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Charlotte Parkin
Head of Marketing & Sub Editor for On Landscape. Dabble in digital photography, open water swimmer, cooking buff & yogi.
Alex Noriega
Alex Noriega is a professional nature photographer and photography educator focused on the American West. After a prior career in Information Technology, he has spent the last 15 years developing a slow, deliberate approach to photography. While his process is grounded in traditional technique, his post-processing emphasizes mood and atmosphere over strict realism. His work is known for a sense of mystery, simple design, and intimate composition which isolates subjects in fleeting light.
Few photographers approach nature with the same mix of patience, curiosity, and creative intent as Alex Noriega. Over the past decade and a half, he’s built a reputation for images that are both simple and deeply evocative . The kind that make you pause and look closer. In this interview, Alex talks about his journey from a career in tech to life as a full-time photographer, the slow and deliberate process behind his work, and why embracing mystery and serendipity is at the heart of his approach to the landscape.
We’d love to hear a bit about your background - what you studied or chose to study at school/college, and your path to what kind of work you do now.
I studied Computer Science, if you could even call what I did studying. I mostly skipped university classes and stayed up all night learning guitar; I was a terrible student when I was required to do more than ace the occasional test. This predictably led to dropping out of college after a couple of years of faffing about on campus.
However, I was genuinely interested in computers, as had been the case ever since my mother bought me one for Christmas at the age of 12. So I quickly got a job at a retail electronics store. When that chain went out of business, I took the client relationships I had built and started my own business, building and fixing computers. That was the last time I had a boss—over 17 years ago now.
After a couple of years of running this business, I had lots of spare computer parts to get rid of. Cell phones at the time had terrible cameras, and I needed decent photos of these products to sell them online. So I bought myself an early point-and-shoot digital camera with manual control, and immediately became enthralled with the process of photography. Little did I know I had just begun a lifelong journey!