The name is StudioTJ. Plain, on purpose — it says exactly what it is. The word carrying it is "studio," and a studio takes the shape of whatever gets made in it: photography, music, video, writing. It holds whatever the work happens to be, and the work moves. The TJ makes it mine while the word stays open.
Behind the name is one person — Tjeerd van der Heeft — working out of Maastricht. StudioTJ adapts to whatever the creative work is at the time, and there's one reason it can. Photography is the ground it stands on — the lane that turned a set of interests into a practice, and what everything since has been built on.
Photography came first, and it's what made me pick software development back up. The skill had gone quiet without a reason to use it; photography was the reason. The work needed a place to live, and I wanted to build that place myself.
I'd tried the off-the-shelf route first, twice. In 2024 I built a portfolio in WordPress with a shop bolted on. In 2025 I built a shop in Shopify with a portfolio bolted on. Both worked. But each platform decides what it's for, and whichever one you didn't come for ends up second. The combination runs on either; it just never runs even.
This site is the first where the portfolio and the shop carry the same weight. The photographs get a portfolio built around how they're meant to be seen; the prints get a shop built to sell them; both run at full strength. That's what the custom route earns — a site that holds the whole thing at once and keeps room for whatever the studio takes on next. Photography is the ground; everything built on it stands level.
The collections are the next layer up. A collection is a body of work — photographs that share a way of seeing, built to be seen together and in sequence. The site is what makes that possible: each one rendered the way it's meant to be moved through.
The collections are named: The Signature Collection, The Atmospheric Collection, The Halcyon Collection, and Monochrome Moods. Series is the other grouping, built from individual entries: Routes, the walks through cities, and Visits, the concerts and exhibitions.
The shop is the layer on top of that. It takes a collection off the screen and onto a wall — a print you can frame, own, and live with. That's what print adds: scale, paper, permanence, a photograph in the room with you. The shop is where the work becomes something you keep.
Photography underneath, the collections on top of it, the shop on top of those — the same work, a layer more real at each step.
Everything so far is built to stand on its own. A photograph, a collection, a print, the site itself — each one is made to be taken in directly, without a caption telling you what to feel. That's deliberate. The work should hold up before anyone knows a thing about how it got made.
But it did get made, and making always comes down to choices. A photograph that reads as one clean frame came out of a process — the seeing, the versions that got cut, the technical problem that turned into a decision. Some of those choices took time; some were quick, settled the moment they felt right. None of it shows in the finished piece, because it isn't meant to.
That gap is what this blog is for. The finished work stands on the site; the process behind it lives here.
This is where it starts. Behind every photograph, every collection, every print, and the site holding them, there's a process — and this is the place it gets shown, as the studio takes on new work and the writing follows it back to how it was made.
The blog is also its own new thing — the first I've run, and writing is the newest lane the studio's taken on. Learning to do it well is part of what this is. So it's two things at once: a place to show how the work gets made, and the writing itself — new work, learned in the open.
Out front, the work stands on its own. This blog is what's behind it — where the making gets shown. The door stays open, and it leads here.