To capture with attentive eyes the most varied views, outlooks and insights, and reflecting them in their natural aesthetics and balanced beauty or presenting them from a whole new perspective, is Heike Schwab’s greatest passion.
Already as a teenager, she experimented in the school’s darkroom with black and white photography and has since been taking pictures of everything she encounters with her analog lens.
Many trips and time spent abroad on four continents provided innumerable subjects and Heike discovered her preference for the liveliness of people and the excitement of architectural structures. Her fervour for yacht photography, now her focal point, was ignited by her first touch with the America’s Cup in summer 2004, at its arrival in Valencia, Spain. The boats, the passion of the people involved and the dynamic of the event fascinated her so much that she followed the Cup from Act 1 in Marseille clear across Europe to Act 12 and moved to Valencia in march 2005, where she will continue to cover the Cup to the finals in July 2007 in pictures and words.
How one perceives things or how one believes things to be, always depends on your point of view
Her fascination with the sport of sailing quickly expanded to include other international classes of boats and regattas, no matter if TP52, RC44 or the Volvo Ocean Race. Today Heike Schwab is a freelance photographer (photographing digitally since 2005) and writer for different sailing magazines and daily and weekly newspapers.
Coming from Lindau in Lake Constance (Germany), Heike Schwab studied business & economics and worked as graduated MBA in advertising before moving on to the film industry and for 10 years being part of the production of numerous cinema and TV films, as well as TV-series, on set as continuity and director assistant. The experiences from that time – the play between light and shadow, the staging of situations and characters, as well as discovering the flair to tell stories – she values especially for her present work as a freelance photographer and journalist.
Having experienced change always as refreshing, she mainly looks in these permanent changing times at the appeal of the unknown and the chance to discover new things, face new challenges, develop further and improve, always with the goal on focus to completely satisfy her customer’s wishes.
Her philosophy is: “Someone who believes they have attained their goals, stops reaching for them.”