Meet the Woman Behind OLA LAB
My relationship with photography started early, long before I thought of it as anything serious.
I remember holding analog cameras with 24 or 36 exposures, never knowing what would come out. Each roll was a small act of faith. One day, by accident, I discovered double exposure. I reused the same film and watched landscapes blend into my birthday party. Faces floating over horizons. Light colliding with memory. It felt like magic. I did not know the rules yet, and maybe that was the point.
In the early 2000s, I moved to digital photography with my first Sony camera. It was a funny little thing that used floppy disks. The resolution was terrible by today’s standards, but I loved it. I started building my own texture library without even knowing that was a thing. Blurred pixels, noise, light leaks. I was not chasing sharpness. I was chasing feeling.
Over time, I became the person who always had a camera in her bag.
I photographed daily life. Gatherings. Quiet moments between friends. Nothing staged. Just what I saw around me. When I started traveling, I bought my first Nikon reflex with a telezoom lens and fell deeply into landscape photography. Vast spaces. Horizons. The way light moves across mountains and water. Occasionally, I photographed friends during those trips. Those portraits quickly became their Facebook profile pictures, long before Instagram shaped how we see ourselves.
Even then, OLA LAB was already somewhere in the background. Not as a name, not as a studio, but as an intuition. The idea of waves, of movement, of returning again and again to what pulls you. Ola is part of my own name. It means hello, but it also means wave. Something that comes forward and retreats, leaving traces behind. For a long time, OLA LAB stayed in my shadow, present but unnamed.
In November 2021, I traveled alone to Iceland.
It was not a trip to prove anything. It was a return to a place I deeply love. For the landscape, the silence, the feeling of being small and fully present at the same time. On Diamond Beach, I stood in freezing cold for almost two hours, waiting for the light to settle. The ice, the black sand, the slow movement of the sea. At sunset, my camera battery finally decided it was time for me to leave. I went back to a remote guesthouse, cold, exhausted, and completely fulfilled.
That image stayed with me.
Later, I submitted it to a Swiss Photo Club competition held in Stuttgart, a town where nobody knew me. The photo was selected among the top 50 by the jury and placed 12th in the public vote during the gallery exhibition. It was a quiet but powerful confirmation. Not of talent alone, but of patience, intuition, and the choices I had made to follow what felt right rather than what felt visible.
In 2019, something had already begun to shift.
I decided to take photography seriously, not as a hobby, but as a craft. I bought my Nikon D500 with an incredible second hand lens kit and joined the Swiss Photo Club in Zurich. I learned to step away from automatic mode. To understand light, exposure, intention. To make decisions instead of letting the camera make them for me.
During the pandemic, I was living in Switzerland, where restrictions were comparatively gentle. I joined a six month program at the School of Design in Bern. Being part of that creative bubble during such a disconnected time felt like a lifeline. We explored studio lighting, creative photography, portraiture, shutter speed, apertures. We experimented, failed, learned, and shared space with other creatives when the outside world felt very small.
When I moved to Amsterdam in 2021, I did not immediately build OLA LAB.
The idea was there, quietly following me, but I was not ready to step fully into it yet. Life had other plans. Only in 2023 did I feel the impulse to try. It came after a fashion photography workshop, where I experienced working with models in a professional setting. Something clicked. I realized how much I loved the collaborative energy of a shoot. The trust. The shared focus.
I set up a small home studio in our apartment by the Amstel river. I photographed creative portraits. A maternity session. I experimented freely. And then life accelerated again. A sabbatical trip. Renovating a home with my partner. Pregnancy.
OLA LAB paused, quietly
OLA LAB did not disappear during that pause. It waited. Like a wave gathering strength beneath the surface, shaped by travel, by home, by the growing life inside me.
So during my own pregnancy, I decided to create self portraits as if I were my own client. I set the scene, chose the props, adjusted the lights, composed the frame. With the Nikon Z, I could trigger the camera from my phone and see the results instantly. It allowed me to stay present in my body rather than running back and forth to the camera.
I am grateful I did those sessions over a weekend. By Monday, our daughter arrived.
The feedback I received from those images gave me an unexpected confidence boost. Photographers question themselves constantly. Creating these images helped me regain perspective during postpartum, when identity feels fragile and shifting. I am deeply grateful to my partner for supporting me through this process, for holding space for both motherhood and creativity to coexist.
One of the images from that series will be explored in my next post. The one shaped by a sudden beam of late afternoon January light cutting through our room. I had a clear vision for it. I explained the angle to my partner. The settings were ready. And then the light arrived, briefly, exactly as I had imagined it.
That image carries much of what defines my visual language.
I have always loved drawing. Art has been part of my life since childhood. I am particularly drawn to black and white, to perspective, to contrast, to depth created through shadow. This is where my inspiration lives. This is what quietly informs my photography.
OLA LAB is not about perfection or performance.
It is about attention, about presence, about allowing images to form the way ripples form on water. One movement touching another. A moment shaping the next. Creativity, for me, does not move in straight lines. It arrives in waves. Sometimes gentle, sometimes overwhelming, always connected to something larger.
I have always been drawn to natural patterns. The way water shapes sand. The repetition of waves meeting the shore. How coral mirrors trees, how veins resemble rivers, how light cuts through clouds the same way it cuts through a room. These rhythms exist everywhere, in the earth, in the body, in the act of making.
The name OLA LAB carries all of this for me, and it has for a long time.
Ola is a greeting, an opening. It is also a wave. A movement. A return. Lab is a space for exploration, for experimentation, for images that are allowed to be imperfect, intuitive, and alive. Together, they form a place where photography is not just produced, but felt.
This journal follows that same rhythm.
Here I share what moves beneath the images. The tides of motherhood. The pull of creativity. The quiet moments where something shifts and becomes visible. Not everything arrives fully formed. Some things ripple outward slowly. This is where those ripples begin.
The waves continue in the next entry. 🙂
More stories that drift together
