WOLFGANG-PETER GELLER AND CALIFORNIA SUNBOUNCE

Peter Geller was born in 1945 in Hamburg/ Germany. In his teen years, while going to boarding school, he was able to make some extra money with his first camera shooting portraits of young girls in the woods and then printing the negatives at night. Since he had no strobe lighting he got the idea to use mirrors to reflect the light onto his subjects. After high school, with law school calling him to become a famous lawyer, he took his photo skills with him as a way to make some extra money. His first part time job was a stringer for the Hamburger Newspaper ABENDBLATT and then STERN magazine as a press photographer. Not surprisingly he found that he was very good at making pictures, and this worked out very well economically as he made much more money than the photographers which were employed by the papers. Peter Geller's big break came when he was assigned to cover the breaking story of a bank robbery in the south of Germany (500 miles away from his native Hamburg). The shots he took where published by all the major magazines in every country in the world. For these amazing shots Peter received the greatest award in press photography available for 1971, the WORLD PRESS PHOTO AWARD. This as they say was the turning point for Peter and his new career.

From then on Peter worked for all major papers and advertising companies from his photo studio in Hamburg, Germany. Companies such as KODAK, AGFA, ZEISS, BAYER Pharmaceuticals, and POLAROID where his new clients. For many years he also shot 10.000 covers for Harlequin Romances. For all these clients he spent the next 15 years bounding around the globe and sleeping at least two thirds of each of those years in hotel beds. One such assignment Peter had been shooting in Los Angeles for AGFA Film. With three AFGA clients from Germany, three models from Paris and a crew of four from Hamburg they found themselves stuck in a freak storm in California. As the clouds went away, it left beautiful brilliant sunshine but also gale force winds on the beach where they were to shoot. They had to improvise as all of his portable reflectors were too wobbly in the wind and the shiny boards from the movie industry were to heavy and Geller did not want to hire a set of Grip people just to move and hold reflectors like in the movies. So in his hotel room during downtime the first prototype SUNBOUNCE was born and worked adequately enough to get the job done. With this success Peter set out to redesign his prototype and came up with the CALIFORNIA SUNBOUNCE (named for where it was born) SUN-BOUNCE PRO reflector which he then patented worldwide.