how would you describe your personal vision?

My main focus (no pun) is loneliness. Mans inability to live together with others. Sometimes we are close, sometimes we even succeed to live together with others, for a while. But often we are lonely, separated by open space or even alone in an (urban) landscape.

These are images I see and that make me trip the shutter.
In writing I also work from this premisse, the inability to live together.

I'm not glorifying it, although I am kind of attached to my sense of loneliness. It's more like making loneliness visible and letting others decide whether to embrace it or discard it.
 
d.sge said:
Mr. Alley,

I guess all we can really hope for is that whatever it is we're seeing and spitting back into the world is something that will impact a viewer in a way at least similar to the same way it moved us. It's no easy undertaking, I'm sure.

Daniel
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don't be so formal...call me back!

i'm trying to seperate the end result (the image) from the process...
 
My digital collages are all inspired. I see them in my mind before I make them. My job is to get the necessary images in my archive, or create new ones to be as faithful as I can to the original vision. It can take some time to get it all together, sometimes even years, and I need to pay attention to things that may change and wait for the sometimes fuzzy parts to become clear. I never make one of these just to make one. I need life experiences and insights before I can create a new one. So in some ways this is incoming, the Universe expressing itself through me with the symbols that hint at a deeper meaning than I can comprehend.

My b&w images are outgoing. Me looking at the Universe and getting a reflection of where I am in my awareness. I pick the time, the pace and the gear, but I never know what I will photograph. I try to stay in the moment, and notice whatever I notice. I often go to the same places again and again, and am amazed at the different things that present every time. For me, this work is all about seeing and the photograph is just the record of that seeing. i am not a professional. artist, but I am not ashamed to say that I make art, because it feels like that is what I am doing, no matter what anyone else may say.

I am humbled often in these two activities and feel the doing of them is the real prize, not the financial reward or the recognition. I hope to be able to follow this path, which began for me in 1995, wherever it goes.
 
I se ein this very particular order:

Dynamic of a scene.
forms.
movements.
When all these things sing together, I take the shot.

Or I just go for the moment when it's about humans in movement.
 
d.sge said:
This burger isn't tempering these delicious black IPAs well enough, so please keep that in mind. But I will stuggle say the following. I'm my own worst (or possibly best) editor. And with that know that I'm disappointed with my rolls of film most of the time.

I was at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden the other day and came upon a scene that I could Fibonacci and Rule of Thirds the hell out of. There's a building with a beautifully sloping roof with plants growing on top of it. Off in the distance, there's a bit of urban decay going on that supports and contrasts new life perfectly. And the negative is just the right. As I'm zooming into it I can see it has all of the right elements, but two. There's no heart in it. As such, I don't see the point of it. I don't want it my wall. If I saw it on a wall at MOMA I would give it barely a glance.

I love street photography, but find it's the hardest combination of desire and happenstance to master. Some guy buried in his cell phone just walking down the street isn't going to do it for me. Some pretty girl might do it for me, but her just walking down the street, no matter how cute, again, isn't going to do it for me in a print. But something that seems to say something... Something where the scene supports a beautifully sad or happy moment that makes me curse myself forgetting to open up to f/4.0 instead of f/11 because I was so caught up in the moment that I forgot my exposure was set to the sunny side of the street is what compels me. Even in a city like New York City where with 8.5 million people and counting, I find scenes that might grab me are either few and far between, or I'm just not seeing what I hope to. As a result, what I see on the rare flickr streams/rangefinderforum galleries/whatever blogs I happened upon that motivate me to try again also humble me.Who knows how they waited or a tried again to find that image that moved them enough to display it proudly.

I can't help but hope that as long as I keep looking, I'll find what it is that compels me to keep a camera around my wrist and ready.

Edit: I forgot to suggest that the process can always be a joy for the love of the process itself. But yes, the result, in my experience, can and often are a letdown. I want every frame to sing to me in a way that that scene sung to me when I took it.
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This (+ extraneous characters)
 
The question is a good one. I find it focuses my work to have some sort of definite and cohesive project in mind, a target, and I always have concentrated on that.

Years ago it was to show how strange and dark the world was. I guess the world changed, because that doesn't work for me anymore. I took a workshop with David Vestal in around 1973, and he asked what I wanted to do; when I said news photography, he said he thought it would be interesting, and that maybe I would be the strangest news photographer ever, or an idea to that effect.

When I actually was a news photographer, it was to communicate what I wanted to show, but to do it in a way that was interesting enough to draw in people who weren't attracted to the subject, as dynamic and artistic as possible, and impossible to edit (my challenge to keep away my editor's scissors).

Now I am shooting pictures only of people I know, trying to show who they are, in a positive way, on top of the newspaper goals. I'm not as sharp as I was when I had to come up with six good pictures a day, six days a week, but I'm working on it.

I've never been satisfied to shoot pictures just because they were "attractive" or "beautiful". Years ago, in the 60s, there was a [Swiss or German?] magazine named Photo Technique, I think. It appeared to be an advertising arm of Linhof, or something like that. It was filled with grandiose shots of landscapes, etc. , but all I could make of it was that it looked like a catalog of calendars and postcards--superficial, attractive, and meaningless. When I first saw a copy I was about 12 years old, and right then I knew I would never want to do anything like that. If there's an anti-goal that I have, that's it.
 
d.sge said:
This burger isn't tempering these delicious black IPAs well enough, so please keep that in mind. But I will stuggle say the following. I'm my own worst (or possibly best) editor. And with that know that I'm disappointed with my rolls of film most of the time.

I was at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden the other day and came upon a scene that I could Fibonacci and Rule of Thirds the hell out of. There's a building with a beautifully sloping roof with plants growing on top of it. Off in the distance, there's a bit of urban decay going on that supports and contrasts new life perfectly. And the negative is just the right. As I'm zooming into it I can see it has all of the right elements, but two. There's no heart in it. As such, I don't see the point of it. I don't want it my wall. If I saw it on a wall at MOMA I would give it barely a glance.

I love street photography, but find it's the hardest combination of desire and happenstance to master. Some guy buried in his cell phone just walking down the street isn't going to do it for me. Some pretty girl might do it for me, but her just walking down the street, no matter how cute, again, isn't going to do it for me in a print. But something that seems to say something... Something where the scene supports a beautifully sad or happy moment that makes me curse myself forgetting to open up to f/4.0 instead of f/11 because I was so caught up in the moment that I forgot my exposure was set to the sunny side of the street is what compels me. Even in a city like New York City where with 8.5 million people and counting, I find scenes that might grab me are either few and far between, or I'm just not seeing what I hope to. As a result, what I see on the rare flickr streams/rangefinderforum galleries/whatever blogs I happened upon that motivate me to try again also humble me.Who knows how they waited or a tried again to find that image that moved them enough to display it proudly.

I can't help but hope that as long as I keep looking, I'll find what it is that compels me to keep a camera around my wrist and ready.


Edit: I forgot to suggest that the process can always be a joy for the love of the process itself. But yes, the result, in my experience, can and often are a letdown. I want every frame to sing to me in a way that that scene sung to me when I took it.
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Well put. Truth is, I like that composition that lacks heart. I get in a rhythm when I am out, especially in familiar places, and I see shapes and relationships. If I strike a pleasing composition taken from a seemingly random set of buildings or whatever, I feel a certain calm, pushing back the chaos. I was in Sydney recently, a great place for street photography really, but my radar for shapes and compositions was completely overloaded. In the CBD the buildings are so tall and so close together and it was so dark and there were so many people I was right off my stride. The few "street shots" I took were nothing much. I have to recover and I will have another look through them.
 
I suppose what Captures my Attention to click the shutter
Is the Play of Shadows intermingling with Light...

Catching the Atmosphere & Emotions conveyed in Everyday Life
in such simple things as a Step, A Glance, A Touch
 
back alley said:
i'm trying to seperate the end result (the image) from the process...
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I'm not sure that's possible. I need the process to make the image. Images, at least for me, don't "just happen." Oh, I take snapshots and most of them are just that... exactly the same as a million other snapshots taken by a million other people. The images I take that I'm most proud of though happen because of the process. I form the idea, plan the work and work the plan to make the image.

And I'm most fascinated with people interacting... either with one another or with the camera (or me,) That's followed closely by shapes and the interplay of light and dark. And when I can get that interplay of light and dark and include a person somehow, I feel like I've nailed it. And that's taken me in some interesting directions.
 
I do not have affixed formula for seeing. I may, for example, go to a marina to photographs boats. When photographing the boats I start to see other things not necessarily associated with boats - patterns in light or reflections, shapes and textures. This was a significant departure for me, as my photos were a bit rigid in the past. I still use the rule of thirds and other compositional maxims while photographing, but I am starting to shoot more looking at the quality of the light as the main subject, or a pattern or texture. How I see is difficult to put into words. It is more emotion for me. One of the main influences on my way of seeing was the book The Tao of Photography - Seeing Beyond Seeing by Philippe L Gross and S. I. Shapiro.
 
I guess I look for images that are nice to look at.... well composed, and edited...
With Street, I try.... - try - to capture an image that shows a human element, be it a inward dark thought, or a more common emotion that we all can relate to.
 
hepcat said:
I'm not sure that's possible. I need the process to make the image. Images, at least for me, don't "just happen." Oh, I take snapshots and most of them are just that... exactly the same as a million other snapshots taken by a million other people. The images I take that I'm most proud of though happen because of the process. I form the idea, plan the work and work the plan to make the image.

And I'm most fascinated with people interacting... either with one another or with the camera (or me,) That's followed closely by shapes and the interplay of light and dark. And when I can get that interplay of light and dark and include a person somehow, I feel like I've nailed it. And that's taken me in some interesting directions.
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separate for the purpose of this discussion only...
 
back alley said:
i'm trying to seperate the end result (the image) from the process...
Click to expand...

When I am making images, I will scan my frame edges to make sure I am not cutting off hands, feet ears or heads. I will think about how much depth of focus I want and set the aperture accordingly. If I want to blur movement, I will think about what shutter speed I need to produce the blur I am trying to capture. I will check to make sure that my verticals are straight and my horizons are level. I will look for overlaps in my background and adjust my shooting position to give some separation between elements in the frame. I will check my frame edges and corners to make sure the elements that are close to them have a bit of room to breathe and are not jammed up against the frame edges or into the corners.

When making documentary or street images, I find myself pressing the shutter release halfway down and waiting like a snake preparing to strike, waiting till I get the optimal arrangement of my human elements in the frame.

I try to anticipate that exact moment and feel a sensation of tautness rise within me as my subjects approach optimal arrangement. I get this feeling of tension - both mentally and physically - that a sniper must get once has his shot set up as he waits patiently for the precise second to take his shot.

Most of this processing happens on a subconscious level; I don't take five minutes to consciously think through every shot. It has pretty much become instinctual. I somehow "know" when the shot is just right and I release the shutter at that instant.

Of course, not every shot works out. Photographing people is sort of like trying to photograph corks bobbing on the surface of a choppy lake. The more people in your frame, the more "corks" you have to try to visually manage, compose around and anticipate their next move or non-move. It is really a challenge to get good documentary or street images.

That is a big part of what makes this type of photography so rewarding when you nail an image just the way you hoped to.
 
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