Heiko Purnhagen - About

Welcome to my homepage!

I hope you enjoy viewing the photography on this web site as much as I enjoyed taking these pictures. And I would like to thank all the musicians you see here for fascinating festivals and events and countless concerts here in Stockholm - hoping that my attempts to capture these performances didn't spoil anything...

If you are interested in any of the pictures presented here, please do not hesitate to contact me at mail@heikopurnhagen.net - usage on the web or in print can be granted under very reasonable conditions. I have also collected a few interesting links and references concerning photography.

Besides photography, I enjoy traveling by bike and have an academic background in signal processing. Last but not least, you can find most of the material from my old alternative homepage on the attic.

Towards concert photography...

My interest in photography started for real in 1986 at the age of 17, when I took a borrowed single-lens reflex (SLR) camera with me on a one week school trip on board of a traditional sailing vessel. A bit later I got my own SLR, which followed me on various trips and journeys and taught me some of the fundamentals of photography. When I decided to move from Germany to Sweden in 2002, I switched to a digital compact camera, basically because it is cheaper to operate and the results are easier to share in the age of Internet. And I soon learned to appreciate that it became much easier to experiment and try something odd or new, since feedback is available immediately on the screen.

Moving to Stockholm enabled me also to explore the innovative jazz scene in the north of Europe. Soon, I became a regular at the Glenn Miller Café, a unique jazz club here in Stockholm, and started traveling to various jazz festivals in Norway. However, trying to take pictures at such concerts with a compact camera is a frustrating exercise, especially if you want to capture the atmosphere with available light, and don't want to disturb the situation with a flash. Being tired of these limitations, and longing for looking through a "real" viewfinder again, I switched to a digital SLR in 2004 when prices had dropped enough to be affordable even to people that do not do photography for their living.

With this camera and an increasing collection of nice lenses, I got really hooked on concert photography. Finally, there is a chance to capture the atmosphere of live performances and get portraits of musicians that really mean something to me. And sometimes I even get a picture that I'm willing to show...

About this web site

Practically all of the photography you see on this web site was done with Nikon digital SLR cameras using a variety of lenses. The photos were stored as high quality JPEG files in the camera and not processed afterwards (except for scaling, sharpening, and imprinting) unless noted otherwise in the filename. The EXIF data was kept in the JPEG files for those interested in more details. Most of the content on this web site is generated using a set of AWK scripts like makehtmlgallery7 and thumblinklist that are available under GPL in the software directory.

Contact