As I’ve said before here (I think now to the point of tedium), I like winter woods in the Mid-Atlantic. Mostly deciduous trees that are bare of leaf, and the thick strangling overgrowth that sometimes seems to be murdering the forest by turning it into a thirty-foot tall shrub mostly gives way to bare vines that reveal the trunks that are struggling to vault their canopies over their parasitic companions.
But it’s impossible to frame. I like the work of artists and photographers who get that and go right at it. Sure, you can pick places where there are clearings, you can find trees distinctive enough to isolate, you can shoot where light is producing a distinction between one stand of trees and the next. But walking in the woods during the winter around here mostly you see a tangle.
And sometimes you see what I saw this foggy morning as I went up a trail that no one else was on that day: a flock of Canada geese who were startled to see a human tramping up next to them. Someday I’ll get a flock of startled birds perfectly framed, but that’s even harder than selecting just the right thicket for a thoughtful composition.
The result this time is objectively a bad photo, probably made worse by my processing. But it feels witnessed in a way that good photos don’t. So I’ll stand by it.
I think it has a fairy tale quality.