MY WAY TO PHOTOGRAPHY OR: ACTUALLY IT STARTED IN SWEDEN

Growing up on the North and Baltic Seas, I spent my school days with my parents and my sister in our holiday home in southern Sweden: Red-painted wood, white window frames, forest all around and the bathing lake within walking distance - a typically Scandinavian, seemingly endless idyll (The realization that this was a cultural landscape came with the first clear cuts, which unfortunately are common in the Swedish timber industry). Going to Sweden not only felt like a great adventure, looking back I think it was also a feeling of 'coming home' - at least that's how I still feel today when I get the chance to meet my parents to visit in their second home.

Picking blueberries, wild strawberries and chanterelles (although not always entirely voluntarily), swimming in the nearby lake, my favorite climbing tree, the dozens of songbirds in front of the window with the food bowl, small car safaris to look for moose and an indescribable silence: All these impressions - and certainly my elementary school days on the island of Sylt - have shaped me and my love of nature to this day.

CAPTURE THE MOMENT

But what does all this have to do with photography? I was given my first digital camera when I was 16 and kept taking pictures of everything I could think of: family, friends, festivals and vacations, but also the nature that surrounds me and its inhabitants – albeit in a rather rudimentary and bumpy form, like me found when combing through my image archive for this text. Nevertheless, the desire to capture and preserve things and moments gradually developed in me - and after all, which medium is better suited than photography?

At the end of my school days, I finally wanted to become a photographer. After a number of applications and the subsequent rejections, both the first disillusionment and the great realization came: I actually knew nothing about photography, nothing about the connections between aperture, ISO and time, nothing about image composition or storytelling. In addition to vocational training in the logistics sector, from then on I dealt more intensively with photography by leafing through photo magazines and posting tutorials, information and entries in photography forums.