I do changed my usual surroundings for a week, have a damn slow EDGE-connection to the Internet and I’m forbidden to do more than looking at my photos in full size…  I guess  this are holidays .

A few free days are coming up – enjoy them…

Merry Christmas to you!

I took them on the Wave Gotik Treffen 2009.

Over the last weeks I gave Thomas Adorff (The Beauty Of Abyss) a little help with his latest project, a calendar for the 20 year anniversary of Shadowrun.

Shadowrun is a pen-and-paper role-playing game set in a near, dystopian future where magic is as common as hightech. To get a glimpse remember films like “Matrix” and “Equilibrium” or books like “Neuromancer” (William Gibson) and “The Shockwave Rider” (John Brunner).

Thomas spent a lot of time in this project, mostly in the postproduction and the results are… well… sit in your car and hit a wall with 50mph than you get an idea

To get a fullsize preview of the teaser for the “Träume waren gestern” (“Dreams were yeasterday”) calendar click here.

I’ve seen the raw photos and the endresults are more than amazing. The calender wil be released on the “Internationale Spieletage” (22. – 25. October in Essen). Orders will also be possible via Pegasus. The calendar is limited, so hurry if you want to get one!

From the journalistic side it also was special, being at close quarters with bands I formerly just knew from the inlay of my CDs.

But too soon I had to put down the rose-colored glasses. Running a online-magazine on a semi-pro level is hard work. Getting reliable people that know how to write good articles and reviews, the webprogramming and all the other adminstrative stuff slowly eats your stamina away…

Still I did it for six years. Taking photos and becoming acquainted with wonderful people over the years were my personal fuel to keep it going.

The last year, 2008, brought the final turn. Running pandaimonix with handwritten HTML/CSS became to straining so I had to to make a decision whether to switch to a PHP/mySQL-powered CMS or stop it.

I decided to switch to the CMS mostly because of one person I used to know and the help I got assured by my editors. Well, around christmas I was doing the migration all alone…

Anyway, the CMS-solution was the right choice because I could concentrate more on the content instead of shaping the HTML/CMS around it.

But lifes always changes (sometimes very rude) and in 2009 my life brought me work enough for two people – besides my usual job. Additionally a few of my editors fell away and that was the point when it started to get worse.

I had to made a decision again and it took me some time to do it. After the evaluation of different ways to run pandaimonix in the future, the final choice was to stop it. Completely. Forever.

As you can guess it was a hard decision, as I (and my editors) spent blood, sweat and tears for six years and pandaimonix became something of a relationship. Parting after such a long time ain’t that easy but the the morning after the final thoughts I felt relieved.

I do not escape the musicbusiness and concertphotography entirely, as I will contribute photos and articles for other mags as a freelancer. But it will all be run on a very small scale that leaves me enough time to concentrate fully on the other aspects of photography I discovered over the last months.

I’m very grateful for the time I had with pandaimonix and I’m more than happy that I made some friends that still stay with me, but now it’s time to go on.

It was a walk on a thin line.  In the beginning we decided to disallow any attendance for the models, but in the end we had around 20 people at the peak time.

Anyway, it was funny after all and some kind of a challenge too. The people I met (photographers and models) were worth the stress and I learned a lot.  It turned out that [(number of models)+1] is the right formula for the amount of photographers participating in such events – at least for me.

Photographers:
Martin Kimmel
Jürgen Kolbe
Hendrik Siemens
Gunther Eichhorn

Models:
LiaLepard
Loonacat
Kim
I.N.E.S.
Joelita
Sevalia
Miriam J.
Christina Weber

You can always opt-out of the newsletter and your E-Mail adress will be kept secret.

Get my newsletter here.