In late 2013, I stumbled upon an article in the local newspaper. It was a short interview with an 18 years old free runner / Parkour athlete from Bayreuth, who had started to make a living off his sport. Since I had been interested in shooting some Parkour action for quite a while, I looked him up on Facebook and asked him if he was interested in taking some photos together – luckily he turned out to be a super nice guy and the first photo session already resulted in a couple of very cool photos. I have been shooting with Waldi on a regular basis since then and I’m pretty pumped about the shots we could get so far!

 

Demolition Flip – My favorite session with Waldi so far was our quick trip to Frankfurt am Main at the beginning of february 2014. Felix, my brother in law, had sent me a news article some months earlier which was about the biggest controlled demolition of a building in a European city yet. He suggested an action shooting at the exact moment of detonation. Naturally, I was instantly hooked. I asked Waldi if he was interested in joining the project and that’s how we ended up in Frankfurt, looking for spots that provided the perfect view of the collapsing tower. During the night before the demolition, we found a pretty nice angle on top of a very nice hotel beside the restricted area – and were promptly escorted away by the police. Though they were quite stoked about our idea of the action photo, they unfortunately had to ask us to look for a different angle since the hotel owner wasn’t particularly stoked to see us on his roof 😉
We eventually found this spot in the midst of one of the main public viewing areas – it was a bit of a fight to keep the view of Waldi unobstructed, but it all worked out pretty well in the end!

Luckily a very nice family sent me this cell phone video, so I have a perfect making of video of the Demolition Flip – thank you again to Mr. Francuz for sending me the video!! Check it out here! (external Facebook link)