Portfolio

Travel

I’m eager to learn about new people and cultures and I often end up mixing my nature photos with shots of towns and cities that I pass along my way. Traditions and secrets are such incredibly valuable things to pick up on travels. I always feel special, when people invite me into their homes and backyards to show me what they’re proud of. Their generosity make so many of my photos possible in the first place.

Portraying counties and cities

In my professional work I often combine both nature and travel photography, e.g. when I take photos of counties and cities. This sort of work I enjoy a lot, because I have the chance to tell a lot of different stories. I don’t hesitate to climb up hills and rocks, drive across the land for hours or visit locals and their festivities any time of the day to get the best shots of a community.

Freelance work

In my work as well as my life, I aspire to be authentic and honest. That describes the way I’m portraying the work of people and companies as well. When I’m taking pictures of a company, you will find me mixed with the employees on the ground doing real work instead of a studio. This style has been incredibly rewarding for me. I feel like a huge part of my work is more than the photography I do: I show people a picture of themselves – the way I perceive them. And all I ever see in people is their hidden potential. So naturally, they aspire to be like the person they see in their portrait. One of my best examples for that is a documentary on a small bakery on the countryside. The master baker (and head of the company) has been extremely critical about his appearance and his workplace. “I’m just a baker. Why bother?”, he asked. Afterwards he was just surprised and in awe, how poetic his and his employees work looked in the pictures. Just a year after the shoot, they had renovated the building and started expanding the bakery and opening new stores.

LARP (medieval reenactment)
Reportage

LARP (Live Action Role Play) is a hobby in which people dress up and play characters in movie-like settings they invent. It is similar to cosplay, but with the added role playing part. I learned about it as a teenager and revisited it to make it my Bachelor’s Thesis.

The people I had the pleasure to take photos of have incredibly high standards concerning their costumes. They research historic representations of clothes, weaponry and craftsmanship from the 13th to 14th century – the High Middle Ages in Europe. They only sew by hand and learn how to craft real bows, shields and various other goods with traditional tools. The armour they wear, is real, hand-made and may weigh up to 30 kilograms. In their fictional world, they represent the knights of Aquitan – a kingdom similar in culture to Southern England. Their quest is to find the insignia of their long lost king in order to restore justice and peace to the world. I highly admire their dedication and how incredibly skilled they become at crafting things by hand. I felt so honored to be their photographer.

Event (Portrait)

During my first years of photography, portraits actually became my forté before I advanced in landscape photography. When I got my first camera, I wasn’t really certain on what to shoot with it. I just always felt like things that I do need a purpose. So, I looked for places that I could take photos that will improve the lives of other people.

One of these places were concerts of newcomer bands. They were so welcoming and happy to have a photographer around. It was so much fun getting to know a huge diverse crowd of creative people, hanging out with them backstage and shooting them on stage. Even though they’re some of my oldest work, the portraits of musicians in concert I took over the years are all photos I am still very proud of.

Corporate portrait

Working with and talking to people is a natural thing to do for me. I somehow get others to relax and get comfortable in front of the camera. A great example of that and such a joyful experience was my series portraying the employees of Implenia Modernbau, an international construction company, for their lobby. I enjoyed the challenge of the minimalist approach to their portraits. That way, I had to focus on their own personal character solely.

They were the most happy bunch. They very proudly had their picture taken for for the company they love. That is especially true for the man in the first picture. He was injured very badly in a work accident and has a lot of health issues to deal with as a result. However, they all stick together and help each other out. He is still a full member of the team and is still working on construction sites. Of that, he’s proud and grateful for it. He said: “When I pass away some day, I hope there’s an Implenia I can work for in the afterlife.”

Aerial panoramic photography

In 2017 I bough my first drone. Since the first beginnings I have accumulated over 31 hours of flight time and 300.000 meters in distance in over about 400 flights. I use aerial photography a lot for storytelling in my freelance work. You may find wonderful examples of that with “Portraying counties”.

A great example of what you can achieve with drones, are my aerial panoramic shots. Each photo consists of 120 individual photos – creating 24 30-bit HDR files or even more – and is carefully stitched together and then processed. What I love about these is, that they are astonishingly detailed and show landscapes in their raw beauty. Here are two shots I did in the Italian Alps at about 2450 meters altitude. My drone was flying hundreds of meters above the cliffs. This format works brilliantly for landscapes with vast differences in shape and height.

Filmography

Through my commercial work with drones, I developed an interest in making films. Like with photography as well, I looked for purpose in my filming. One of my earliest works became a reportage on a seminar of my Kendo teacher: Kozaki Kanta sensei.

A huge opportunity to explore making films were my videos of a special engineering company and their huge machines they build for producing car parts (e.g. Tesla!) and electronics. Through this series of films I learned so many things and ended up creating a wonderful extended imagefilm of the company, they’re now using as a background video for presentations, in their lounge and at trade fairs all around the globe.

Analogue photography

During my first semester of design school, we were only allowed to shoot on film and we had to develop the images ourselves. At first, I did not understand, why we had to do it. But after a few weeks in, I fell in love with it. Shooting analogue is such a different approach to photography than digital. There’s only 36 images on a film or even less on bigger format cameras – and they’re expensive. On a medium format camera, a single photo might cost you about 1 Euro or 132 ¥. You have to focus a whole lot more and be 100% dedicated to each shot before pressing the button.

One of the projects I did during my studies was a series on people visiting my local gym. I called it “Starke Kerle” (roughly translates to “tough boys”) and is dedicated to everyone who fights their own lazyness and hits the gym every day.

Originally, my Dad inspired me to shoot it. He used to own a company when I was a child. He worked almost every day and night. Nevertheless, he wanted to work out regularly, so he set up a small gym with self-welded equipment in our basement. I sometimes sat down next to him, when I was little. There were weeks, when this was the only chance I got to talk to him. I remember him strolling around the basement with a troubled mind, thinking during the few seconds of rest between each set.

Other work

An artist has to try out new things every once in a while. I enjoy doing a lot of things on the side – some of which you have just experienced on this page! – like diving into E-commerce and webdesign, writing, illustrating, art reproduction and print design.

A fun example of that are Pedro and Rosa, an illustrated artist couple. My mum’s a painter. She has been teaching drawing and painting for 30 years. Together, we’ve made a bunch of wonderfully illustrated textbooks for teenagers and young adults in which Pedro and Rosa teach the readers how to draw and paint. They’re also supported by a different teacher in each book. It’s a great diversion from other commercial projects and the illustrations just bring me so much joy. My mum (she’s 65!), inspiried by our books, even went on and started a YouTube channel. It has since accumulated over 5.200 subscribers and 580.000 views.

For my illustrations I draw a lot of inspiration from my landscape photography and I think you can somewhat tell from the colors and contrasts.