Dehan Engelbrecht

About

I'm in love with clean simplistic images, I have a deep appreciation for fine-art style images.

Story

This is me, I’m a twenty-something year old with a passion for people. I take photos of weddings, engagements, families and basically anything where people are involved. I grew up in the north of South Africa on a game farm, a era spent with dialup internet until mid 2000’s and beautiful old school values.

After school I started studying for a degree in Visual Communication, but my impatience got the better of me and I left my studies to become a full-time photographer. It was hard for a young guy entering the industry with no background, but I was determined to make it.

In 2013 I decided to move to Cape Town. I got an opportunity to intern for another photographer as a full-time assistant and in-house editor. It was a blessing to my career! I got to know the industry and worked on amazing projects under my new boss. It was a valuable and amazing time.

In March 2014 a friend invited me to church and I gave my heart to the Lord. From that day I could really see the Lord’s blessing on my life as I gave up every desire I had to replace it with the desire He has for my life.

During my time interning I also started taking in clients of my own. A wedding here and there and a lot of couple shoots. I did my first Cape Town wedding in October 2014, it was extremely stressful and it felt like I couldn’t focus. For the first time I knew what it felt like to have the title of Wedding Photographer. The image above was from my first wedding.

Thank you Bernhard & Nolene for trusting me with your special day and these once in a lifetime memories.

Fast forward to January 2015, I decided it’s time to give up my internship and go into photography full time. I started taking on more projects and going into the industry full steam, this was honestly the scariest time of my life, but nothing worth having ever comes easy.

In September 2015 I asked the most beautiful woman to become my wife!! We got engaged underneath a huge jackalberry tree with hanging lanterns (my dad installed these just for our engagement). It was a mammoth task to pull of a dream engagement from 2000 km away, but with the help of both my parents everything was perfect and something both Roelandi and I will never forget!

We tied the knot in April 2016 and we had the most beautiful wedding and shared our day with our nearest and dearest.

From that day my whole view point on wedding photography has changed. I want to capture the essence of a wedding! For my wife and I, the most special photos were the emotions of our wedding, my father crying as we said our vows, my in-law’s laughing uncontrollably as I accidentally called Roelandi’s father ‘oom’ instead of dad during my speech. It was those small moments that made the impact in our photo collection! Almost everyone remembers the big things, I want to capture the smaller things that may be easier to forget over time, but when ever you page through your album, you can have a flashback and relive everything! That’s my goal!

August 2017 marked another big highlight in my life, my wife and I packed our bags and moved to Sweden! We settled into a little town in the south of Sweden and we're now calling Landskrona home. I'm beyond excited to see where my photography career will lead in this brand new chapter in my life!