My name is Near L. I’m in 10th grade. What led me to the photography world was watching David Attenborough wildlife documentaries when I was growing up. I would imagine myself as the person taking the shots and constantly annoy my siblings by pausing the screen to analyze each shot I found interesting. 

The change I want to express through my photos is about protecting nature so David Attenborough can keep making films, but also because it’s good too.

In my first photo, I narrowed it down to protecting trees, the lungs of our land. Some context behind the photo is the transit station used to have lots of trees around it, but lots of them were cut down and replaced with an obsessive amount of city lights. The wavy streaks of the lights was a cool accident when I was playing around with the lighting of the camera settings. I kept it because it distorted around the trees, mimicking the situation.

For my second photo, it is about the wildlife of nature. Some important elements are the floss shaped like a fish, the fact that it’s plastic, and the crow itself is the subject taken. The crow, Monty, and I are close, so I knew he was smart enough to not actually eat the floss but pose with it, attracted by the banana bread I placed behind it. I wanted to show how different it was from when birds would eat their natural foods but now, they unknowingly digest litter and plastic. It would’ve been better if I used a bird that actually ate fish, but this was the only bird I knew was at ease with me so I went with that rather than spend countless hours with a random seagull that could possibly swallow the floss. What drew me to create this photograph was seeing all the plastic and trash at my bus stop everyday, because there’s so much wildlife that’s affected by it that you wouldn’t notice unless you stop and really look around and listen around the trees and bushes and cracks and crevices of the bus stop.

#ProtectMonty 

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