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Branches
17 October 2022
For 20 years we have walked by these tree limbs at various times of the day and seasons of the year, struck by how the light behind them drew them out. They seemed to be reaching in a desperate way for something far away.
Branches. Olympus E-PL1 with Lensbaby 60mm Twist (120mm equivalent) at f8, 1/125 second and ISO 500. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
This time of year the sun is low enough in the sky to barely light the branch tops. So once again we lined up a shot and tried to capture what we'd seen with our naked eye.
We never do.
It's is always a colossal failure. We return home with a photo of brown tree branches in the shade. And try as we might to bring some drama out of the shot in post processing, we always fail. Always.
This is just the latest proof.
We got rid of the color to emphasize the contrast between the shadows and highlights of the branches themselves. We almost wanted to draw the converging lines to show the chaos of the outreaching limbs.
The problem, though, is representing the depth that, in person, is obvious. With two eyes you see the branches of the foremost tree, then the tree behind it and the tree behind that and on and on.
You don't get that with a photograph. You get a knitting pattern, everything the same depth. One-eyed perspective. No sense of relative distance at all, in fact.
But we will take a clue from our subject and branch out to another approach the next time we pass by. One day we may, in fact, find some way to depict this dramatic scene on the side of the road overlooking the old canyon.
And all those limbs will finally applaud.