Jon Miller, Monika Andrae & Chris Marquardt at Rongbuk Monastery near Everest Base Camp, Tibet 2010
A bit of information about who we are and what we’ve done in the past.
ChrisMarquardt and Jon Miller met back in 2006 through their respective podcasts, Tips from the Top Floor and The Rest of Everest. Only one year later, in 2007, they met in person for the first time in Ft. Collins, Colorado and decided to spend a weekend camping out in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
In 2009 Jon, Chris and Monika teamed up to take a group of photographers up to Mt. Everest Base Camp. The trek sold out in under a minute and it has been the foundation of a successful series of treks that lead to all the three Mt. Everest Base Camps, the southern base camp on the Nepal side, and the northern one in Tibet and at the uninhabited Kanjung face on the eastern side of Mt. Everest in Tibet. In 2011 they took a group of photographers to the Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal. In 2012 they came full-circle and held an adventure photography workshop in Canyonlands National Park in Utah…where it all began back in 2007.
The photographs they brought from these treks are a mixture of landscape and people photography, always taking into account the specifics that the culture and the landscape has to offer.
Jon Miller is a true podcasting fanboy. He produces The Rest of Everest, a video podcast that gives viewers an all-‐access look at the places, cultures, people, travelers and mountaineers that call the Everest region and the Himalayas home. This popular show has received millions upon millions of views, won “Best of iTunes” in 2006 and 2007 as well as snuck it’s way into podcasting case studies in several books about new media. The show’s logo even appeared on-‐screen in a slide during Steve Job’s 2008 MacWorld Keynote.
Jon is also the owner of an award-winning production company, TreeLine Productions, where he’s had the opportunity to blend his creative vision with an outstanding technical ability. Over the years, Jon has worked with various clients and projects that have found him filming around the country and the globe. His company has produced videos from 4,000 feet underground beneath the Continental Divide in Colorado, to 29,035 feet up on the summit of Mount Everest in Tibet.
Before launching TreeLine Productions in 2001, Jon enjoyed the challenge of building and operating a Northern Colorado Bureau for CNN Headline News, in Fort Collins. During his 6-‐year tenure, Jon had the daily opportunity to cover news stories throughout the community he resides in, and enjoyed distilling complex issues and concepts into television easily understood by the viewer.
In addition to The Rest of Everest, in 2011 Jon created SecureNinjaTV, a series of weekly video interviews with thought leaders within the Cyber Security industry. SNTV is produced on behalf of secureninja.com, a leading IT Security training company and has given Jon the opportunity to film engaging interviews in cities all across the US and Europe.
Jon lives in the foothills outside Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife Heidi and their two boys, Sam and Chris.
Chris Marquardt, owner of media production company Top Floor Productions, has been in photography for nearly 25 years, with his main focus on digital photography since 1999. He is the host and producer of some of the world’s most renowned shows on photography with his flagship show being Tips from the Top Floor. This show received the PodcastAward in the Education category in 2005 and 2006 and it is also part of 2007 “Best of iTunes”. His photography show Happy Shooting which he produces together with Boris Nienke, is among the most popular podcasts in Germany. In 2006 he kicked off the Photocast Network together with John Arnold of Photowalkthrough fame. This network now includes over 15 photography-related audio and video shows from all over the world and in all sorts of languages, including English, Spanish, German and French. Chris also has a regular appearance being the photography expert on Leo Laporte’s US-wide syndicated “Tech Guy” radio show, which is broadcast via XM Satellite radio and via many terrestrial frequencies and can be heard by millions of people every weekend. He took over the entire TWiT Live studio for a day in 2009 to invite photographers for Photo Day.
Chris holds photography workshops across Europe and in the United States in both, English and German. He owns a photo and video production studio in Tübingen, Germany.
Chris lives in the historic medieval city of Tübingen in southern Germany.
Not only is Monika a well known entity in the social media field. She is also on a mission: to bring more creativity into a photographic world that is becoming more and more technological every day.
And she does that in several ways.
Monika’s German podcast “Monis Motivklingel” is gathering a fast growing following, and her blog (also in German) is a fun mixture of every-day things and creative topics, written with a sharp pen and an even sharper mind.
She is also the master mind behind the Everest Trek online experience, and as a photographer she has a keen eye, as demonstrated in several exhibitions.