about me

Welcome to Staralfur Photography. Staralfur is an Icelandic term and means ’staring elf‘.

This term means a lot to me. On the one hand it is a song by my favourite Icelandic band Sigur Ròs and it expresses my bond to Iceland. On the other hand ’staring elf‘ also highlights my attitude towards photography: To me the most important element is to develop an eye for unique moments and to capture them. In my opinion this is much more essential than using high-tech equipment properly.

To tell you the truth, this is actually the way I started. First, I was addicted to Canon’s L-series and got eventually fed up with carrying all this bulky equipment around. Then I got inspired by pictures taken with Leica cameras which made me buy a digital one myself. I enjoyed taking pictures with it tremendously because I was able to get closer to what I wanted to photograph. But after some time I got bored by the technical perfection because the pictures were too sterile for my taste. I wanted to come up with pictures that were less perfect, more natural and more focused on the actual moment.

Thus, I moved back to the analogue world. Nowadays, I only take pictures either with my Rolleiflex 3.5f or my Leica M3 camera and I really enjoy self-developing my negative and positive prints.