Commercial Photographer Rasmus Kaessmann on Trust, Craft, and the Film That Traveled the World
The Bavaria-based commercial photographer and documentary filmmaker on spontaneous beginnings, 15-year client relationships, building a creative practice on trust, and the 20-minute film that traveled from an alpine hut to Hollywood.
Portrait of Commercial Photographer & Filmmaker Rasmus Kaessmann.
Rasmus Kaessmann did not grow up wanting to be a photographer. He grew up in the mountains of Bavaria, finished school with no particular plan, took a job on a construction site to save money, and bought a VW campervan. It was a borrowed camera, an old Pentax SLR left behind by a friend, that quietly changed everything.
“I’m not the kind of photographer that was playing with cameras as a child,” he says. “I had no clue what to do after school.” What followed was a journey through Europe, then Africa, climbing Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, Mount Meru, and a chance encounter on a remote beach near the Somali border with an American journalist chasing a story. Something about that figure, traveling the world alone in pursuit of the unexpected, landed hard.
“That was the moment where I thought—this is what I want to do. I want to travel the world and do stories like that.” His traveling companion had the same revelation on the spot. One became a journalist. The other became a photographer. Both went back to Munich and got to work.
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An Accidental Entry Into Commercial Photography
The leap from curious traveler to established commercial photographer was, like most things in Rasmus’s career, a matter of following a spontaneous lead. His friend landed an internship at Siemens and introduced him to the head of internal communications. A portfolio meeting followed. Then a call from the PR department, on a Tuesday morning, asking if he could quote on a 24-city worldwide shoot by Thursday.
“I left that office, went outside and I was like, shit. What am I gonna do now? I mean, of course I’m gonna do this, but how?” He called the photographer he had been assisting, who pointed him toward his agency.
That same afternoon, Rasmus walked into Agentur Neubauer (now Neubauerschwarz) with his portfolio. He was 24 years old, with long blonde hair and camouflage trousers, walking into Siemens headquarters surrounded by people in suits. They looked at his sports work and said yes. The Siemens job, scaled back to 12 European cities over five weeks, launched his commercial career and a partnership with the same Munich agency that continues today, without a contract and without any intention of changing. “It’s just spontaneous things happening on the way, and just if you follow these leads , it just comes together sometimes.” explains Rasmus.
Rasmus Kaessmann, campaign for Kärcher Services
On Representation and the Business of Being Creative
For Rasmus, the agency relationship has been foundational, both commercially and creatively. Neubauerschwarz handles quotations, client negotiations, and production logistics, freeing him to focus entirely on the work itself.
“The financial part is absolutely not my thing. I love the creative side of the job, so I’m really happy the team handles costs and client discussions for me.” He adds that the arrangement also provides something less tangible: “It gives me a kind of security. They’re always there, you know, to help me out.”
He has been with the agency long enough that the relationship has outlasted people on both sides. The original contact at the agency has since retired. He’s still there. For photographers starting out, he sees representation as one of the most underestimated steps a creative person can take: not a sign of dependence, but a practical structure that lets the work speak for itself.
Building Long-Term Client Relationships
The word “relationship” comes up again and again in conversation with Rasmus, and it isn’t hollow. He has been shooting for Stihl since 2011, fifteen years this year. His work with RB Leipzig began in 2013, when the club had just entered Germany’s third division. In his entrance hall, a special-edition jersey marks their ten-year anniversary together.
“Every year I thought it was going to be the last one,” he says. “I’ve never had that before—a client coming back over such a long period.” Ad agencies changed. Marketing teams turned over. He remained. His explanation is disarmingly simple: “We have so much experience now with working with the players, with the team—and they know we do a good job. But also I think we’re just a good team. I think we’re just, you know—I surround myself with good people, with friends.”
- 15+ Years with Stihl
- 13 Years with RB Leipzig
- 10+ Best Cinematography Awards
The Philosophy of the Set: Collaboration Over Hierarchy
These long relationships are not simply a function of output quality. They reflect a working philosophy that Rasmus has refined over two decades on set, one he now articulates on his website as: collaboration over hierarchy, energy over ego, authenticity over perfection.
It didn’t begin as a philosophy. It began as a crisis of meaning. “I realized I don’t really care about the products. It feels a bit senseless.” The answer came not from the work itself, but from who he was doing it with. “It’s always about the people. It’s about my team, the clients, from the assistant up to the client—the creative approach, the work together, that’s what I really love. And that’s why I do it.”
In practice, this means building a core team of freelancers he returns to consistently, people he can sit down with after a long day’s shoot, have a beer, and still feel at home. “I always wanna be able to, even after a hard day’s work, sit down with them, have a chat, have a beer and still feel comfortable, you know, still feel home.” Clients, he says, feel that atmosphere the moment they arrive on set. “They know the quality, they know the expertise we have, and also the fun we have together.”
“I think that vibe that is between us—we’re so good together, we work hard, we’re creative together, and but it’s still such a friendly vibe and so positive. And the clients feel that.”
Light, Craft, and an Analog Foundation
Rasmus came of age photographically in the analog era, an experience he credits with shaping the way he still approaches every frame. In those days, the first check was the Polaroid. The second was trust. “Film stock was expensive, the lab costs and everything—so yeah, you had to know what you were doing.” When digital arrived and clients could stand behind him watching every frame on a monitor, the shift required real adjustment.
“Before, they saw the Polaroid, and from then on they had to trust you. So it took a while getting used to having the clients standing behind you, seeing everything—even the bad shots, even the in-between shots where you’re trying things out.”
Today, light remains the organizing principle of everything. He checks locations with the Sunseeker app, tracking the sun’s path before committing to a spot. He always shoots against the light. For studio work, such as the large composite sets for RB Leipzig, he thinks spatially about where the light in his frame will need to match a background plate that doesn’t yet exist in the photograph. “I always want to shoot against the light. If it’s front-lit, that location doesn’t work for me.”
From Stills to Film: A COVID-Era Pivot
Video entered Rasmus’s practice the way most things have: unplanned. When full-frame DSLRs first arrived with video capability around 2012, he watched from the sidelines as photographers crossed over. He was curious but cautious. Then COVID arrived and closed everything down.
“There was nothing I could do. So I thought—let’s use this time.” He spent the lockdown watching YouTube tutorials, then shooting test videos with friends. “After a few videos that I’d done with close friends, I felt confident enough to even do it commercially.” Within a few years, film and stills were running in parallel across his commercial work.
He’s careful, though, to draw a line between filmmaking and content creation. Brands increasingly ask for the latter: constant social clips, fifteen-second Instagram posts. He tried it once for a local mountain resort. It wasn’t for him. “I see big shots, I see big videos—I can’t do these little clips. That’s not my approach of the work.” What he will create, alongside a key visual shoot, is an image film: something with shape and intention. “Quality is way more important to me than just content.”
The Documentary That Wasn’t Supposed to Be One
In 2023, Rasmus lost his best friend to cancer. In the months that followed, he grew close to a woman named Kathrin, a mutual dear friend who had been with them both until the end. He knew she spent every summer working as a shepherdess at an alpine hut in Switzerland. He asked if he could visit. She agreed, on one condition: the camera would be for them alone.
“I just really wanted to see how you live up there, how it is. I just wanna do a video just for us—a family album thing.” She said yes.
In the summer of 2024, squeezed between commercial jobs, he hiked 1,500 metres up to the hut with a camera, just himself, no crew, no storyboard. He spent a weekend there, then drove straight to Leipzig for the next shoot. When he sat down to edit, he aimed for five minutes. He ended up with twenty.
“It was very, very still, very calm, very nice pictures, and such a nice vibe to it.” He showed it to Kathrin. “She’s like, ‘Wow, so when are we gonna have a premiere?'” They organised a screening in Munich. A friend at a local mountain film festival loved it but couldn’t screen it: too long for their ten-minute ceiling. Rasmus started sending it out. Berlin. Cologne. Then the Belgrade Film Festival got in touch.
“I said—have you guys seen it’s in Bavarian? Who wants to read subtitles?” They did. He won Best Cinematography. The film kept traveling: New York, Hollywood, Cannes, Hawaii. At last count, Best Cinematography ten times, Best Short Documentary three times.
“There was no plan, there was no storyboard. It was just the camera and us. And I was just yeah, shooting what I was seeing.”—Rasmus Kaessmann, on Ich bin einfach nur da. Und das ist gut so.
Roots, Recharge, and the Next Documentary
After years in Munich and seven years in Berlin, which he still calls his favourite city in Germany, Rasmus and his wife moved back to the Bavarian countryside when their children were born. “I grew up with the mountains behind the house, with snowboarding and rock climbing and mountain biking and everything. And I wanted to give that to my kids.” The return has also become a creative anchor.
“Being on set, being out traveling with team and clients—I love it. But it’s socializing from the moment you leave your hotel room till when you go back to bed. Long days.” Coming home to the countryside resets him. “I come back here to the quietness, and I just fill up my batteries again.”
That rootedness has quietly shaped a new body of work. He has been collaborating with a local podcaster who travels the region meeting interesting people, and together they have made two short documentaries. A third is in development: about ecological farming practices in Bavaria, and how agriculture might be sustained for coming generations without pesticides. His wife will appear in it. He’ll shoot it himself, between commercial assignments.
Alongside that, his first narrative short is shooting in September. The recognition from Bin einfach nur da has opened doors in the film world he had never previously knocked on, and he is walking through them deliberately, one project at a time.
Ten Years Building a Portfolio on Format
Rasmus has been building and maintaining his portfolio on Format since 2015, over a decade. He came to the platform after years of relying on a programmer to manage his website, finding the arrangement both expensive and limiting. The Sierra theme caught his eye, and he’s been on it ever since.
“I found Format and I found the Sierra theme, which I’m still on today, and I really liked it.” He brought in a web designer initially to help with some CSS customisation. “From then on I was just amazed how easy it is to change everything by myself.”
“I could add new pages, I could add new projects, I started a blog page—it’s all possible, and it’s so amazing. And then Format keeps coming up with new features all the time, and I’m always asking—okay, is that something for me?”
“I love tech—you know, kind of. But you don’t have to have any skills to actually use Format. You just have to get into it a little bit and look at the possibilities and try them out. And it’s so easy and intuitive.”—Rasmus Kaessmann, Format member since 2015
When Flex Block arrived, it changed his approach to the site entirely. He had always thought of his website as a canvas, somewhere to arrange work the way he wanted it, at the scale he chose. Flex Block made that literal.
“It’s now possible to do whatever you want with the website. It’s exactly as I said—it’s like a canvas, you can place whatever you want, wherever you want it, what size you want. You’re not restricted to any size.” The ability to configure layouts separately for mobile and desktop was, for him, a significant step forward: “With flex block you can have a big image and then a very small image and then a bigger one, because people are zooming in on the mobile device anyway—they want to see it bigger.”
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He also relies on Format’s hosted video feature, which lets him embed film work directly on the site without Vimeo or YouTube branding. “There’s no logos. You can just have the frame with no player, no logos, nothing. Especially for us artists, you don’t wanna see that many brand names—you want the pure images speaking for itself.”
In his day-to-day practice, the site functions as both portfolio and outreach tool. New projects go up as soon as they’re cleared for publication. A newsletter goes out with the link. His agency carries a link to his Format site in their own portfolio listings. Most of his clients find him through personal recommendation rather than search, but the site is where they go to confirm what they’ve heard. “I try to promote my work, so every time a new project gets published and I’m allowed to show it, I build a new page.”
Advice for Photographers Starting Out
Rasmus is candid that the business has become harder to enter, even as the technical barriers have lowered. Digital made learning accessible; it also flooded the market. AI is now compressing budgets further. “If you’re not established yet, it’s quite a way.” But he does not dwell on the difficulty.
His advice comes down to two things above everything else: find your niche, and invest in the personal relationship. “Get really good at what you’re doing—and then the most important thing is the personal relationship. Be good with clients, have fun, have a positive attitude. The combination of personal relationships and getting very professional, very good at what you’re doing—that’s the most important thing, I think.”
There is, he notes, one thing technology cannot replicate, and it happens to be the thing he has built his entire practice on. “There is something that AI can’t do, and that’s the personal relationship.”
Explore Rasmus Kaessmann’s photography and film work at kaessmannphotography.com, built with Format.
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