1st place
gold star award
Manuel Enrique González Carmona
spain
title
LAND AGGRESSION
I spend a lot of time reading books, mostly printed catalogs of the most important nature photography contests in the world, as well as books of renowned photographers from whom I learned to take every picture seriously, trying to reach for a similar quality.
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entry description
In the city of Huelva (Spain), just 200 metres from the first industrial estate and 500 metres from the nearest residential area, there are phosphogypsum ponds covering some 1,200 hectares, which are estimated to hold some 120 million tonnes of industrial waste from the production of chemical fertilisers. This pond is located in the marshes of the Tinto river. In 2010, a ruling by the National High Court forced the company Fertiveria to stop the dumping and ordered it to immediately regenerate the entire area of damaged marshland. This ruling was subsequently confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2015. Today, everything remains the same.about the photographer
I began taking nature pictures 5 years ago, before that I just took pictures when I was traveling, without any ambitions. In these years photography took all my spare time as a hobby. At the beginning I started with landscapes and patterns, but quickly I felt in love with wild animals, birds over all, and I improved with every new discover I did in hiding techniques and birds behavior. Today, a big part of my photography is about birds, but I prefer a more creative approximation, showing their relationship with environment and looking for diffuse pictures and non-traditional images, where pixel peeping or definition are not important. About 95 per cent of my work as photographers is done near my living place, and I consider this essential to grow as a photographer. When you are very used to a place and the species that live in there, you think more about the picture to be taken so I can show it in a different way, which increase my creativity. In fact, in the last two years I have travelled for the first time in a Nature photography trip out of Spain, the country I live in. I consider myself versatile, and I am more and more interested in every category of Nature Photography: birds, mammals, invertebrates, macro, flowers, landscape, patterns, etc, trying to do something creative in every one of them, where composition is more important to me that the subject itself.I spend a lot of time reading books, mostly printed catalogs of the most important nature photography contests in the world, as well as books of renowned photographers from whom I learned to take every picture seriously, trying to reach for a similar quality.
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