As a freelance photographer (mainly landscape, architecture and underwater) for over 45 years, my passion for both photography and nature started early in life.
I was born and raised in Munich, Germany. At the age of 12 my family moved to a small town near Heidelberg and soon after I signed up for a photography course at school. I was then hooked and spent all my spare time and money on cameras, lenses, film material and my darkroom that I had installed at home. I started working on the weekends as a freelance photographer for local newspapers and did freelance work for local councils and companies.
During my University studies in Mechanical Engineering, I also began to learn scuba diving and attained several instructor certifications. It was then that I began to pursue underwater photography. My scuba instructor experience as well as my engineering background helped me to advance in the challenging field of underwater photography.
Over the years I have won many awards in international photo competitions and live shootouts taking place in Australia, Palau, Indonesia, Maldives, Germany, etc. In addition I conducted many underwater photo workshops and multi-media presentations.
I have contributed ocean-related articles and images to many dive and travel magazines, including: Asian Geographic, tauchen, AsianDiver, DIVER (USA&Canada), Divemaster, dive.at, tek990, ScubaDiver AustralAsia, etc. Additionally my images have been published in books, calendars, advertising brochures and magazines ads.
In 2006 I transitioned from film to digital and started to focus more on photography outside the water, in particular on landscape and panorama photography. To create panorama images I use a multi-shot technique with high-end digital cameras and post-processing on Mac computers. This allows the creation of extremely detailed images which can produce very large-sized prints (over 3 meters wide). My goal is to recreate the same experience of when I took the photograph – so when the viewer walks up and stands close and can see the huge panoramic scale and fine detail – they feel they are there.
I prefer to digitally optimise a good photo rather than trying to improve an average one in Photoshop. My use of Photoshop is very limited and instead I focus on adjusting colour, tone and other key parameters in the raw conversion process. I primarily use Adobe Lightroom to tune the image in a way that it best resembles the experience of when I took the photograph, this includes occasionally the usage of HDR software.