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Hafenliebe Elopement Photography, Hamburg (2026)

11/09/2026

I am afraid of getting bored in this job. There. I said it. Not bored by people. Bored by myself, by repeating what already worked until I stop looking properly.

That is probably why I have always preferred new places to returning to the same reliable locations.

Knowing a place is useful. You know where the light will be, which corner works and how to get the safe photograph quickly. Efficiency is useful. It is also how you end up making the same photograph if you are not careful.

Lisbon was new to all three of us. Ana and Till were there for their fifth anniversary, and I joined them for the final three days.

We had no reliable route and no list of proven locations. We walked, stopped when something caught our attention and moved on when it did not.

The stairs, the road, the rooftops and the coast only became locations because we were paying attention.

Lisbon might still feel new after ten visits. Some places have too much going on to believe you have finished seeing them. I do not need a new country every time. I need to make sure I do not arrive with the photograph already finished in my head.

Otherwise, what the f**k am I doing?

09/09/2026

I hate being photographed. Slightly inconvenient for a photographer, I know.

I understand the idea behind “everybody is beautiful.” I even think there is a lot of truth in it. I also know how difficult it can be to apply that kindness to yourself.

When I see a photograph of myself, I find every detail I think is wrong and stare at it until I cannot see much else.

So if you are looking at these photographs of Kira and thinking, “I could never do that,” I am not going to correct you with a slogan.

You do not have to arrive feeling confident. You do not have to know what to do with your body or your hands. And you definitely do not have to love every part of yourself before we start.

These photographs are carefully constructed. That is part of my job. I can work with the light, the position, the clothes, the hands and everything happening inside the frame.

You only need enough trust and curiosity to see what we can make together. Feeling strong can come later.

07/09/2026

We found this empty hall at the harbour in Lübeck by accident. It was part of a construction site and definitely not on any location list, so we asked the workers if we could go inside. They said yes.

Five minutes earlier, the place had meant absolutely nothing to Kira and Jannick. Or to me. And honestly, that was fine. Not every place needs a love story attached to it before you make photographs there. Sometimes it can just look f**king good.

The scale, the lines and those enormous windows completely changed what I wanted to make with Kira and Jannick. So we went inside and used the place for what it gave us.

A meaningful location brings its own history. A completely foreign one gives you no instructions at all. I like that too.

Five minutes earlier, none of us knew the hall existed.

04/09/2026

Hard midday light on sand is a PITA. A proper pain in the ass, and I love it anyway.

It does not give you one easy solution. If you insist on making every frame soft and romantic, you spend the whole time fighting the place you chose to be in.

I would rather see what else the light can do. With Sandra and Lars, that meant moving between graphic portraits, small gestures, direct closeness and photographs with much more space around them.

Sandra is a photographer herself. So she can probably see where I am trying to go a little earlier than someone who has never stood behind a camera. And she knows how important trust is when an idea is not fully there yet.

Both of them gave me that trust completely, so I did not have to pretend every idea was finished before we tried it. We could move, change direction and see what worked.

The light stayed hard. Fine. We kept using it.

31/08/2026

Michèle met Noah in a book café and asked what they were reading. Noah answered, they talked for a while, and then Noah left without exchanging names, numbers or anything else that might have been remotely useful if either of them ever wanted to meet again. They now call this gay panic, which is fair enough, but also a f**king terrible system for finding love.

Michèle tried to find Noah on Instagram and failed. A few days later, Noah followed her and liked some photographs. It was not exactly a grand romantic gesture. It was barely a gesture at all. But it was enough for Michèle to recognise the door had opened again, so she messaged immediately. That part worked better.

I had known Michèle since 2017, when we met at a photography workshop I taught in the Azores. Eight years later, she asked me to photograph her and Noah during a Lovers Session in Berlin. Inside Mahalla, I kept noticing the space immediately before contact: a hand approaching, two faces almost meeting, the point where you cannot quite tell whether somebody is about to kiss, laugh or move away again.

Photographers often want the completed gesture. The kiss, the embrace, the clean little answer at the end of the movement. I like the second before it. There is hope in it, but there is risk too. Both people still have somewhere else they could go, and they are choosing, again, to move closer.

Noah and Michèle had spent their first meeting almost finding each other. Now I had them standing in an enormous industrial hall while I kept photographing the moments in which they almost touched. The difference was that this time neither of them had to wonder whether the other one would disappear without leaving a name.

Some stories deserve a neat visual metaphor. These two apparently needed Instagram first.

For all the s**t we say about that app, it managed one useful thing.

24/08/2026

Ariane and Pia had been together for 17 years when they went to Copenhagen to get married. In all that time, they had never made a proper set of photographs together.

Seventeen years.

Honestly, that takes commitment.

Their plan was Copenhagen City Hall, two friends as witnesses, a few days in the city and New Year’s Eve. That was it. No enormous wedding hiding behind the word elopement. No twelve-hour schedule pretending to be relaxed. Get married, drink champagne, enjoy Copenhagen. Fu***ng excellent plan.

The ceremony was short. Rings, signatures, a kiss. Copenhagen City Hall is exceptionally efficient at marrying people, which sounds terribly unromantic until you are standing in that dark little room and realise nobody there needs ten thousand decorative words to understand what is happening.

Their two friends were not an audience. They were part of the machinery of the day in the best possible way. They had helped beforehand, came as witnesses, held things when we made portraits and then raised their glasses after the ceremony. No entertainment required. Just four people who actually wanted to be there.

We stayed inside City Hall for a while, made a few portraits and then walked through Copenhagen together. Afterwards I left them to spend the rest of the day with their friends.

A photographer knowing when to f**k off is an underrated professional skill.

We met again the following morning. No ceremony, no witnesses, no schedule breathing down our necks. Just Copenhagen in winter and a shared love for Anton Corbijn, which gave us permission to make things darker, stranger and much less obviously wedding-shaped.

Those photographs belong to another story.

And yes, I am absolutely teasing it.

21/08/2026

Copenhagen, half past seven in the morning. Fu***ng early. Deliberately.

Kevin and Terence had been together for nearly seven years. They came from Hong Kong and Taiwan and were living in Hong Kong, where their relationship could not be legally recognised as a marriage.

That is a bureaucratic way of describing something completely f**ked.

I asked them to meet me this early because most of the city would still be asleep. At home, being visibly close in public had not felt uncomplicated. Empty streets and an old courtyard gave us time before Copenhagen started looking back.

The first photographs were careful. Of course they were. Seven years of having to think about who might be watching do not disappear because some German photographer says, “Just relax.”

So I did not say that.

We walked. We made photographs. Then they kissed.

If I remember what they told me correctly, and after almost ten years I am about 95 percent certain, this was their first kiss in public.

“Public” is doing a heroic amount of work there. Nobody else was standing in the courtyard. It was just the three of us, perhaps some people behind the windows and a city slowly waking up outside. But it was not behind a closed door. Someone could have seen them. That was enough for the moment to carry seven years of context it should never have f**king needed.

The remaining five percent is there because memory is an unreliable bastard and this is their history, not mine to certify.

The following day, Kevin and Terence got married in Copenhagen. The city did not make their relationship real. It finally did the paperwork.

14/08/2026

I love symmetry, and Copenhagen City Hall is frankly ridiculous in the best possible way. Dark wood, repeated lamps, parallel railings and a staircase that keeps rebuilding the same frame across several floors.

I had photographed that staircase before. I knew the picture worked, so I made it again.

There is a version of photographer talk where every couple is completely different and therefore every photograph must be invented from nothing. Sounds lovely. Also a bit like bulls**t.

I do repeat photographs. If I know a composition is good, I will use it again. That may not make the idea completely individual, but the photograph still belongs to the people inside it. For them, it has never happened before. And it still carries the way I see shape, distance and people rather than becoming the usual City Hall photograph everybody is expected to take.

You cannot reinvent photography every f**king Tuesday. Repetition is part of style. Certain distances, shapes and ways of placing people return because they are mine. A reliable picture also gives me somewhere to begin.

The problem would be stopping there.

With Kris and Ilya, I made the staircase photograph I already knew. Then I changed the distance, separated them inside the symmetry, brought them back together and kept working before they followed the registrar into the ceremony room.

The safe photograph helped. It did not get to make every decision.

10/08/2026

I love Superkilen, which is slightly inconvenient because everybody else seems to love it too. It is one of Copenhagen’s hipster and Instagram spots, full of people and photographs that have already been made. Every time I go back, I try to find something different and remove everyone who happens to walk through my frame. Usually not by force.

Kris and Ilya went there with me the day before they got married. We had eaten together the evening before, but this was our first time with a camera between us. No registrar was waiting. There was no ceremony to reach. We had time to try things and for me to quietly wonder whether Ilya was enjoying any of them.

Kris gives his energy away almost immediately. Ilya keeps his closer. I know that feeling because I can be exactly the same, but apparently self-awareness does not stop me from becoming a grumpy idiot when I cannot read someone else.

Between his Kazakh accent, my German English and the fact that we had known each other for less than a day, some things were probably lost in translation. Meanwhile, Ilya did every bit of stupid s**t I suggested. He changed position, lay down on the painted lines and stayed open to whatever we tried. He could have said no at any point. I am fairly sure he would have.

Then he noticed the words “F**K MY ASS” underneath them, completely lost it and insisted that we make the photograph there.

Right. He was fine.

We kept changing height and distance until two men in good clothes were lying on the ground in the middle of Copenhagen, because apparently that was where the f**king picture was.

07/08/2026

I was already booked. F**k.

Jule had asked me to photograph their wedding in a small village in southern Germany. She was making her own dress, there would be Irish music and the ceremony would move between English and German. I wanted to be there, but the date was gone.

That should have ended the conversation. Jule wrote back. She and Rory lived in Dundalk and had maybe twenty decent photographs together, most of them taken with a phone. Her solution was that I come to Ireland after the wedding. They would put their wedding clothes back on and we would spend three days making photographs around the places where they actually lived.

Was that a completely unreasonable response to a scheduling conflict? Yes. Did I want to do it immediately? Also yes.

We met for the first time two months after their wedding and went straight into spending three days together. The first thing we did was walk into the moor in their wedding clothes.

Jule and Rory came up here regularly. Wearing the dress was Jule’s idea. Rory’s first reaction was basically: “What the f**k? You’re hardly taking the good clothes into that muck?” She did. He came with her.

There was a film set built for Vikings on land owned by friends of theirs. Or maybe their parents. I explained that I had never seen Vikings or Game of Thrones and that the original Highlander was all anybody needed.

Then we arrived in the middle of the day, the light was s**t and the entire idea stopped working. So I killed it. The set never made it into the photographs. The trees did. I did use the portable toilet, so the visit wasn’t entirely wasted.

The sunset was less negotiable. We knew exactly where we needed to be and when the light would be right. Fifteen minutes before that, we were sitting in the car behind a flock of sheep blocking the road, all of us politely willing them to f**k off before the sun did. They moved. We made it.

The photographs from that first walk are still my favourites. They have all the atmosphere and almost none of the usual wedding bulls**t.

I couldn’t photograph the wedding Jule first wrote to me about. That should have been the end of it. Jule didn’t let it.

Thank f**k.

Hafenliebe Elopement Photography

11/09/2026

09/09/2026

07/09/2026

04/09/2026

31/08/2026

24/08/2026

21/08/2026

14/08/2026

10/08/2026

07/08/2026

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