I was born and raised in the small town of Walbeck in the lower Rhine valley in Germany near the Dutch border. The love for nature and traveling has been in my blood for as long as I can remember. As a teenager I made my first big trip to Northern Africa together with two school friends.
After finishing high school my fever to explore distant lands became unbearable and I started wandering around the globe wondering what to do with my future. First I worked as a sailor on several German merchant marine ships for 2 years to satisfy my appetite for seasickness, big ships, short stay-overs in harbor towns and views of endless bodies of water for weeks and months on end.
Life improved much when I decided to become captain of my own boat. I packed my camping gear and headed for the remote and wild Yukon in Northern Canada, purchased a canoe and spent the whole summer of 1978 paddling down the entire length of the Yukon River to the Bering Sea. This trip and many other canoe adventures that followed over the next decade took me all over the arctic realm of North America across some of the remotest, untouched wildernesses on earth.
At the end of 1978 I began studying geology at the University of Cologne. Five years later when working on my thesis in the Iberian Mountains in Spain I suddenly discovered my love for photography. After completing university I further developed my photography skills during a one-year trip in northern Canada across one of the remotest regions on earth. In 1990 a longstanding dream came true: the emigration to Canada's Yukon Territory.
It took another 6 years until I made the best decision of my life and began a career as a full time nature photographer, a move I have never regretted.
