Ken Alexander (kensimage)

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Name: Ken Alexander Contact
Country: United States
Intro: The great thing for me about doing travel photography is that it forces me to think about just what it is about a scene that I find appealing. What objects, with what associations, are positioned "just right"? What are people doing that is characteristic of their daily lives, or unique? If you're in, for example, Paris, then what is the essense of Paris that can be captured in a photo? It's easy to miss these things if you're not specifically looking for them. It's true that sometimes one can miss things by being too focused on getting a picture of everything, but figuring out what's special, and capturing it to take home, makes it worthwhile.

I am not the kind of photographer to try to perfect my execution of a particular type of photo--to keep going back to the same location to get something a little better than what I got the last time. After I shoot "city" pictures (which usually means "people") for a while, I find my creative impulses have waned, I'm frustrated by missing out on the great shots that are only present for an instant and I get a hunger to capture something that's beautiful, a hunger for the pure aesthetic pleasure. That's when I want to head to the desert or the mountains and find the great scenes in great light.

Then when I've captured the forms and the light in nature for a while, I get the feeling it's not spontaneous enough, the work doesn't have my personal mark, I'm just shooting the same things any other landscape photographer would shoot and trying to do it with enough skill that it looks almost as good as theirs. So I go back to the spontaneity and in-the-moment creativity of street and travel photography. And the cycle repeats.

Besides being an amateur photographer, I am 52 years old, a husband, the father of an 18-year-old college student, and a mathematics professor. I live in southern California.

I started a TrekLens page, which is here.
Member Since: 2005-04-22
Equipment: Canon 350D (Rebel XT), Canon Eos Elan, Canon EOS Elan 7, Pentax Z10
Note: Gold Star Critiquer/Silver Workshop Editor/Gold Note Writer (8563)
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