more about…

This page contains short videos (reels) from various categories.

I’m actually a photographer, not a filmmaker. At some point, though, the idea came up to combine photos and videos. This idea goes back to something my youngest daughter once said. I had shown her a portrait of herself. It had originally been taken in a meadow as an application photo. Later, when I wanted to try out some compositing, I used that portrait and placed it in front of the Elbphilharmonie.

When I showed it to her and asked what she thought, she replied: “It’s okay.”

What??? “It’s okay”??? Why?

“I wasn’t even there!” she answered.

So there I was, standing there with a puzzled look on my face. Are images supposed to show where you’ve been?

I’ve actually heard similar comments quite often. For example: “That’s not how it was at all,” when I edited an image a bit more heavily.

So are images supposed to show where you’ve been and what it was like there?

That’s actually impossible. No image can truly represent reality. Every camera makes certain “adjustments.” Think back to the early days of photography: all images were black and white. Not a single one showed “reality,” because black and white doesn’t exist in nature—it’s full of color!

To show a bit more of the reality of my subjects, I looked for a way to present them more comprehensively: by combining photography with short video clips of the subject.

The result is this website.

My Reel Formats

Scene-to-Print-Reels

These are reels showing my subjects in their setting. As condition change (e.g. the weather), you may find more than one reel for a single subject. This is the first type I startet with.

10-Seconds-Reels

When filming the scene-to-print reels, a lot of video footage naturally accumulates, much of which ultimately goes unused. This gave me the idea to create additional reels that are not related to my subjects, but instead show life and nature as they are.

These clips are also only a few seconds long, as I mainly produce them for Instagram, but in some cases they can be up to a minute or even two minutes long—especially if they were created exclusively for this website. Even though the videos are longer, they retain their categorization as “10-Second Reels,” as the idea behind this format is to showcase city life without resulting in a fine-art image reflecting my personal interpretation.

Enjoy browsing!

Marcus