About

Dave Monley studied fine art and photography at San Jose State University. After working briefly in 16mm film, he settled into a career in fine art and commercial photography. He has received many awards including AIGA, Murphy, Addy, SUMMIT, and Western Art Directors.

Dave lives and works in San Jose, California.

360º Panoramic Photography

"Perhaps the most basic tool available to the photographer is cropping. We choose a piece of what we see then use the four edges of our image to direct the attention of our audience and create our composition. To abandon those edges and show the entire 360 degree environment seems highly limiting. Furthermore, since panoramas are digitally assembled from many images, we have no eyepiece to look through to see the composition. We must construct the image mentally and control it only by moving the point of view.

Yet many forms of art impose such radical limitations. The panoramic photographer, like the haiku poet or the rock musician, embraces the form and finds not restrictions and borders, but possibilities and clarity. We need the wall to create the window.

In my own experience, I find I can communicate a sense of place and moment that I never found possible in traditional landscape photography."

Commercial Photography

“Commercial Art is an unfortunate label - for art is art and the word commercial does not describe or limit that art but simply designates one of the objectives. The art we grew up knowing and learning about, the art we travel to museums to see, nearly all was created with an objective in mind - usually someone else’s objective. The great majority was created for the church and/or the glorification of an individual, yet none of that diminishes the work. It may be commercial art that traces it’s lineage back to the renaissance and fine art that is the modern branch of art.

Having said that, there is no doubt that much commercial shooting is pretty mundane. We often just need to show what a product looks like, though even those shots benefit from the generous application of craft. We can emphasize a texture, diminish the less interesting aspects, and direct the eye to where we want it. There is very little in this world can not be attractive.