Kersten Luts had me on the Camera Shake Photography Podcast for episode 324. We talked for 75 minutes, and he opened with the photograph that started my career: the lightning strike on the Berlin TV Tower.
That frame is from 2013. I was on a fire escape above Alexanderplatz for a summer sunset when a storm moved in and the sky turned purple. The camera sat on a tripod shooting HDR brackets, and I pressed the remote again and again until the lightning hit the tower inside one of them. The result is Thunderstorm at Alexanderplatz.
The two days that turned a hobby into a business
The photo went viral on 500px. A press agency picked it up and placed it in UK newspapers, on a double page in Stern and on Dutch television. Then the agency could not tell me who it had licensed the image to.
So I ran the photo through Google’s image search myself, and then every other photo on my blog, one by one. It took two days. I found around 120 uses of my work online: hotel chains, travel agencies, an airline. None of them had asked.
This is my hobby right now. But if all these companies had come to me and asked, the way the agency did, I could make a living as a photographer.
This is the part of the conversation every working photographer should hear. Copyright exists the moment you take the picture. A company that uses your photo owes you the license fee it skipped, and very few photographers ever ask for it. Kersten and I go through how a claim runs in practice, why I lost my first case against a Polish company in a German court, how that loss led to PhotoClaim, and what AI changes for people who license travel images. If you want the evidence side in writing, read how to prove copyright ownership of your photos.
Aphantasia, and why I need the photographs
The episode title comes from aphantasia. I close my eyes, think of a beach and see black. I cannot call up my own photographs either, the Berlin one included. I know what is where in the frame, and I see nothing.
That is the reason I started photographing my trips in the first place: without a photo, the trip is gone. Today a screen in my living room shows a different photograph of mine every two minutes, and that is how I go back. Amateur Photographer covered this side of my work in July, and that interview is here.
Europe Rising
The last third of the episode is about Europe Rising, the series I have been building since the Brexit vote: European places at sunrise, photographed without people so that nothing in the frame dates them. Four countries of the European Union are still missing: Finland, Slovenia, Belgium and Malta.
If everybody is overly negative, it takes someone to be overly positive, so that people end up somewhere in the middle.
Watch or listen to the full episode
The full conversation is on YouTube: The Photographer Who Can’t Picture His Own Photos. It is also in every podcast app as episode 324 of the Camera Shake Photography Podcast.
Thanks to Kersten Luts for a well-prepared conversation and the room to cover the business side properly.
