Nate799 Blog

I chose the message of the world’s voracious fossil fuel consumption and the resultant pollution and particulates that are crowding our life sustaining environment. There is a finite end to the fossil fuel resources and it is estimated that it is within a window of less than 40 years. Therefore, we need to capitalize on energy alternatives, which are Biomass Energy, Wind Energy, Solar Energy, Geothermal Energy, Hydroelectric Energy sources. What these alternative energy sources do in comparison to any individual fossil fuel energy source is that it is renewable in terms of relative timeframe to fossil fuel sources and the source of the energy is… free! Solar, by far, is the most likely energy source for conversion to electricity or thermal energy (depending on your location to mostly sunny days a year).

I used several well-known images for my poster to exhibit the pollution cause by coal stacks spewing lethal chemicals into the air and traveling significant distances causing environmental effects. I also chose to use an iconic image of Iron Eyes Cody from the early 1970’s environmental advertisements. Instead of using a modern home, I chose to use a 18^th century cabin with photovoltaic (solar) panels, while taking a vibrant sun and diminishing the opacity of the sun and using the coal stacks grey sky background to give the impression of blocking or reducing the sun’s rays from reaching the ground and rendering the solar panel as useless. There is the step back into time and reverting to a “settler” lifestyle by placing an early 19^th century candid family picture along with a more modern little girl from a third world country that appears to be despondent and of whom I thought expresses the feeling of insecurity in humankind’s insatiable consumption of fossil fuel and resultant pollution to our world. Of course, she’s upset too that there are dead fish in the rising waters that is surrounding the vehicle she is trying to fish from and this also alludes to detrimental implications to our shared environment. To express the anxiety of a heavenly entity, the exhausted angle atop the cabin’s roof mounted solar panel, as if to say not even heaven can save our “Garden of Eden”. Note that the only images that have any color are the solar panel, the sun and the angle while all the other images are in greyscale. For the angle, I chose to increase the white balance to given her more of a heavenly appearance.

Use of Photoshop tools: Since the majority of the images used in this poster are grey scale, I simply used the Image, Adjustment and Black & White tool. Depending on the original color and its transition to grey scale, I may have increased or decreased the opacity so that a layer beneath it would be visible. I also used Image, Image Rotation to get the right placement and then I manipulated the image by skewing it for proper perspective. To help blend images where there were significant transitions from one to the other, I used the Clone Stamp tool. Finally, I freestyled the fishing line by using the Freeform Pen tool and for the text I kept it bone stock by using the Calibri Regular and increased to 150pt font.

References

Aficionados, A. E. (2016, March 11). Alternative Energy Solutions for the 21st Century. Retrieved from Alternative Energy: http://www.altenergy.org/

Wolfson, R. (2012). Energy, Environment, and Climate 2nd edition. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company.

Angle Image: http://tntfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2013_06_01_archive.html