Visual Reflections: Nature Photography as Palette in the Age of Uncertainty – No. 8 (Coneflower and Hydrangea Photomontage)

21 August 2017

Lens:

Taken in Camera+ and edited in Snapseed, Polamatic, Stackables, and Pixlr.

Flower Photomontage; 2017 Sally W. Donatello All Rights Reserved

Click onto image to enlarge. Let me know your response to this photomontage. Prints are available upon request.

Pens:

America has become unrecognizable. Breathing and exhaling takes more effort; there’s a constant bombardment of rhetoric that scorches the heart and soul. The spirit feels injured, deflated. How, how could we be led by such a person? How can we endure what he represents?

One way is to allow the light to prevail, be more prevalent. The weightiness can be lifted, temporarily, secluding the dark and revealing beams to shore the inner world. I believe that dark cannot stifle light.

To pledge allegiance is to believe. Today’s belief must be substituted for uncertainty in collaboration with HOPE and persistence to recover the country’s moral center.

In the Lens section is my latest photomontage: a combination of coneflower and hydrangea. The conversion to black and white helps to detail the visual language of photography. It allows the words to bounce from the image and creates meaning that is wrapped in contrast, tone, shape, line, and effect of the monochromatic.

With the variation of these elements come a clearer frame of possibilities for each of us. Hold tight to one’s principles and never let them go.

Note:

James Balog is a nature photographer who has spent the last 30 years documenting the interconnection between nature and human nature. His images explore endangered animals, North America’s old-growth forests, and polar ice. From the National Geographic website: “Photographer James Balog, whose Extreme Ice Survey employs time-lapse cameras to document glaciers worldwide, has indisputable and visually stunning proof that ancient glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate.” His work on this series began in 2007 with the mission to combine art and science to give a voice to the Earth’s ecosystem.

View (19.22 minutes) the TED talk in which he presents his Extreme Ice Project. Balog says, “When I realized that climate change was real, and it was not based on computer models, I decided that one day I would do a project looking at trying to manifest climate change photographically. And that led me to this project. Initially, I was working on a National Geographic assignment — conventional, single frame, still photography. And one crazy day, … I got the idea that I should shoot in time-lapse photography, that I should station a camera or two at a glacier and let it shoot every 15 minutes, or every hour or whatever and watch the progression of the landscape over time.” His project has become critical to study and understand the shift in ice formations, and how those changes will affect the planet. 

 

 

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