About

Traveling the world is probably the most wonderful way to open your mind to other cultures and people. For me as a young man, it came to words when, for example, I set out to explore the world in 1994 and left everything behind me. But not to make myself important on YouTube and show the world what a hero I am, but just for myself to expand my horizons and absorb the beauty of the world.

But my love for photography started already 6 years before that date. I was just 21 years old at the time. And although you are already considered an adult at 21, that was still quite early, because in the last century there were no cameras for children to play with (because high-quality analog cameras cost a lot of money back then) and you first had to earn your own money to take photos . Also quite early on, in 1988, I traveled to an island called Mayaafushi in the Ari Atoll in the Maldives, which was still largely unknown to Europeans at the time.

I borrowed the Minolta 7000 from my father - the first autofocus camera, by the way - along with a 50mm 1.7 standard lens. I knew absolutely nothing about photography - nor was I interested - and only had three rolls of 3 Kodak Color Gold 36 film with me. Nevertheless, I managed to take some good snapshots on this diving vacation.

For all the young people:

In 1988 there were neither computers in the modern sense nor the Internet. All the information you wanted to acquire had to be obtained from specialist literature. For photographers there was, for example, the monthly magazine called “Colorfoto”.

This is a situation that may seem almost unimaginable by today's standards. You can't google anything, you can't call anyone and you can't take photos of anything with your cell phone. When I came home from what was essentially my first "trip around the world" and examined the results, my interest was piqued. And shortly afterwards I bought my first Nikon, an F801s, back then as an amateur it was a good analogue camera with lots of setting options.

In order to understand how photography was lived back then, you would have to beam yourself back to the 1990s in a time machine. Cameras with analog film did not have swiveling monitors on the back on which you could immediately examine the perfectly exposed result. And the pictures couldn't be sent to the cell phone via WiFi and then immediately uploaded to Instagram. At that time, there was a film in the camera that often took several weeks to develop in a laboratory. But after that you only had slides or negatives and no real photos that you could look at. And there was no digital photography at all, and as already mentioned there were no computers either.

But I don't want to say that everything used to be better, because this is not true, especially when it comes to digital photography. Of course, the step away from black and white to color photography, then on to the DSLR, was a huge one. But as with many things, there was a limit where progress unfortunately did not stop. And this progress brought us AI's that can already create images ourselves and apps that “improve” the photos so much that even the "photographer" no longer recognizes his work.