A Sense of Place:
Travel, Photography, and Photo-art
by David E. Moon
About this site
Photography
I have been interested in photography
since high school where I was the school
photographer for two years, but while
technically competent, I lacked creative
vision. Dispirited by my limitations, I
lost interest until documenting my
travels, gave me the impetus to begin
again. My renewed interest encompassed
travel, landscape, and studio, but my do-
it-yourself home darkroom with a home-
made enlarger and the cost of film and
materials was limiting. The advent of
digital cameras and printing was a
release, physically, economically,
psychologically, and, I hope, creatively.
Digital Art
If digital cameras and printers had been
a release, the advent of digital drawing
and painting was liberating. I had
always admired traditional visual artists’
ability to ignore the detail of
photorealism or technical accuracy and
still capture the essence of a subject. My
digital art began as an experiment to see
how much detail I could remove from an
image while still retaining the essence of
my subject. I am now experimenting with
techniques to enhance the feeling or
narrative of an image, and I feel that I
am finally beginning to make progress.
Travel
Here you will find personal recollections
created for the pleasure of revisiting my
travel experiences and of creating a
vehicle (this web site) to share them with
anyone who may be interested. They are
personal and are conditioned by previous
experiences, by preferences, moods,
attitudes, and biases. They are entirely
subjective; not even my photographs can
make any claim to objectivity because my
subject matter and how I choose to
portray it are equally personal.
Not all the images are my own. When my
own images are inadequate, I borrow
shamelessly from my wife Sheila.
You will not find suggestions of places to
see or things to do, no recommendations,
ratings, schedules, or tips and tricks. You
will find only my attempts to share my
pleasure in the exploration of people and
places.
Poetry
I have difficulty referring to myself as a
photographer, more so, referring to
myself as an artist, and even more so,
referring to myself as a poet, but I was
finding it impossible to communicate
some ideas and feelings through my
photography, my attempts at digital art,
or even my writing. What is presented
here is my attempt to express some of
those feelings in poetry.
About me
I enjoy both the experience of travel and
recording some of that experience in
photos and journals. I travel with my
wife Sheila. We travel in a small
campervan, often for months at a time,
and we are still together. Sheila reads
the guidebooks and chooses our itinerary,
I follow her directions and reap the
reward of discovery, unconditioned by
expectations.
Organizing these materials for my own
use and review,
I found that a
web page
format worked
well, and
having
produced what
was really a
personal web
page, I decided
to share the
materials with
anyone who
may be
interested by
publishing to a publicly accessible
website.
The events, places, and
feelings are described as
I experienced and
recorded them in my
daily journal, but much
of the background
material was added
during production of the web site.