Born in 1958 I collect minerals since I was a 14 years old boy. In the very first years of collecting I became a micromounter, for cost reasons originally. Many rare species are not available in bigger dimensions than some tenth of a millimeter. A micromount-collection requires not much space and swapping and buying is very easy with partners all around the world. Additionally those little crystals are very often more perfect than their bigger representatives.

End of the 1970s I considered studying Mineralogy, but finally decided to earn an engineers degree. Most of my life I worked as an Executive in the Stuttgart area automotive industry.
Now I am retired and play golf with my wife over the warm period.

Well crystallized and aesthetic minerals fascinate myself and it is my passion taking photos of my items. Actually I own more then 2200 different species and some 10.000 items in total. Instead of a print version I share my photos in mindat, somehow an online encyclopedia. Improving my equipment continuously since 2005 I believe that the photo results from 2015 ff are good enough to persist for a longer period of time, because the limitations of physics are more or less reached now.

To share my experience in equipment and workflow optimization I wrote several articles on mindat.

In 2025 wolfsriedite as a new mineral found many years ago at the Clara Mine as type location was described.