Richard Leon

Profile

City: Oakland
Country: United States

Joined: Jul 2008

Thirty years as a graphic designer & entering my 20th year enjoying image making… I began my photographic journey after an almost devastating loss to our graphic design business. It’s interesting how our lives can change from one event to another in a blink of an eye. After a suggestion from one of my design clients to shoot my own photos, I purchased a k1000 pentax camera and began taking Fridays off to learn photography – traveling throughout northern California’s beautiful coastline and the Napa Valley.

Photography allows me to see the world one moment at a time, one experience at a time. It’s a medium that fits much of my art training where the emphasis was on experiencing personal moments. The habit and discipline of much of my art comes from allowing myself to focus, then observing the moments of my experience to be etched in my mind, my consciousness, & my heart. I can recall these moments, these images, as they cross my path, what I was feeling and thinking as I captured those moments. As I had been sharing with a neighbor on the first day of an exhibit, some of what’s so interesting about these images is what was occurring outside of the frame of these photos. The continuation of life, of sunsets, of moving skies and oceans and sounds of waves and events into the next phase, into the next experience. I find myself at a sunset for many seconds and minutes, just waiting for the next “it’s happening” again moment. Or I’ll just click away at an image because it’s changing too fast for my mind’s eye to capture the passing moments and make sense of it. These are the expressions of impressions, experiences, etched in my soul’s journey.