Hello everyone! My name is Stefano Balma and I am a landscape photographer. The path that led me to landscape photography is quite varied: I was born in Turin, Italy in 1988 and creativity has always been present in my life. Since I was a child, I loved to draw and write stories, while in adolescence I was fully dedicated to music; I sang in a heavy metal band with which I recorded two albums and made several appearances in Europe. Near my fateful 30s, I completely changed my life by moving to Genoa from my great love Ilaria (now my wife); it was a period of great changes! I stumbled upon a Buddhist community that introduced me to meditation, an experience that deeply marked me. From there, I studied Buddhist thought and participated in numerous meditation retreats, usually held in nature, which I learned to appreciate and love. Words like \"compassion\" and \"awareness\" began to make sense and I also made the decision to stop eating meat and fish. My idea of life changed dramatically! I started taking photos like many others: before the covid, my wife and I had started traveling to experience new things and, like many, I enjoyed taking photos with my terrible smartphone! My wife\'s sister encouraged me to take my first camera and, as soon as possible, I started traveling again. It was immediately clear what I wanted to see and photograph, namely natural landscapes, so calm, so \"honest.\" Photography requires a certain amount of attention, calm and love, all qualities that I found in meditation. It didn\'t take long before I fell in love with this beautiful art, capable of combining artistic expressiveness with the contemplation of nature. It is in nature that I find my greatest source of inspiration; through it, I am able to get to know myself better and this relationship is at the foundation of my photography. In these years I have also focused on post-processing of my photos, a fundamental aspect for my creative process as it allows me to emphasize the relationship I had with the place at the time of the shot. In my workflow, there are no photo montages or invented landscapes, as the spirit that leads me to create images is closely linked to my relationship with the places I shoot at that precise moment. PROJECTS I would love for my photos to help raise awareness about issues related to nature conservation, the climate, etc. With this in mind, I have a quite ambitious project that consists of collecting groups of images of the main actors in climate balance: forests and glaciers. Trees and ice are the two protagonists that I love to photograph the most and this has often led me to travel to Northern Europe in countries like Iceland and Finland or to the beautiful volcanic islands of Madeira and Tenerife because of their beautiful and rare laurisilva forests. If you\'ve made it this far without nodding off from boredom, all I can do is sincerely thank you and hope that my shots may inspire and entertain you.
