A moment of pure tenderness –blog entry 2

This photograph show a moment that a polar bear cub and its mother swim through the Arctic Ocean in Svalbard, Norway. The cute cub clambered on to his mother’s back as she swam in the icy waters surrounding the Svalbard Islands. The image has huge ice field and ocean as its background, and there is some areas on the ice field where ice absent and the earth under it shows out. There is a polar bear cub hitches a bear-back ride from its mother as the subject in the foreground, in the middle of right side of the picture. The mark of water wave behind the bears shows that the bears are swimming. The color of this photo is simple, mostly just white, which constructs a pure and cold atmosphere.

The ice field in the background of this picture is huge, as wide as the image itself, while the pair of polar bears in the foreground is small. The photographer’s use of the strong contrast between them reveals the great mother love of the mother bear. Why the mother bear had the baby bear on its back when it was swimming? Perhaps the cub was just too tired to take the plunge. Or maybe it didn’t fancy taking a dip in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean. Either way, it seemed that the baby bear found the perfect solution to its predicament – by hitching a bear-back ride on its mother. It was a moment of pure tenderness – unusual for such a world-class predator. They huge cold background makes the action which the mother bear takes for keeping its child safe be even more impressive.

In the other side, the areas on the ice field where ice absent implies a serious problem in the modern society: global warming. Rising temperatures caused by global warming makes the polar bear’s natural habitat fall apart in recent years. As a result, the polar bears have to swim longer distances to reach a food supply. That might be the reason why the mother polar bear in the photograph swam in the ocean, even it had to carry the baby bear on its back.