For years I have spent a lot of time showing professional photographers my island and I saw how they work. After finding a live coach and 
photography teacher and learning to understand my feeling using my camera I became a photographer. I am now able to steal pictures from the world using the latest updated cameras and software techniques to create my work. The picture I make comes to life it grow into my mantra after printing it. Be able to expose them on this site and in our gallery “THE BEAUTIFUL EYES” is fulfilling. Meeting photographer friends, exchanging ideas and talking about our passion, while showing them our beautiful island, gives light to my soul. Now I see why photographers came and come they met and meet the beautiful culture here. And capture all that, in a street portraits and landscapes. The success we have, creating this website to a showcase site selling our work, giving workshops is rewarding,a new world has opened for me. I am the mother of three children born in the World Heritage Site of Stone Town, where we still live today. I’m aware that the world of photography is all around me. It has given me a new way to live life
Zakia Abdullah Agterdenbos
When traveling the road we call “Life”, looking for balance within ourselves, we discover places never known and situations only feared before. My life 
has given me so much, often after initially feeling helpless and finding no way out. One of the most valuable gifts I have been given is to be able to tell my story through photography and being a photography coach now. All over the world, I have been driven by my curiosity to find an answer to the question: “We have received life, what do we do with it and where does it bring you” These are the stories I like to tell. The second gift Life gave me is the possibility to practice Zen Buddhism.This has made my road to travel on significantly easier and has given me balance. My experience as a professional photographer is diverse. I have worked almost 30 years in my own studio as a portrait photographer and for advertising agencies have portrayed live jazz musicians creating cd covers . My signed work, mainly the photography made on my journeys, has been shown in galleries and other art institutions in Europe. In Zanzibar through the project “THE BEAUTIFUL EYES“, both sides of my balance come together. Creating work for exhibitions and books and couching photographers to reach their goal. My inner self is expressed through photography and the expanding boundaries of my photographic vision in the present moment by Zen Buddhism.
Hans Agterdenbos