Felix Petersen

Entrepreneur

A tall, dark-haired guy in a plaid shirt and glasses opens the door for us on Berlin’s Schiffbauerdamm. He gives us a warm welcome and heads straight for the kitchen of his charming pre-war office to fix coffee for the whole team. You might take Felix Petersen for a humanities grad student, a graphic designer, or a musician – on first glance, not many would pick up on the geek genius that’s put him in the top echelon of Internet start-ups. A native Berliner, Felix has been intensively involved with the internet since 1997, and has always – excepting a brief academic stint in sociology and technology – pursued his own ideas. Felix founded his first successful start-up, Plazes, in 2005, and is now hard at work on his latest project, Amen. Here he presents his favorite camera, a 1984 Nikonos.

Nikonos and Jacques Cousteau

Blue shirt, red wool cap – really, there’s no cooler guy than Jacques Cousteau. Cousteau personally developed the Calypso (the predecessor to my Nikonos camera) in 1963, together with the Belgian engineer Jean de Wouters. They wanted to build a rangefinder camera that also worked underwater without an annoying protective case.

I bought my Nikonos on eBay. Both its functionality and its design were fantastic, in my opinion: it has interchangeable lenses and really feels like a normal camera even though it’s waterproof. Though I wouldn’t call myself a camera collector, I do have about 20 cameras now, and I love this one in particular. I definitely have to check if Wes Anderson used this camera in his film “The Life Aquatic”. But apart from the design aspects, I also use the camera: I took it with me on holidays in Thailand and Mauritius. As far as I know, the 1984 model was the last before Nikon began producing SLR cameras.

 
Interview and Photography by Freunden von Freunden for MONOQI.