From then on things got serious: I fell in love with black-and-white photography above all (after first falling in love with my girlfriend, of course ;-)), started developing films myself, set up my own darkroom, and for years produced high-quality, sometimes large-format prints from my negatives. I even bought a used twin-lens Rolleiflex T-model and shot medium format for a while. I measured the exposure times for the Rolleiflex with an old Gossen Profisix handheld light meter.

I also developed color films and made color prints myself, but the chemical fumes that left me completely “high” after a few hours in the darkroom, the expensive materials, and all the effort… nah, that wasn’t really my thing.

Digital started for me in 2001: I was working in the USA for a few months, my wife couldn’t come along, so I bought a Canon PowerShot 110 (a compact consumer digital camera with only 1024×768 pixels, JPEG only, and insanely expensive at the time) to send her pictures regularly via a small private blog. I was totally blown away - the digital photography virus had infected me!

After that things moved quickly:

2003: Pentax Optio 550 – suddenly 2592×1944 pixels, an insane leap!
2004: Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 with 8 megapixels.
2005: My first DSLR – Canon EOS 20D.
2006: The tiny Sony DSC-T30 as my always-with-me camera.
2009: Canon PowerShot G10, small but damn good.
2011: Before a trip to Egypt I bought the Canon EOS 7D – a top-class camera!
2014–2015: Lived and worked in Taiwan for 9 months – the 7D felt too bulky, the gear too heavy, so I treated myself to the extremely expensive but fantastic Sony RX1R (my wallet still has the scars). A rational decision? Definitely not! Being fixed to a 35mm prime lens: exciting!
2020: Switched to Fuji with the X-T3 – lighter, more compact, superb quality, simply more fun.

Since February 2026 I’m the proud owner of a Nikon Zf, which I mainly plan to use with various manual M42 vintage lenses (Zeiss, Asahi Pentax & Co.). A bit of “back to the roots”, returning to the feeling of the good old analog days - slowed down, manual, but with ultra-modern technology under the hood.

Since 2013 and up to now I’ve taken a huge number of photos with the iPhone again and again, often just out of convenience, while the other cameras unfortunately spent too much time sitting on the shelf. But better to always have a camera with you than not take pictures at all.

In digital I almost always shoot in color, but I regularly convert images to black and white. What you can achieve today in digital post-processing in just a few seconds (exposure, contrast, gradation, cropping…), used to take me hours in the darkroom - test strips, dodging, burning, trying different papers with different grades. In digital editing, a quick tug on a little slider is often enough…

After more than 35 years as a passionate hobby photographer, I’ve now spontaneously decided to start this photo blog. Purely for fun. I’ve promised myself to stick with it—as a famous German footballer once beautifully put it: „Schaun mer mal!“ (“Let’s see how it goes!”)

I hope you’ll find one or two interesting, inspiring or motivating posts here that bring you joy.

I wish you always good light, a quick finger, lots of fun shooting, and plenty of great pictures!