RoseFire Photography

  As Harry Callahan said, “I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.” This bird intrigued me as soon as I laid my eyes on it, when I saw the bird I got a feeling like it was almost as if the bird was hiding a secret from me that I so desperately wanted to know. The striking blue colour of this birds feathers as well as the bright orange eye compelled me to photograph the bird as it was the first of its kind that I had ever seen. Still to this day I have never seen another bird of its kind making this photograph very special to me because it was almost as if I had this strong gut feeling to go and fetch my camera and photograph the bird that was perched on a old telephone poll. The bird stayed perched on the poll until I got this photo and then turned its head to look at me and then flew away. 

  As John F. Carlson said, “To the artist, the forest is an asylum of peace and dancing shadows.” This quote resonates very deeply with me as I find all of my inspiration as a photographer and as an artist in nature, and mostly trees. There is something so beautiful, yet haunting about a forest. Trees give off a lot of energy, be it negative or positive. To me there is nothing better than being left alone surrounded by a big group of trees, there is this sense of peace and tranquillity that overcomes me when I am surrounded by trees and nature. It gives me a chance to clear my head and focus on the good things in my life and also helps me to figure out solutions to problems that I am having and helps me to forget about all the stressors that comes with living in our modern world that is filled with so many problems and terrifying things. 

  This photo was taken after the fire broke out at the truck yard. The reason behind me taking this specific photograph was because it almost reminded me of photos I have seen before of the aftermath of an earthquake which is an alien thing to me as I have never experienced one. The sunlight casted a patch of light on a section of the photograph which put more emphasis on the photograph. This photograph evokes a sombre mood caused by destruction, although the flames, even though it was destructive, added a beautiful aspect to the photo. For me fire is an amazing thing to have the opportunity to photograph as I see the beauty in the destruction of things. Ash can also be seen in the photograph because of the cardboard packaging still busy burning. In the foreground more of the destroyed fruit can be seen scorched by the fire.

  A fire broke out at a truck yard as the temperatures reached above 35 ° C one day, all the fruit and the packaging caught on fire and went up in flames. I had my camera with me at the time and my first instinct was to pick it up and just start shooting. Just after the people who worked at the yard realised what was happening, they immediately started to attempt to put out the fire. It took over an hour to put the fire out as the plastic packaging wouldn’t stop burning. I was fortunate enough to capture this amazing moment of a man by the name of Efraim using a hose to put out the last of the fire. Although it was the first time that I saw this happen, apparently it had happened before an on a regular basis. 

  As David Lynch said, “Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema.” I have always been fascinated by photographs that are usually described as “creepy” although I don’t know why they are described as that. On a family holiday my brother and I were walking through this forest and I noticed that a thick fog started to roll in and I had the idea to take this photograph. I asked my brother to go and stand in between the two trees and look down at the ground and to look up when I asked him to. The moment I said now my brother half lifted up his face to look at me and at that moment I took the photograph. This resulted in what most people would consider an odd or ominous photograph. This photo has always stuck with me and kind of describes my style of photography.

  As Alex Tehrani said, “Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most preceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments.”  I was driving in the passenger seat of a car one night on a street that is usually very busy during the day which made me feel uneasy while driving on this stretch of road. Even though there was a feeling of uneasiness within me I had noticed that the street lights were reflecting colour on the road that was wet from the rainstorm that had taken a break that evening and the moment I focused on the colours bouncing off of the wet road I started feeling a sense of peacefulness and gratitude that I was able to see the colours of the stop street lights blending in with one another in such harmony. The abundance of the green colour in the scene compelled me to take the photograph.