Dear friends, followers, colleagues and potential customers,

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I am Ben from Cologne, Germany. The man behind this website and its images.

By trade I am not a photographer but a chef, which is closer to a photographer than one might think. For both professions you need a lot of creative thinking and the ability to imagine how the final product might turn out. As a chef, that refers to the flavour of my ingredients and how they might work as a composed dish. For a photographer, the ingredients are the subject/object being shot and the light - whether it's natural or not - surrounding it. Not only the flavour has influence on the final dish; also the cooking techniques and tools do. My techniques and tools as a photographer are my camera gear and my settings. Simple as that... or as complicated as that? Sometimes you get lucky and everything comes together just as perfect as you wanted it to be. But honestly? That rarely happens. Skill and experience come into play when its about the adjustments that need to be done to get to the result that you had in mind. Sometimes it's just a little tweak or minor change, sometimes it's taking a whole new approach, and sometimes it means coming to the decision that what you had in mind just won't work and you should move on.

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What fascinates me about photography is this mixture of technical knowledge and unlimited creativity and freedom about what and where to shoot. Even the same picture, taken by the same photographer on the same camera will always look different, due to light, time, settings and personal freedom of the creator. Same as every detailed recipe will always turn out different depending on the chef who cooked it.

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My eye for detail, my composing skills and my good organisation skills that I have gained over the years of being a chef, help me a lot to become even better in all genres of photography that I do. Whether it is Food, Portrait or Landscape.

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