Welcome to this issue of PHOTOLounge Customer Spotlight. This month features Maggie Manzer as she shares her photos and some words about how photography plays a roll in her life.

1. What role do pictures play in your life or work?

I think about photography all the time. I shoot commercial jobs for magazines and advertising clients and I'm always working on personal projects as well.

2. What do you take pictures of?

In my personal work I prefer photographing people that I know well, usually in natural settings. Most of my friends are artists or musicians, and this influences how I photograph them. I've been working on a series called Private Concerts, where I photograph musicians playing their favorite songs just for me. I'd like to start recording the sessions too and put out a little book with a cd eventually.

3. What inspires you to take pictures?

I've woken up everyday since I was 15 thinking about taking pictures. I like the idea of creating a really beautiful record of my world, of my experiences. I'm also inspired by other photographers and work that I see in galleries and magazines.

4. Describe your camera and what is involved in printing your images?

I shoot primarily with a Hasselblad 500C that's about 50 years old. I bought it when I was 18 and I still use it whenever I can, I prefer the square format. I used to print all of my images myself in the darkroom but technology finally caught up with me and now I have you guys develop my negatives and then I scan them, do the retouching at home on my computer and then have you print my digital files onto photopaper so that I'm still getting a beautiful c-print as my final product.

5. Do you share and exhibit your printed work?

I've exhibited my work in the form of prints and photo books in galleries in Holland, Italy, Germany, Japan and the US. I also work commercially, so my portraits and fashion stories appear in magazines as well.

6. How does the PhotoLounge help you present your vision?

In a very literal way - I have a small portfolio of about 20 5 x 7 prints that I had printed at PhotoLounge that I carry in my purse at all times, so you help present my vision almost every day!

7. Tell us about the pictures you shared

My best friend Jane travelled to a friends museum show last year. I took this portrait of her playing her guitar on a big pink sculpture by the artist Mark Gonzales that can be found in the garden of a museum in the South of Holland.

The two photos of the girl with the dark hair (in the white dress in the tree and in the shawl picking flowers) were taken on a trip back to Bergen, a tiny town in North Holland where we lived when we were teenagers. Elisa Wald-Lasowski has been my friend for more than ten years.

I took this picture of my cousin's daughter Grace in the peach tree in my grandmother Mimi's back yard in Arkansas. She's wearing a flower print dress that belonged to her grandmother Golden when she was the same age.

My friend Niel and I were in Calgary, Canada for a Wild West themed photoshoot and I took this photo of him jumping on a haystack. People tell me that he looks like a monkey in the picture but he's actually holding one end of a scarf in his hand.