The extremely concise and briefly short:
I’m a full-time professional rock photographer living in Zurich, Switzerland.
The short:
| 2011 | Went full-time photographer! Here’s my “other” photography site: www.k-photo.ch |
| 2010 | Took photos at Sonisphere and was happy as a pig in the mud :) |
| 2009 | Switched jobs & cut back to working part time eng, part time photog |
| 2009 | Started freelancing for 20 Minuten as their concert photographer |
| 2008 | Shot my first live photos with a DSLR. Got a Nikon D3. |
| 2007 | Shot my first digital concert photos (with a compact cam…) |
| 2006 | Got my M.Sc. in Computer Science and started working at Google as an engineer |
| 2005 | Did an Internship at Google, bought my first DSLR (a Canon 20D) from the money |
| 2002 | Shot my first concert photos. With a disposable cardboard camera :D |
| 2001 | Started studying Computer Science at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich |
| 2001 | Got my university entry diploma and stopped flipping hamburgers |
| 2000 | Started working at McDonald’s |
| 1998 | Listened to my favorite bands on a walkman during class |
| 1992 | Discovered rock music with the first few bars of “Welcome To The Jungle” |
| 1990 | Got my first camera and took photos like crazy of just about anything |
| 1981 | Born on November 20 in Zurich. Beware, this concert photographer is a scorpio ;-) |
The very extremely comment-flooded and totally exaggeratedly long:
My mom and dad both don’t take photos, nor do they like rock or metal. My aunt was a very avid photographer until they stopped making the kind of battery her camera needs, and then she stopped taking pictures (also, she’s over 80 now, so forgive her for that).
But something must’ve been in the air, maybe hair metal (hair spray?) or some other music of the era when I was born in 1981, ready to rock.
The first thing I rocked was my aunt’s mirror, one of the first photos of me is her feet in the mirror and me discovering myself and the mirror. Shiny things and photos, I knew it even at 6 months!
Since my eyesight is spectacularly bad since birth, I got to wear glasses and was also spectacularly fast a total outcast. That never bothered me much, I was happy just tinkering with paper and tape (I never was patient enough for glue – still ain’t today :D) and drifting around in that hole in my head called wonderland.
My older brother and the other kids in the house and I would play hide and seek in the tree nursery that’s now fancy family homes, and we built a tree house where we cooked tea on an open fire in a flowerpot.
When I was 11, I accidentally put one of my brother’s CDs into the player and got hooked for life when the first few bars of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome To The Jungle” flew past my ears. The most I’d been exposed to music until then had been my parents’ classical music collection during Sunday morning breakfast and the worn-out tapes my ballet teacher would play. Holy smokes. Maybe I’m still recovering from that experience.
I started plastering the walls of my room with black posters and blasted rock as loudly as I could – went through about 3 sets of speakers in 5 years. We didn’t have MTV (yeah, back in the early 90ies, when they still played music videos), but I sure got my share of visuals from all the magazines and posters of bands and rock stars and whatever else I could get my hands on.
One Christmas when I still was in primary school, I got a camera. I have no idea who’d had the idea to give me one. But I fell in love with taking photos instantly. Considering how few time I spent “composing” the picture (I just glanced through the viewfinder and hit the button), they turned out pretty well (I’m a natural, or something like that)!
In 1998, I went on an “exchange vacation” to Canada, and shot 30 rolls of APS “film” in 14 days. My dad refused to pay for the developing of all of them, so I just had the contact sheets. Hey buildings in this part of the world don’t have half as much mirrorish shiny stuff attached to them, and (at least back then) they didn’t grow as freaking tall either! I *had* to take photos!
I’d love to tell you a story about how I was a rebel and went through the school of hard knocks and ended up a billionaire through the rock business, but that would just be a total lie. I was actually a very good student – my goal in general was to keep everyone from bothering me as good as I could; and teachers tend to leave you pretty much alone if you just do your stuff and don’t disturb the lesson (I even got away with listening to my walkman, filing my fingernails, and drawing on every single page of my books during lessons).
When I finished school I decided to study Computer Science ’cause I thought computers were kinda cool, I wanted to know how they worked, and it sounded as if you could count on being able to get a job with that degree. So I did. I buried myself in textbooks for five years and exited with a Master’s degree. Yay.
It was the hardest thing I ever did, and I don’t think I could do it again – and it took its toll. The creative animal in me was starving and started to rebel more badly every day. Long story short, two jobs later I saw myself with a stellar CV and a burnout before the age of 28.
Studying CS and working on the job for four years did have its advantages though: I’m pretty fast at reading and learning, I understand very well how a digital camera works, I can build my own website, and I made enough money to buy myself some gear to toy around with before I went full-time creative animal photographer.
The first camera I had was the one I got for that Christmas in primary school. It was a film point-and-shoot camera and I drowned it in chocolate cream that I carried in the same bag to a party about a year after I’d gotten it. The second camera was the APS camera I went to Canada with, I got that one for confirmation. With both cameras I just took photos as if the developing of photos were free…
Then I didn’t have time and cameras during my studies, but from my first salary as an intern, I bought myself a Canon 20d (which, back then, was a state-of-the-art prosumer camera). I had no idea what I wanted to take photos of, so I got myself a 100mm macro lens because I found photos with shallow depth of field kinda cool.
I watched a lot of live rock shows once I was out of university, and since digital cameras had arrived by then, I took quite a lot of photos (with a crappy compact digital cam from the megapixel war era). And I noticed how I cared less and less about the headbanging and more and more about the taking of a good photo. Sitting at the comp and seeing some of my photos really turning out great made me stupidly happy, so I thought maybe I should try to give concert photography a go with the DSLR, too.
Needless to say, my first concert as an accredited live photographer was a total disaster, but I guess I’ve learned a lot about taking pictures since. You can read all the photography books and blogs and websites you want in advance, but I’ve found you need to make every single mistake yourself to learn something from it :D
I went on to become better than my 20d and bought myself the then brand-new Nikon D3, since that one just has a freaking superior magic superhigh ISO performance. In plain English: You can shoot the nose hair of a bear in hibernation in a cave at night without having to use a flash or tripod and still get a great photo.
It’s been an upward spiral for me since: I shoot concerts for Switzerland’s biggest newspaper, 20 Minuten, I took photos at Sonisphere Switzerland, and I now get to be a self-employed creative animal music photographer. It rocks!