thorsten helped get me into Leica.
But the Leica isn’t actually the important part.
The important part is that I started enjoying photography more.
I started caring less about cameras and more about photographs.
And perhaps most importantly, I became more interested in going outside with a camera than sitting at home reading about the next one.
There are thousands of people online who can tell you which camera you should buy next.
Thorsten Overgaard did something much more useful for me.
He made me want to take photographs.
And that is why he remains one of my photographic heroes.
