In December 2014 I went to Cuba with my good friend, the talented filmmaker
Jan Stollberg. We mostly stayed in Havana but also explored the valley of Viñales and the beautiful landscape surrounding it. We both went to Cuba to shoot personal projects.
My series is about the different men living in Cuba. Each person represents the place where I found them. I wanted to show the diversity of the people from the small boy to the old man.
I used my Profoto B1 in combination with an Elinchrom Rotalux Deep Octa to light them. My goal was to achieve a nice balance between the ambient light and the flash.
I wanted to thank Jan for the big help during each shooting in assisting me with the lighting and our local guides who showed us amazing places and for translating.

This is Jan’s amazing film from our trip! 

and here are a few behind the scenes images by Jan

Finally I had the time to edit these images from the shoot with Mario. It was one of the last sunny days at the end of August. I really like this raw background texture and the sunlight in the shots, but I still wanted the light quality and control from the studio. I used one Profoto B1 with a beauty dish as my main light on him. The rest is just the ambient light…

As I mentioned in the other blog post about New York, I shot a few rolls of film on a Hasselblad 501cm as well. With that camera I took more portraits of people I met on the street. I really enjoyed the whole process of shooting, developing, scanning and editing the images… Here are some of my favourites from the trip.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of photographing my good friend Lena at a local
running track in Darmstadt. I saw the location for the first time about a year ago
and always wanted to shoot there.
I wanted to photograph an athlete sitting in the stands. Lena is an incredible runner, so she was a perfect subject for it.

Two weeks ago I was in New York for 10 days. The city is absolutely breathtaking and photographic opportunities are everywhere to be found. I was walking around the city with two cameras by my side, my trusty 5D Mark II with either a 50mm or a 35mm lens and a Hasselblad 501cm with an 80mm lens. Here are some of my favourite images from the 5D. I am currently in the process of scanning all of the negatives from the Hasselblad and will post them once I’m finished. So stay tuned…