Kat Eye Studio

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What do you know about Trees?

Turns out, even though I photograph trees all the time, I know next to nothing! I started to rectify that knowledge gap on Friday when I partnered with Oregon State University Professor Emeritus Ed Jensen to teach a workshop on tree identification and smartphone photography. 

It might seem like an odd combination, but it worked well! Trees brought Ed to photography, which he uses as botanical illustrations for his books. Photography brought me to trees, which are a fascinating artistic subject. So here we met in the middle, and shared our respective passions with a group of interested participants. Fun!

Here are a few things I learned about trees…

I learned how the Ponderosa Pine pollinates. They are a wind pollinator. These are the male pollen cones which are releasing their pollen right now. If you barely touch them, yellow pollen streams away.

 

I learned why the Oregon White Oak, one of my favorite trees to photograph, grows with space between them. (They are shade intolerant.) I also learned why I can only get the really green leaf silhouettes of this tree in the spring.  As the leaves mature, they grow thick and waxy, as a protection from drought. Later in the summer, no light gets through the oak leaves, but right now they make an wonderful silhouette.

 

I learned about the Dawn Redwood, also known as the fossil tree, which was thought to be extinct until China opened up to the West in the 1940’s. It’s a deciduous conifer, losing its needles in the fall. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as deciduous conifers! I guess I’ve only noticed the evergreen variety.

  
And did you know the Dogwood flower is really only the part in the center? Those big “petals” are really more similar to a leaf. Here is Ed, showing us the flower in the center.

  

Isn’t that all interesting? And that is just a small fraction of what he showed us!  It makes me want to learn more about the trees I photograph. Ed has a book, Trees to know in Oregon, which I will be studying. As I learn more about trees, I may find new ways to photograph them. At least I’ll be more aware of what to notice and observe, which is always a good thing for a photographer. 

So, what do YOU know about trees? Have you ever looked closely at the trees in your area? They are a fascinating subject, for both academic and artistic study. 

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The Call to Capture

Sometimes, when you go out to photograph, instead of you finding an image, an image finds you. Unexpected, unbidden, it calls for you to capture it with the camera. It begs you to pin it down, within the frame.

This is one of the things I love about photography. This is why I like to wander around, camera in hand. I never know what I will find. I never know what will jump out at me. The scene that originally caught my eye usually gets transformed into something different. I get to see the world in new ways. The world begs me to see it in new ways, to frame and reframe it.

I wasn’t looking for this image, but it needed to be captured when I found it. I wonder why?

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Changing Perspectives

OK, here it is, the window that started off last week’s rainy photowalk. I was drawn to those window frames of wonderfully peeling paint in contrast with the shiny smooth metal of the building. It was interesting to find that the metal wasn’t as shiny smooth as it seemed from the car driving by. It had it’s own texture of rust and even writing on it, as you got closer. I like the shapes and lines in this image, and the contrast of not only textures but the silver-blue building against the warmer yellow and brown found in the windows and doors and repeated in the color of the curb.

I’ve been noticing lately how “straight on” many of my images are. That seems to be a favorite perspective. It’s not intentional, I often take many different angles and perspectives of one scene but come back to the “straight on” one as my favorite. Maybe it’s a reflection of my personality, I’m pretty direct and straightforward.

But the angles often show something that the straight on perspective cannot, and that’s depth. This is the window on the left. You can’t tell the depth of the texture, borne out through the paint and screen and screws and nails, in the image above. To show that, it took moving around the angle of the camera, the depth of field, capturing the layers and the details. Of the two images today, this second one is my favorite. It has more depth, it reveals more. It says more to me.

It’s just a reminder to continue looking from all different perspectives, to see which one connects with you the most. You never know!

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