Daniel Beltrá captures the profound beauty and vulnerability of the natural world in his photographs of natural landscapes and wildlife. Primarily a landscape photographer, Beltrá combines painterly abstraction with the haunting details of an earthly paradise in peril. His sweeping aerial images invite us to soar over majestic fields of ice, water and earth, to experience the natural wonders of our planet, and to bear witness to the scars, and shocking scale, of environmental degradation.
Beltras oil spill work
Daniel Beltra takes an abstract approach when photographing the oil spills from a high up POV. The bright colors of the oil massively contrasts against the deep dark tones of the ocean; this catches the viewers eye.
His images always have lots of texture due to the swirling of the oil, he makes these natural disasters look pretty.
Spill- Daniel Beltra (2011)
It was the world’s worst offshore oil spill: 5m barrels spewing from the BP-run Deepwater Horizon rig into the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people, marine life and devastating hundreds of miles of coastline. From a Cessna float plane 3000 foot above the Louisiana coastline, photographer Daniel Beltrá captured the carnage. It was only from this height, he said, that the magnitude of the spill – and the futility of the clean-up operation – became apparent. “It was like trying to clean an Olympic pool full of oil while sitting on the side using Q-tips.”
My respone:
I aim to photograph signs of oil in our seas, inspired by the work of Beltra. i want to take an abstract approach to my work by photographing the multi-colors of the oil in the sea. I will find this mainly in the harbors, as oil spills from the boats. To compliment this, i might also take photos of boats in the harbor as they are the cause of the oil spills.
Juha Tanhua
In this collection of cosmic photographs, comets, nebulas, and galaxies stretch before the human eye, showering the sky in glittering scenes that ought to be from a telescope. But instead of looking upward into the night, Finnish photographer Juha Tanhua points his camera to the ground. He documents his “oil paintings” in broad daylight, shooting gasoline and oil spills usually found in car parks. “I don’t look up, but down,” he tells Colossal. “It’s not space above us; it’s space under our feet. You can find subjects to photograph even in dull places like parking lots. Expect nothing, get everything.”
The photographer first got his idea for the gasoline puddles when noticing an oil spill next to his car. “It looked a little bit like the northern lights,” he says.
My response:
As well as capturing the oil spills in the sea, i can also focus on where oil also spills from, cars. Using this idea, i aim to approach it in the same abstract way as the oil spills in the sea, capturing the colors of the oil on the ground. Inspired by Juha Tanhua.