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Analogue Beginnings

 

My father gave me the first camera when I was 10 years old. It was a sort of Kodak 35mm non-SLR camera from the early 1960s, with a separate Selen-cell exposure measurement device which showed me the combination of exposure time and aperture to set at the camera. He taught me the basics of focus and exposure setting and started in me the interest in photography. In the first few years I shot about one 24 picture b/w film roll per year - film and picture developing was quite expensive. Later I turned out about 2-3 rolls per year, with holiday photos in color.

 

In 1979 my grandfather bought me an SLR camera from Porst: still with manual setting, but with built-in exposure indicator in the viewfinder. I bought a 35mm wide-angle and a 135mm tele - basic accessories, but I took a lot of pictures. Wherever I went, I had my black photobag with me, with the camera, accessories, and a few spare film rolls.

 

Four years later I was able to afford a Nikon FE-2, with two zoom lenses (35-105mm and 70-200mm) - a great camera. For 8 years I shot about 200 film rolls, documenting my life and travels, and starting a few experimental trys with filters. The obligatory photo bag had gotten bigger and heavier.

 

Going Smaller

 

But in 1992 convenience began to rule: I bought a non-SLR Olympus Superzoom compact camera. No additional lenses to carry, no photo bag anymore. I still took the Nikon with me, for "special" pictures, but the day-to-day shots were taken with the Olympus.

 

Going Digital

 

Then came digital photography. First with a compact 640x480 camera for convenient snapshot in "web-quality" which my brother gave me as a present. Then with a Sharp MiniDV camcorder. Still photography took a break for a while, as I was fascinated by the possibilities of moving imagery, to capture sound and vision. I experimented with in-ear microphones, to capture the subjective full-surround sound.

 

Then in 2002 I bought the 2 MP Canon Powershot S300 - and the inflation of pictures began. Storage is almost unlimited, no more cost for film developing. And the immediate viewing on an LCD monitor during the shot gives an SLR-like control, but with the better abstraction of the content into how the image will actually look: in the viewfinder of traditional cameras, the user still applies the internal filter, seeing the image in the mind rather than how it will actually look. This often leads to surprises, when the user later sees that there were things in the image that the user's eye just had ignored. With an LCD image as the "viewfinder", it is much more apparent how the image later will look - the translation from 3D into 2D is already done, and this gives the photographer a much better control on image composition.

 

I began a wild photo-spree, taking hundreds, well, thousands of pictures during travel. In 2003 I got a Canon Powershot 45 for work - took many pictures with that camera. And in December 2004 I bought for myself a Sony DSC-M1. A wonderful combination of picture camera and MP4 video recorder! Now I also could leave my camcorder at home and take just this gadget with me.

 

Later I got a water-proof digital camera, so I could also take pictures under water. And then came the Smartphones. Since about 2010 I have taken more and more pictures just with Smartphone cameras. I also did have a Panasonic DMC G2 and later a Sony RX-10.

  

Sharing Pictures

 

I knew about Flickr since a long time, signed up in April 2006, but have just in March 2007 begun to upload pictures to this site, to share them with my friends and with other people interested in photography. My goal in my pictures is to capture an impression, to document a sight, to do justice to the reality of a situation. Often I immediately take several shots, just to have a few to choose from later, as there may be minute differences in details.

 

Not much experimental photography is here - I have yet to dive into the wonderful world of HDR photography. Most of my pictures are simply documentary, trying to capture the essence of what I saw.

 

The pictures on Flickr here are a cross-section of the visual world which we encounter daily. The eye of the photographer tries to extract the intrinsic beauty in visual constellations.

 

My goal is to reveal the inner beauty of our world, in the natural parts as well as in the man-made ones. Taking pictures can preserve the beauty of the world, as it is now slowly vanishing before our eyes.

 

Geo-Tagging

 

One of the great things to do with pictures is to place them onto a map - to link the geographic location with a view taken from a certain point. Flickr has a web tool, using Yahoo Maps for interactively placing the uploaded pictures onto a map. For the case that someone wants to geo-tag the pictures before uploading them, I wrote a software with which a user can do just that.