After Delhi and the Taj Mahal, we hopped on a train and enjoyed a comfortable train ride, followed by a rather uncomfortable and very scary nighttime taxi ride, to Rishikesh, a place that became very popular around the world when the Beatles joined an ashram here in the late sixties. Today, it’s known for its countless ashrams/yoga academies as well as a very spiritual place in general, lying next to the «World’s most sacred river», the Ganges.

We’d had the intention to travel to India for a few years and last December we did so. We stayed for a month and started our trip in Delhi, which, looking back on it, was probably the most chaotic and intense place we visited. Yet, we didn’t experience a huge culture shock. Many things like traffic, piles of garbage/plastic next to train tracks, bad air quality were a little more intense than in pretty much any place we’d been to before, but I guess we came prepared.

Another year has flown by and once again, I’m late with my flashback sort of post on here. I haven’t been photographing much lately. Instead, my focus was on another project-come-business of mine: Drip Roasters. I started a coffee roasting company together with my brother Dennys, which means we pretty much worked day and night to get our coffees to taste the way we wanted them to and to start a company and create a brand from scratch. But this post isn’t about the last few months only, it’s about 2018. And I did a good many other things in this crazy year, too. As anticipated, I did spend (much) more time traveling compared to 2017. A little too much, […]

After having visited Penang about three years ago on a Southeast Asia trip, I went back to the Malay island this November for a work trip. I was there for a week and we had a pretty tight schedule that didn’t allow for much personal shooting. When we went to George Town towards the end of the week, though, we stopped at this pretty fishermen’s beach and I shot a few frames on the Leica.

We initially planned a trip to Japan on our way back from Hawaii in early spring, making it a round-the-world trip. However, we had to change plans and fly back the other way around, postponing our trip to Japan by a few weeks. So by the beginning of June, we finally left for Japan after spending a bit over a month at home. On the road again! (Or in the air, rather.) We had been to Tokyo a year and a half earlier and absolutely loved it, but we hadn’t seen anything else of Japan. This time, besides Tokyo, we were to visit the two small towns Hakone and Yamanakako in the Fuji Five Lakes region, close to the beautiful symmetrical volcano, as well as Kyoto.

When the tickets went live for this year’s Traveling Light, I didn’t hesitate and booked my spot as soon as possible. Traveling Light is a gathering for photographers passionate about film photography. I wrote a few words about it on this blog last year. This year’s event was even better! It was a perfect mix of inspiring keynote presentations held by speakers from all kinds of different styles and genres, workshops with some of the industry’s best and most experienced photographers, delicious food, a few parties, and a whole lot of side activities.

In September 2017, the guys who run the photography podcast Graincast initiated a 365 photo project. The idea was basically to shoot film for a full 365 days without being able to see the resulting pictures. After a year, one would develop all film rolls and finally be able to look at the photos. 49 photographers took part in the challenge, each participating in a somewhat different way, creating their own rules. I decided that my rules were to take at least one portrait per week with my old Pentax K1000 on Kodak Tri-X 400 film.

Before I’m diving into the Oahu part of our trip, the first picture here is that one photo I took on Maui. Oahu was our last destination on our 3.5-months-trip (not counting a 20-something-hour layover in LA). After having been to quite a number of beaches within the last few days on the Big Island, we didn’t need much beach time on Oahu. Instead, we did the short hike/walk up to the Diamond Head crater, where I took the same photo I’d taken two years ago. We ate a lot of delicious things (poké!) and (re)discovered some great coffee spots in Honolulu and enjoyed being in a big city again after a few weeks without one. And we rented a […]

We flew from San Francisco to Maui after a week. We weren’t able to rent a car because my license had been stolen along with my daypack in Mexico. This, along with the not-so-great public transport on the island and the location of the exorbitantly overpriced apartment we rented, led to us not seeing a whole lot of Maui at all. We went to the beach once or twice and spent what felt like most of our time Skype-calling several car rental and car sharing companies and getting frustrated because we couldn’t really go anywhere. At least, the weather wasn’t great either so we didn’t miss that much. I took one single photo on Maui, which is why I’m skipping […]

It was my first time in San Francisco, second time for Seraina – she’d once visited the city with her uncle when she was a child. The city was everything I expected and more. Buildings and streets were beautiful, it was rainy and rather cool at first (though we got quite some sun a few days later). We ate like kings and queens for a full week, coffee was top-notch, people looked very normal. Our Airbnb was a cozy room in huge, old, beautiful apartment heavy with Asian antiques.