Today I decided to take a little walk down to a small wood, that I have never visited before, yet is only 2mins walk from my front door.
I’ve walked and driven past this little sign hundreds of times, get never ventured down to have a look! My intention was to look for some fungi, one of my favourite things to photograph. However, the recent frosts have possibly put paid to their growth, so I didn’t find any.
What I did stumble across was this wonderfully weathered fallen tree, which I thought looked like a large crash landed space cruiser!
Looking at the fallen tree, took me off the track and down the slopes of a very overgrown embankment, with lots of fallen trees and masses of leaf litter. This, I thought, was a changing season polarised by nature perfectly.
I then spotted a really large tree that looked as though it had fairly recently fallen, possibly in the high winds we experienced a couple of weeks ago. At its base, just on the edge of the crater it’s upturned roots had left, were some buds of a plant I’m not familiar with; but that were destined to become my picture No5, to honour they’re fight to continue the cycle of life.
Learnings – photography can take you to new places, even ones that are right under your nose! Those places might hold the things you imagined they would, they may also hold things you never expected, and some nice surprises! Capturing the scale of the tiny budding plants, and the large fallen tree was a challenge, and I took 20 pictures (mostly sat in the crater the tree roots had left) before I had one I was fairly happy with. That said, I still didn’t quite capture the scale extremes as much as I’d have liked, so some work to do there. The lighting I like, I wanted it to feel like from the dark entanglement of the fallen tree roots, some new life was fighting to burst through, and I’m happy with how that panned out. Though it feels kind of unbalanced, again I hope that helps to illustrate the ting plants struggle against the massive trees demise.
Onegav 