The first thing I felt confidently happy shooting once I went full manual and starting prowling around with my camera were woods and forests.
But not trees, still not trees.
I’ve written before about this problem, but unless I come across a tree that is perfectly isolated against a big landscape, I still cannot figure out how to compose a shot that makes a visually interesting tree the main subject of the photograph. I will circle around and around, climb up and climb down, and still be disappointed at the outcome. If the tree isn’t making it easy for me, I can’t crack the puzzle.
There is something about an interesting tree that is so contextual that it’s hard to use a photograph to capture it. The tree is interesting as a small variation on a theme—older, rougher, a different species, brighter, more scarred, more gnarled, straighter. Leaning, fallen, going the other way. More loaded by parasitic vines, defiantly free of vines in a forest engorged by ivy.
But it makes for frustrating walks now, because when I see woods, I mostly see the same landscape repeated again and again. It draws me, my eye is caught, but in the viewfinder, I see a groove that I have furrowed deep already, changed only by light and weather. But trees? Every walk I see a new one that I stop to appreciate and realize I can’t do anything to make it move from life to image.