Thanks for visiting my website. My name is Jana and I'm a landscape and wildlife photographer based in the Ruhr area which is located in the Western part of Germany. During the pandemic, I was chained to my desk for a long time. On the one hand I was working from home office, on the other hand I was writing my master thesis. I was basically just switching laptops once a day. That's when I first felt the desperate need for a balance. I found it in photography.

Within the scope of my media and communication studies, I've been particularly interested into the field of visual communication. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? This is of special interest for scientists who use images to explain complex phenomena. Climate change is such a complex phenomenon. It's a development that happens slowly and is widely invisible. Its causes and impacts have been and still are subject to a lot of research projects but how to make the results understandable for laypersons?

I dived a little deeper into this topic when writing my master thesis about the flagships of visual climate change communication and the way they are used by the media.  That was the starting point of my photography focusing on conservation storytelling. I would like to capture the beauty of our surroundings and thereby show that the conservation of our planet and its inhabitants is worth fighting for. Also I would like to raise awareness for potential threats of our natural world. If you're interested in getting to know more about my way into conservation storytelling, please check out my blog.

Apart from that, I love to travel. You may have noticed that most of my pictures don't look as if taken in the Western part of Germany and (no) surprise - you're right. While I truely believe that practising photography whenever you can is the most important thing to become a better photographer, still an unkown surrounding always sparks my creativity.

Sometimes I envy all the nature photographers living close to the greatest sceneries, having the best views right onto their doorsteps. Then I tell myself that it's easy to take a beautiful picture of a beautiful landscape whereas it's not so easy to take a beautiful picture of a not so beautiful landscape. BUT it's the best training. And that's what I do. Instead of wasting my time with jealousy, I practise.

I practise with my 10 year old second hand cam and the only two lenses that I own because I think there are no shortcuts. 5 years into photography and I still don't know all the functions this camera even has. So why overwhelm myself with a newer model?

I know I'm still far away of benchmarking myself with my role models but I see some progress and it makes me proud. I think it's always important to enjoy the journey, to not take yourself or your work too serious and to have fun. Conservation storytelling can be exhausting but there is still a lot of beauty in this world.