1969 | May 19 | Frank Schulenburg is born in Uelzen, a rural town in Lower Saxony, about 60 miles south of Hamburg, Germany.

1990ies | During his college years in Göttingen, Germany, Schulenburg casually takes pictures with an analog Nikon FM2 camera on Ilford black-and-white film and Kodak Ektachrome color slide film.

2005 | February | Schulenburg starts contributing to the German language version of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

2008 | December | When the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that operates Wikipedia, offers Schulenburg a job, he moves to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Wikimedia’s headquarters are located.

2010 | January | Schulenburg marries Payton Walton, a native Californian who spent her early childhood in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Donner Pass. In their first years together, they live in Santa Rosa in the California Wine Country.

2012 | February | Fascinated by the natural beauty of Northern California, Schulenburg buys his first digital camera, a compact Leica X1, and begins taking photos along the Pacific Coast. Start of a series of images depicting California lighthouses.

2012 | June | Move to Mill Valley, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.

2013 | Schulenburg purchases his first DSLR and gets started with bird photography, a passion he pursues for the next ten years.

2013 | August | A sunrise picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog goes viral on Flickr. Later, Air France choses this photo for its in-flight entertainment system on flights to San Francisco.

2013 | November | Winner of the National Wiki Loves Monuments Photography Contest. The award-winning shot, taken at night from Yerba Buena Island, shows the old and the new San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge.

2014–2020 | Many of Schulenburg’s images of the Golden Gate Bridge get published on Wikipedia. He documents the Old Crissy Field Coast Guard Station in the fog (2015), the installation of the movable median barrier (2015) system and of the suicide barriers (2020) on the Golden Bridge, as well as the protest “Bridge Together Golden Gate” (2017).

2017 | August | First cover shot: the image of an urban coyote in Bernal Heights makes it onto the title of Speak for the animals magazine.

2018 | November | Trip to Japan. Photos of “snow monkeys” in the mountains of the Nagano Prefecture.

2018–2020 | Photos of the wine industry in Sonoma and Napa Valley. Start of a series of wine cave pictures.

2020 | March | During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Schulenburg and his wife move to Chico, where Payton went to high school and college.

2021 | January | Schulenburg obtains U.S. citizenship. During the process towards citizenship he takes a series of images of the California Capitol for Wikipedia. Increasing interest in night photography.

2023 | March | Portrait of jazz musician Ravi Coltrane performing at the Blue Note in New York City. The same month, Schulenburg shows 26 of his photos at the Museum of Northern California Art in what is the first ever solo exhibition of a Wikipedia photographer.

2023 | June | Start of the “Agriculture in Northern California” photo project, aimed at enhancing agricultural imagery on Wikipedia.

2024 | January | Schulenburg is the first accredited Wikipedia photographer at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Portraits of actors, directors, producers, and musicians, among them Eugene Hernandez, Jason Blum, June Squibb, Laurence Rupp, Britanny Howard, and the band DOVO.

2024 | June | First work as a freelance photojournalist for newspapers in Northern California