Hi,

My name is Eric and after a year of being on Flickr, I think I'll put up a description of myself. I spend most of my day running around and administering educational programs at a place called The Esalen Institute south of Big Sur, California. My background is as a mental health counselor, bodyworker, business owner, and international lecturer in alternative manual therapies.

In high school I was very much engaged in 35 mm black and white photography and loved both the composition of the picture as well as the challenges of the darkroom. Until recently, I had stopped taking pictures after high school. As photography has moved increasingly digital, I had watched it with a great amount of distance and suspicion as (what I perceived to be) the two fields of graphic arts and photography move almost indistinguishably together. Indeed, I thought photography as an art form was being lost.

Eventually, my friend Brian got into digital photography, and the combination of a cross country move, wanting a creative process again as well as another means of connection with distant friends, got me to purchase my own camera.

Since that time, I have enjoyed the opportunity to slow down and pay attention to the world that photography provides. I have started taking pride in some of the pictures that come out of the process, and I have even started to soften a bit on some of the post processing that happens in the digital world. I continue to dislike pictures where the subject of the picture is the processing or where the original picture is made interesting only by what has occurred in the computer. But I have developed a great appreciation for the places where a strong original picture has taken on added beauty because of the originality, artistic spirit, and maturity of the photographer during the post process phase.

So, I hope you enjoy some of the pictures and that we all continue to grow in our chosen medium. In terms of online community, I actually spend way more time on FaceBook under my name of Eric Moya if you feel inclined to contact me.

Warmly,

-Eric Moya

PS- My daughter is about the most precious thing in the world to me, and Deacon Jazz is the name we had chosen for a boy had we ever had one.