About.

Actually I started to take pictures because of scuba diving. At first I got an analog Sea&Sea MX5 but quickly I changed to a Canon Ixus 500 with an original Canon housing, because of high film costs.
The image quality became better, but I still did snapshots under water. After the Ixus was getting older, I bought a Canon Powershot S5IS for my study and later a fitting Ikelite under water housing with a wideangle lens and red filter.

Underwaterphotography became more and more interesting for me but a flashlight was missing. On a south safari tour in Egypt I met Bettina Balnis, Uwe Schmolke and Ivo Vaessen. All three very good under water photographers and I recognised the differences between their and mine images. Ivo helped me to buy a Inon D2000 flashlight.

So I got more active and watched a lot of under water pictures from other good photographers and searched information all over the web. I looked for good motives in the web and tried them on my own during the holidays. Soon I recognized that a compact camera cannot hold the competition with a DSLR. Speed, image quality and dynamic range are some of the reasons why I wanted to have a DSLR.

In May 2009 I bought a Canon EOS 500D and began taking photos very serious and intensive. I had to understand the connection between aperture, exposuretime and iso and the best way to do this, is to exercise and taking pictures. During that time I got interested to work with decoupled flashlights, also called strobist. I did a lot of photos with my diving buddy Bjoern and the range of interest was growing.
October 2009 I booked a journey to Curacao and fortunately I got a rent underwater housing from UK-Germany and my friend Ivo lend me a Nikonos SB 105 with strobe arm. Equipped with a Tokina fisheye and a Canon EF 60mm Macro I started my first diving vacancy with a DSRL.

Immediately I was impressed by the differences and the succes for the first try. After my vacation I started to plan a system with Ivo for my actual equipment. After I saw the overall costs I catched that the camera itself is one of the cheapest parts and so I decided to change to a Canon 5D MKII. This camera will not be antiquated in a short time and will do good pictures for a long time.

Focus.