T
rees are notoriously hard to photograph. They're ubiquitous in our world, often going unnoticed as we hurry about, and as such a successful photograph of a tree requires enough character and perspective to warrant more attention than we give the trees all around us.
I've made a lot of photos of trees; most are boring. Trees are riddled with imperfections—discolored leaves, runaway branches, awkward proportions—and in my quest for a perfect frame, photos often fall flat. The bright sky behind an exposed tree makes leaves dark and fringed, and too many trees together gives little room for contrast or composition.
Just like with Lake Michigan, I needed a way of simplifying and distilling the woods in order to strip them of their busyness and imperfections and capture their essence.
So, just like I had on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the woods I turned to panning.
I started simply, finding bright, colorful trees in the throes of autumn. By panning with a tree's trunk, I can make abstract a photograph without losing the basic form and, more crucially, the identity, of my subject.
These photographs are clearly of and about the woods, but rather than show what we all see every day, they provide a clairvoyant view of trees freed from imperfection.
Coming up from the beach one cold winter evening (shooting these), I crested a hill and was clobbered by the fiery light of the sky. By panning across the line of bare trees, I captured both the intense color of the sunset and the wispy hints of looming woods ahead.
Unlike with my first set, I panned across the trees, instead of along their trunks; while the grounding of a solid trunk calms and soothes the photograph, the frantic shake of these trees tenses and dramatizes the image and tells a completely different story.
Months later, I found myself again in a dense, dark woodland. Pockets of light danced on the underbrush as tall cedars swayed above. I came across a thin maple, much smaller than its neighbors, taking advantage of a gap in the canopy. While around it the woods were dark, its young leaves basked in the crisp light of late summer. It was an island of radiance in the shadowy forest.
With as little light as I had, I knew I had to use blur. Instead of panning, I tried zooming in while taking a photo, and got this shot. The effect is captivating, and seems to suck the viewer into the frame.
Both literally and figuratively, photography is less about capturing the unusual in regular light and more about capturing the regular in unusual light. These trees are everywhere, and I see them almost every time I go out. They're nothing special, and they've been blooming and glowing and turning with autumn for millions of years.
That doesn't mean they deserve to be neglected, however; they're a part of our world whether we notice them or not, and in the moment I took these photos, I chose to do the former. I think that's why these photos are so important, why photography is so important: with a camera, I have the power to give new light to the overlooked.