Each spread carried a title, a GPS coordinate, and a short text. Not captions. Observations. The kind of thing you say after a long day on set, when the light is gone and the cameras are packed and someone asks how it went.

The magenta that could have dyed an entire photo team, socks included, at the Clariant plant in Frankfurt. The night shift on runway 14-32 at Zurich Airport, where a hundred machines had to resurface the tarmac and be gone before the first flight at 7am. The pump station at Zmutt, reached on foot through the high alpine landscape in sub-zero temperatures, equipment on our backs, the view reaching all the way to the Matterhorn at the top.

And South Korea. We sat on a plastic stool at the harbour and scanned the sea for a ship we were supposed to photograph. The ship did not come. We found it in port, photographed it there, and brought it out to sea in postproduction. We left the stool behind. For the colleagues.

The magazine was designed by Keller Maurer Design. It went out to agencies, clients, and contacts: a physical object in an increasingly digital world. Something you could hold, leaf through, set down on a desk.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. It still is. We’ve got a few copies left, and when someone receives one today, the reaction is the same as it was in 2016.

Ten years later, the spirit of ON LOCATION is what you are reading now.

The locations have changed. A compressor foundry in China. The Ceneri Base Tunnel, deep inside the Ticino mountains. A portrait studio built from scratch in a glass-fronted conference room in Hamburg, with models, stylist, hair and make-up, wardrobe on a rack in the corner, the days before we had been inside an EX zone in Bremen. These are not the same kind of job. But they come from the same curiosity, and they require the same commitment to getting it right.

Over more than twenty years, the work has grown in directions we did not always anticipate. Industrial photography was where we built our reputation, and it remains central to what we do. But so does the portrait session that needs a full crew. The annual report shot across three cities. The CGI integration that makes a physical build unnecessary. The personal project that takes us somewhere no client brief would have sent us. The postproduction that ties it all together.

What has not changed is this: The final image rarely shows what it took to make it. That is true whether the location is a restricted pipeline zone or a carefully lit studio. The decisions, the logistics, the moments before the first frame. That is what this journal is for.

The last page of ON LOCATION carried a line that still holds: When it is too loud, too uncomfortable, too far away for most people – that is where you will find us.

Though we should add: We are equally at home when it is clean, bright, and perfectly safe. The location has never been the point. The curiosity has.