It's just past midnight and I'm sitting in bed with my MacBook. Sounds like one of those moments where you catch yourself thinking, doesn't it? The thing is, I'm not really the type for late-night brooding. But sometimes, it just has to come out. This vague feeling that the world is slipping through my fingers. As if someone set the playback speed to 1.5x while I'm still trying to keep up at normal speed.
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International editions of Vogue and Elle were piled on my desk. For hours, I studied the photo spreads, searching for the secret of their fascination. What makes these photos so magnetic, so irresistibly alive?
Digital communication certainly has its pitfalls. This morning I received a message from a well-known model — if you can even call it a message. A single emoji, that little figure with a raised arm, like an eager student just before the bell rings for break. The digital gesture was probably meant to say: "Hey, I want to go to Ibiza too!"
As a kid, I had those "Where's Waldo?" style illustration books. I could disappear into them for hours, hunting for details, inventing stories between the drawn figures. Maybe I should have loved AI composites. But I don't.
Recently my wife repeated that sentence she likes to say often: "Find yourself a hobby." I had to smile, because how do you explain to someone that it's not so simple when you've turned your hobby into your profession? Photography isn't just my job, it's my passion, my constant companion, essentially my second wife — though perhaps I shouldn't phrase it quite like that.
Here we go again. A new year has begun, and here I sit with my coffee, scrolling through my calendar. A few shoots are already scheduled. February: Tenerife. May: possibly Paris. But in between? Gaps. Large, white gaps waiting to be filled.
Sometimes I have to look twice when I realize how working with models has changed in recent years. Not because of new camera technology or sophisticated lighting, but because of something much more fundamental: the way the younger generation lives relationships and earns money with them.
Sometimes the strangest things happen when you're just sitting there, staring into space. Like yesterday, when I was slouching in my living room, looking at this picture on the wall. Not particularly attentively, more like the way you look at things that have been hanging there forever. And suddenly this thought hit me like a small electric shock: Is this actually really mine?
Today I'm getting personal. I rarely share such stories, but this particular photoshoot deserves an exception. It's about Julene, the woman with the "Fighter" tattoo on her hip bone.
For days, I've been preoccupied with a message. "The contrasts are wrong," someone writes to me. Just like that. Four words that have me pondering. Not because I doubt my work, but because they say so much about our understanding of art.
It's Petra's birthday. I have a beautiful photo of her, taken just a few weeks ago during our shoot in Fuerteventura. She's wearing lingerie, kneeling on a sofa, looking toward the window. No nipple, no provocative pose, nothing you wouldn't see in any perfume shop display or at any train station newsstand. So I post the image on Instagram with the caption "Happy Birthday" and think nothing of it.
8 AM. After two days of photo production, I'm boarding a flight home from Ibiza, looking forward to seeing my wife. But first, I need to cry. It just breaks out of me. Thankfully, I have the entire row to myself. Why me? Why won't it stop?
You know how it is with art. It really belongs to everyone. At least that was always my modest conviction when I sent my photo books out into the world. Limited editions, yes, but not to create artificial scarcity — rather because it just felt right. Like a good conversation — it eventually comes to an end, and that's exactly what makes it valuable.
Today I stumbled across a study that particularly interested me as a photographer: researchers have been investigating why men have different preferences for female body parts. Some are Team Breasts, others Team Butt. Apparently this is biologically hardwired, and I see evidence of it every day in my work.
Back from Fuerteventura, I'm sitting at my desk signing the last copies of my Mellow photo book. Remove the wrapping, flip through, autograph on page 5, done.
I'm driving against traffic on social media. Never spent much time there, don't really get the hype. Looking at other people's photos just makes me jealous, makes me feel small as a photographer. So the platforms aren't good for me.
The EU has decided that we'll soon need to label images when they've been created or edited with AI. Starting August 2026, it becomes mandatory. The EU AI Act aims to create transparency, prevent deception, restore trust in visual media. Sounds reasonable, right?
A model with a perfect figure, flawless makeup, and an off-the-rack hairstyle — I experience this situation more often than I'd like. Yet hair isn't just a decorative accessory, but rather the strongest ally in front of the camera.
I know this article won't interest everyone. If you're here purely for photography, feel free to skip ahead. But over the past few weeks I've been tinkering so much with my website that I wanted to share a few thoughts about it. Not to pat myself on the back, but because I keep getting questions about it.
The email hits my inbox like a sledgehammer: "Your images have been discovered on a Russian website." Without permission, without credit, without any respect for creative work. Once again. You'd think I would have gotten used to it by now, but this digital vandalism affects me every single time.
When I was flipping through my work from the past few years I had to smile. There it was again, this unmistakable style in my pictures. Like a red thread, it weaves through my portfolio, without me ever consciously searching for it. Sometimes I'm amazed how distinct my signature has become. I probably couldn't even publish my images under a pseudonym without being immediately discovered.
Recently at Frankfurt Airport. A group of Asian tourists catches my eye, their faces as white as a sheet of copy paper. Even for me, as a chronically pale person, it's a surprising sight. With these Asian women, it seems to be no genetic coincidence, but rather a system executed with absolute precision.
Have you experienced this? You're sitting on the subway, and across from you sits an attractive woman. She's wearing boots that look excellent on her. In the past, you would have simply said: "Great boots!' In today's woke era, you risk a public backlash for "male harassment".
I'll be honest, I was a bit offended when someone recently asked me if I even still shoot for Playboy. Yes, of course I do. I'm just not the go-to photographer who appears in every single issue. Sometimes it's months between shoots, sometimes a year. That's just how it is.
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