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The story behind California Sunbounce:

Wolfgang-Peter Geller was born in 1945 and in his teen years, while going to boarding school, he made extra money with his first camera by shooting young girl portraits and printing the negatives at night. Since he had no strobe lighting he got the idea to use glass mirrors to reflect the light onto his subjects. After high school and law school calling to him to become a famous lawyer, he took his photo skills along as well as a way to make extra money. His first photo jobs were working for the Hamburger Newspaper ABENDBLATT and STERN Magazine as a press photographer. He found he was very good at making images, and this worked out quite well economically as he made much more money than his student friends working regular jobs - and much more than even the photographers who were emplyed by the papers.

Peter Geller's big break came when he was assigned to cover the story of a bank robbery in the South of Germany. The images he made were exclusively published first in Europe's most famous magazine STERN and later were picked up by all the major newspapers and magazines worldwide. For these amazing shots he received the greatest award available to a press photographer for 1971, the WORLD PRESS PHOTO AWARD for the best single image of all the entries, as well as the best photo story of all the entries. This was, to put it mildly, was the turning point in Peter's career.

From this point on Peter Geller worked for all major papers and advertising companies from his studio in Hamburg Germany. Such clients as KODAK, AGFA, ZEISS, BAYER, and POLAROID. For these clients he spent the next fifteen years bounding around the globe and spending at least two thirds of each year sleeping in hotels.

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.