Well, I saw a lot of trees today and they were all made of wood.
They were wooden trees and they were made entirely of wood - Laurie Anderson, Walk the Dog
I see a lot of trees. I like looking at trees. I don’t think the trees have any feeling one way or the other about this.
But I take a lot of photos of trees, especially when I’m in the forest. The forests I visit have a lot of small trees, so it’s hard to find the ones that really stand out and say “Take my picture!”
I’m refocusing on taking photos of trees, simply because I love looking at them and can’t find an easy, straight forward way to make them work in photographs. The woods I visit have lots of smaller trees, lots of trees that look a like, are all about the same size, all grew up together.
It’s a beautiful sight when the sunlight dodges between the trees, playing tag with itself. The small trees are so unpretentious – no denizens who stood while ancient civilizations fell, these are just weedy saplings that cropped up when the land was clear cut, and have managed to eek out an existence. Lots of them all a like, shoulder to shoulder, just getting by from day to day. These are trees I can relate to.
I have a lot of negatives in sleeves, mostly medium format, mostly of trees. The notebooks stack up to be a few feet high, and a few of the images have made it out to the website or even into physical prints.
But the trees here are elusive, and that’s saying something since they can’t move or otherwise change their appearance. It is the quintessential quandary of photography – how to capture a two dimensional image that speaks to the essence of what you see in the real time real world.
Well, I have another pile of negatives to go through, and the B&W shot at the top of this page is the first promising image I’ve been able to cull out so far. Just to do something different, I shot an ancient and long expired roll of 35mm Kodak EPR 64, cross processed it in C41 chemistry, and then inverted the images and color corrected them to produce cyan toned images. So along with the medium format film, a few cyan images of trees are presented. I like the look, and it might be a project worth continuing with other slide films.
Tomorrow I will be shooting more trees. I’ve taken a day job and only have one weekday a week to shoot, and so far have been adapt at picking the rainy day to go out. But rain or shine, I will see a lot of trees tomorrow.
3 comments
Comment from: kim Visitor
Comment from: mcc Member
Thanks Kin - those are great old trees down in Bronson Park. I look forward to seeing your shots (or sketches) of them. Good observation about art asking the questions there to be asked - I’ve been mulling on that since reading it.
Comment from: penny barron Visitor
trees…roots,solid in the gound
……..branches spreading
……..twigs
……..life supporting
……..shapes so different
……..leaves green
……..autmmn barely there
……..winter simple
……..photos of trees,perfect
i like the top image,looks like a tree, doing whatever it is trees do, there in the neighborhood among its friends and associates.
i’m still all undecided about whether trees have feelings or thoughts, or what those might be like.
i’ve been making a special effort for 3 or 4 months now to foto some of the old oaks in bronson park. old, beat up, missing parts here and there, largely unappreciated, but still standing, with no intention of falling down anytime soon. i can relate to that. now if i can just image it.
i’ll be watchung here for clues.
i wanted to say something re the previous post too, but it keeps coming out too wordy, way too pretentious sounding, so… basically, what you said.
money is good, i fully intend to earn some someday. real soon. but that’s what marketing is about. the art is about asking the questions that are there to be asked, and nobody else can assign questions to the artist.
yeah, i go off and spout stuff like that occasionally, and i hope it was kind of relevant.