You might not know the feeling: You spend years perfecting your artistic vision, meticulously crafting your visual language, and then some algorithm comes along and labels your website as pornographic. Welcome to my world.
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Travel has always been something we long for. In Schwetzingen Castle, there's a special building. A long, dark corridor that leads to what looks like "the end of the world". As a child, I loved this installation. There was something tempting about it, something that pulled me towards faraway places. Away from the limits of daily life, towards new horizons.
The other day, I looked in the mirror and was terribly startled. Not because I looked particularly bad — no, because I looked completely normal. No flawless porcelain-like skin. No eyes gleaming like hand-polished marbles. And, God forbid, even a few wrinkles that testified to the fact that I had laughed once or twice in my life.
We've all been there: A photo shoot is coming up, and you need to quickly print some inspiring reference images. Not as rigid templates to copy — that would be boring — but as visual cues. A small mood board, if you will, to help break through creative blocks when ideas run dry.
We photographers are all somewhat vain, aren't we? Actually, I think people in general long for recognition. For being seen. And so I'm always delighted when there's a publication of mine in a magazine or my images appear somewhere else.
As a photographer, you experience all sorts of things in front of the lens. But the latest posing trend is pushing even experienced professionals to their limits. A story about stretched necks, dominant chins, and the eternal search for the perfect shot.
This morning I was staring at my Eizo ColorEdge screen, wrestling with color calibration. You might know this: You look at the same photo in different programs and suddenly it looks different everywhere. My lab prints in sRGB, so it shouldn't really be rocket science to set things up, I figured.
Last Monday, I found myself once again at my computer, engaged in an epic battle with Adobe's artificial intelligence. You probably know the drill: you just want to quickly edit a photo for your blog, but the AI has decided to play moral guardian for the day.
You barely open your phone in the morning before you're hit with the usual headlines. "AI revolutionizes photography," "Photographers on the brink," "Artificial intelligence makes humans obsolete." Oh, right. Here we go again.
As a nude photographer, I know censorship all too well. Not from totalitarian states or distant regimes — no, I'm talking about censorship right here in the supposedly free Western world. The same West that's supposedly the land of unlimited possibilities.
There is this magical moment between Paris and Frankfurt on the TGV, when the Champagne region passes by like an impressionist painting. 320 kilometers per hour of pure inspiration. While other passengers watch Netflix or stare into their laptops, tomorrow's images form in my mind. Not technical details or simple poses. It's something different.
A garage sale? Well, not exactly. "Lingerie closet sale" sounds a bit odd too. But I had to call it something, this thing that's been going on these past few days…
In the photography scene, they're more common than velvet boxes at wedding photographers: self-proclaimed masters who consider their work priceless — but prefer to pay with "exposure" rather than euros.
So I was standing with my camera in the allotment garden again. The model was sitting on this white plastic chair, you know the one, the one that's everywhere. While looking through the viewfinder, I had one of those realizations that make you pause for a moment: This chair is following me. It's always there. On every balcony in Mallorca, in every small garden plot in Munich-Moosach, even in cafés in Marseille.
You know the drill: You're sitting at your computer, your coffee's gone cold, and the RAW files from your last shoot are staring at you accusingly. Quick processing session? Yeah, right. What usually follows is the grand fumbling with exposure sliders, the shadows-highlights dance, and that eternal question: "Was the light really that brutal, or am I just incompetent?"
Recently, I was sitting at the hairdresser's. A new one, just three minutes from my home. He cuts well, no question about that. But while I sit there staring into the mirror as he works meticulously on my hair, this strange feeling creeps over me: I simply don't know what to talk about with him.
Last week I was at an outdoor photo shoot. The model wore sunglasses, which looked cool and added variety to the session. But my camera was confused: no autofocus on the eyes possible. This got me thinking: How do machines actually recognize faces?
In today's art and photography scene, we're experiencing a veritable cult of minimalism and rapid production. While our grandparents treasured family photos like national treasures, today we feed our social media profiles with images faster than a hungry teenager. Quick content is the new cash cow.
What grandmother once dismissed as a character flaw is now revealing itself as a special gift: sensitivity. Join me on a journey of discovery into the world of heightened senses, and learn why we urgently need to stop using sensitive soul as an insult.
The days when humans decided on the appropriateness of images are long gone. Today, algorithms scan our photos for every square centimeter of skin. And it's frighteningly simple, as I'll show you in this article.
As I sit here tweaking my website, I realize something: many of the improvements I make behind the scenes aren't immediately noticeable. Yet there's constantly something new happening! High time for a little update.
Recently, during my evening wanderings through the TV landscape, I got stuck watching First Dates — a show that celebrates the magic of first impressions like no other. Amused, I observed how the protagonists, when asked about their first impressions, performed the same dance over and over like in a well-orchestrated ballet: Those eyes...
Recently at a photo shoot, a model asked me if I knew what Male Gaze meant. Of course I didn't know. I'm only a photographer with twenty years of experience. But apparently, in recent years, an entirely new language has developed to describe the world's injustices. So here's a little guide through the jungle of modern terminology.
Sometimes you have to wonder why the most obvious solutions take so long to arrive. Recently, I discussed in a blog article how fantastic it would be if digital cameras had built-in LUTs. That is, the ability to select and see a specific look directly while taking photos. And all along, the answer was sitting right in my pocket.
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