I started photography in earnest during my military service in the German Navy in 1980/81. Since then I have never stopped. I developed my interests and got into darkroom work and then medium and large format. Then, in 2000, allergies against photographic chemicals manifested themselves on my hands and ultimately stopped me from doing analogue photography. From 2002 to 2014 I only did digital photography - which was better than not being involved in the creation of images. However, it was not enough. When the Intrepid Camera Company announced their Kickstarter campaign I didn't hesitate to back them. By the time I got my copy of the Intrepid Camera Mark I had a couple of 35mm cameras, two Linhof Kardan monorails, a Shen Hao PTB 45 field camera and a complete Mamiya RZ67 outfit with 4 lenses - that's only mentioning the main lines there were some cameras besides the ones I mentioned. In the meantime I have also acquired a 13x18cm Plaubel monorail, a Soviet FKD 18x24cm and a wonderful Omega 4x5" enlarger. The Intrepid 8x10" field camera is four months overdue now and I need a lot of energy to restrain myself when I surf on ebay.

I have rediscovered black and white film photography and am learning to print and enlarge my own negatives on fibre based paper again. That is an extension of the digital scanning and printing that is so easy to do nowadays.

Furthermore I have seen videos about the collodion wet plate process and taken quite a few steps in this direction. It works for me and I can get a fairly clear image on my plates, but I'm running out of subjects. The stream of people wanting their portraits in collodion hasn't materialised and several batches of the stuff have exceeded their shelf life and had to be given to waste disposal. My attempts at building a dark box to take my collodion into the field to do landscape and architectural photos have failed so far - and indeed, I find the idea of lugging my darkroom about rather cumbersome. I must be getting old. As far as collodion is concerned I am thinking about variations in the poe boy recipe that will allow me to mix tiny batches of the stuff, so I can make about as much as I need for a series of portraits or a still life project.

Apart from that my aim is to get fluent in the darkroom again and make better prints. At times I see that my prints are still behind the scans and that is a shame, really.

That is about what I can say about my photography - only one thing: I don't think I could live without it....