Evaluation committee

Born and raised on Lake Constance, Heike Odermatt moved to the Netherlands with her family at the age of 16. Nature photography was her secret dream from childhood, but she was only able to realise it many years later. She has been doing it with heart and soul since 2002. In the first few years she still took analogue photos with SLR and medium format, but then the switch to digital was unstoppable.
In the beginning, her focus was on landscape photography, but now she feels at home in all disciplines. Her love is for the colder regions of our earth. The rough and lonely landscapes of Scandinavia and the (ant)arctic regions. There she finds what she misses at home in the heavily populated Netherlands. In these areas, the feeling of being just a little guest in this overwhelming nature is strongest for her.
Her wish is to sensitise other people to the beauty and importance of nature with her pictures. Learning to appreciate and love nature is the beginning of a better way of dealing with it.
Heike has been a member of the jury of international nature photography competitions several times and has given several lectures at home and abroad. Her photographs are regularly published and have won many national and international awards, including European Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Wildlife Photographer of the Year by the Natural History Museum in London.

Nature interested him even as a child. Klaus Tamm grew up in a hunting family and was fascinated by the animal photographs in his father's hunting magazines even as a young boy. Inspired by this, he bought a reflex camera with a small telephoto lens as a teenager.
Klaus Tamm began seriously with nature photography in 2005 and bought his first digital camera that year.
It has always been his concern to sensitise people to nature with his photos. His goal is to create artistic-looking photos that give the viewer pause. His photo journeys have taken him to remote areas in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Bulgaria, Romania and Spain, but also to South Africa and South America and the Falkland Islands.
In 2015, he founded Aufwind gemeinnützige GmbH with the aim of donating all income from lectures, image and book sales to nature and environmental protection projects. Klaus Tamm pursues nature photography as a hobby. He is 59 years old and self-employed as a waste disposal contractor in Wuppertal.

Thomas Kirchen

In real life, Thomas Kirchen (*1969) is a system administrator and keeps the computers running. When technology became usable and affordable in photography in 2002, he fell in love with a new hobby, initially macro photography. This earned him his well-known name “Macro-Tom”. First in the photo community, and since 2006 also as a full member of the GDT. Later, Thomas also got his hands on other focal lengths. The love of small things has remained.  
Since his son left home in 2018, he has had more time for photography, which has led to more involvement in the GDT and new friendships within it. Since then, he has also contributed his professional knowledge to the Lünen technical crew. Since 2020, after Sebastian Vogel moved to the board, he has been managing RG6 with Thomas Scheffel and is very happy to do so.

www.makro-tom.de

Radomir Jakubowski

Radomir is 34 years old, has a degree in business and is a self-employed nature photographer. He became a full GDT member at the age of 18. Originally, he comes from Saarland.
He combines his interest in nature with his passion for photography. On tours and journeys, he produces reportages and creative photographs that are repeatedly recognised at international nature photography competitions. Among others, he was category winner at the European Wildlife Nature Photographer of the Year, at the Glanzlichter, the Asferico and Nature Photographer of the Year. At the same time, he was awarded the Fritz Poelking Junior Prize and in numerous other competitions worldwide. His pictures and reports are published in magazines, catalogues and books all over the world. He conducts photography workshops in Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland.
Radomir Jakubowski volunteers for the GDT and has been a member of the board since 2016. In 2013, Rheinwerk Verlag, in collaboration with Sandra Bartocha and Werner Bollmann, published his first book Die Fotoschule in Bildern: Naturfotografie was published. In 2019, Rheinwerk Verlag has published his second book Fotografie in der Natur in collaboration with other authors. In 2020, his latest book Workshop Naturfotografie vor der eigenen Haustür was published by Humboldt Verlag. Radomir Jakubowski has been an official Canon Ambassador since 2019.

www.naturfotocamp.de | #naturfotocamp

Sebastian Vogel

Born in 1979, grew up on the hills of the Middle Rhine Valley and has lived in Bingen am Rhein since 2006. He lives here with his wife Dani and his daughter Marlene. As a carpenter, he restores historic half-timbered houses and churches.
His photographic focus is clearly on his homeland. Although he is reluctant to commit himself to a particular subject area, bird photography is already at the top of his list. The constant availability, the knowledge of species that can be found where and when, being quickly on location and yet always being surprised are essential ingredients for his nature photography.
Sebastian Vogel has been a GDT member since 2005, was regional group leader of the RG VI Hesse, Palatinate, Saarland for many years and supports the festival team in Lünen together with his wife. He has been on the GDT board since 2019.