About Me
It is all my wife’s fault.
She came up, back in 1996 or so, with the idea of getting me a ‘real’ camera, in the secret hope that doing so would stimulate me to more willingly come along on cross-country hikes. Before, we had merely owned point-and-shoot pocket cameras, plus I wasn’t much of a hiker anyway.
What can I say? The ploy worked but turned out to be rather expensive. 😉 Photography doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, but if you are into bird photography, you better watch both. As far as I am able to tell, she has no regrets, though, as we both get to enjoy the results and the ways to get there.
I have always enjoyed traveling the world. A lot of that came with my job, which frequently had me traveling all over the Americas, Europe and Asia. At least as important to both of us, however, has been, and still is, seeing the world with our own eyes. As this map showing the routes I have flown demonstrates, I achieved some of that, but still not nearly as much as I would really like to.
So far, I went to 230 or so airports via about 370 different connections, from short hops like the 52-mile one from Tobago to Trinidad’s Port of Spain to the 7,240 mile trip from Melbourne to Dubai. My latest trip brought me to my 64th country, Romania, and I still have a long list of places I would love to see, as well as places I would like to return to. I’ve been to six of the seven continents and still hope to get to Antarctica one day.
All in all, I covered the distance from the Earth to the Moon almost seven times. If that sounds glorious to you, consider this: the flipside is that when counting it all, I spent almost five solid months of my life, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, in airplanes.
In spite of all of it, this beautiful planet keeps fascinating me, and I don’t see me tiring of wanting to see more of it any time soon. Capturing some of this beauty is a passion and a joy for me. I hope some of you feel that joy, too, when looking at the pictures on this site.
Lothar Katz