Rita Marnau

My photographic journey:

The hobby of photography has been with me for a long time. When I was a teenager, I fulfilled my wish for a small analogue camera and recorded my youth in photo books. The image quality of my first digital camera was much worse than my small analogue camera and my enthusiasm was severely dampened. Until I (already in the middle of my studies) was able to talk my older brother out of his second-hand Canon digital SLR camera. What an aha effect! The (only) lens was not particularly fast. As a student turning over every cent, photography initially remained a dream, my first attempts with the free image editing tool Gimp and photo excursions in good weather.

When I became a mum, my photography hobby became more of a focus again. I needed a compact, handy camera to photograph and record my children growing up. An SLR simply didn’t fit in my rucksack with nappies, a change of underwear, a picnic, and a bucket of onesies. At the end of 2022, I came to a point where I needed something “just for me”. A creative balance alongside my job, motherhood, household, and family. Thanks to an inflation compensation payment from my employer, I changed to a Sony A7iii and since then I have been pursuing my hobby even more seriously and enthusiastically.

My photographic philosophy:

There are moments in life that you want to freeze like in a snow globe, put on a shelf and have ready at hand at any time. Shake the snow globe and the moment becomes reality again. Sometimes I only have a camera in my head and turn moments into eternity. But sometimes I’m lucky and have a camera in my hand. Pictures of such moments remind me how precious life is and how beautiful! Everyday life makes time fly by so quickly. I stop time with my (imaginary) snow globes and precious pictures. Photography is like meditation. With the camera in my hand, I can push my daily carousel of thoughts away for a while, I can “empty” my head. I concentrate on this moment, see the light and only a tiny section through my viewfinder. Focus. Completely in the here and now. For me, image processing is an essential part of this. An image can have a completely different effect with appropriate editing. I particularly like black and white images. There is so much to learn and try out. That’s the beauty of this hobby. My favorite genre is people photography – and my favorite thing to photograph is children. Their honesty and light-heartedness fascinate me.

Being part of Blende8 now is great fun. Spending time together behind the camera, chatting about photography and life at our meetings, discussing our pictures and learning together is exactly what I wanted from a photo club. When we discuss pictures together, I not only learn something about design, technique, editing and composition, but also a lot about myself. After all, photography is art. What kind of photos do I particularly like and why? And how do I get my own pictures there? It’s always exciting to see what different reactions one and the same picture can evoke.

You can find more about me, and selected pictures of mine, in my Portfolio or at

• Instagram

Please also have a look at my website https://familien-momente.de/