Paul Porter Photography's photostream  

All my images are copyrighted and cannot not be used without permission. If you are considering use for profit or non-profit or if you're interested in purchasing my work, please contact me directly.

I'm a husband, father, son and brother, living in Oakland since 1989. My love for wandering in the outdoors was nurtured from a young age, where I continually explored woods, ponds and creeks on the land adjacent to my house in central northern Connecticut. With my secondary education in upstate New York, I had access to even more diverse wild places that continued to feed a developing passion for the natural world. Places like the Catskills, Taconic Mountains, Bash-Bish Falls, Mohonk Mountain, Lake Minewaska and Minewaska Falls are all indelibly tattooed in fond memories.

By the time I made the move west in 1977 to Tempe, AZ, I quickly fell in love with the places and spaces in the West, starting with the desert southwest and expanding to the immensely diverse geography of California.

Inspired by my friend George Grossman, I started exploring the Flickr community in 2008. I was so impressed by the apparent camaraderie and mutual respect this photographer community demonstrated for each other's work.

On a insatiable quest to learn more and develop my skills, I shoot as many themes/subjects as possible, read as much as I can, study the work of people I admire (and that's a lot of people) and gain inspiration from the community of artists I've come to know.

Although I don't label myself as any particular type of photographer, I love being in the outdoors, and when the opportunity arises, the wilder, the better. My goal is to be able to convey not only a genuine sense of place, but also a sense of "equivalence" with the environment I'm experiencing. Philosophically, for me, this notion of equivalence is rooted in what Alfred Stieglitz introduced in the 1920's. To quote Minor White from his 1963 essay in the PSA Journal , "When any photograph functions for a given person as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed".

Many of us simply know this by striving to capture what was seen and felt, the mastery of which, I continually strive for.