ZAFER

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. -- Ansel Adams

This section is a virtual gallery showcasing some personal digital photography projects.  A platform for projecting visual works in progress.  A place, no, an establishment for exhibiting this ongoing work. For me personally, it is a cathartic process. These photographs represent the straightforward facts on one hand, and on the other, an enigma. Several photographic images you'll see here at alexzafer.com currently hang in private homes. Let me know if you're interested in purchasing a print of your own.

I'm constantly in the process of finding new and unique compositional elements to bring out a sense of organic beauty in whatever I'm shooting. Instead of looking at composition as a set of "rules" to follow, I look at it as more of a set of ingredients found in a fine kitchen ready to make a great meal. I'm always studying space and balance while challenging traditional design principles, texture, lines, form, colour impact, lighting environments, use of shadow (especially with black-and-white), and the creative process in general (digitally and otherwise).  It is all a part of this artistic expression, its exploration and discovery. Seeing something from an enitrely different perspective.

When capturing these images I'm thinking forwardly about the end result that I'm after... always trusting my gut instincts yet often taking chances. Digital improvisation. Free will. At the same time I begin to separate myself from the moment (in a sense) with a hightened awareness observing and capturing pertinent moments as they fly by. Seeing it before it happens, almost. It can be surreal and dream like. I call these shutter moments -- within the scope of "shutter moments" the eyeball and the viewfinder meet to connect the wonderous creative mind linking it to another dimension. When the groove is right, as in "shutter moments", no man made drug can touch the ecstacy that I feel.

So in the end, for me, photography is about the process of waiting for the right thing to happen, as in reportage, for the animal to make himself seen as in wildlife, waiting for just the right light as in nature. It's a process of looking for the unusual, from point of view to detail, of being aware of all the things in life that we pass by everyday and making the viewer notice them. A wall is not a wall, it's brick and mortar, it's stucco and graffiti, the chipped paint and overgrown vines, the shale and limestone textures in the escarpment or the waterfalls that shape them, the tree branches that reflect over the marsh, and the prop for a person to lean on... Enjoy --->

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

-- Oscar Wilde