Living here in the desert Southwest, one of the things that I miss most are the green trees and forests of my native Mississippi.  A few weeks ago when I went home for a visit, it rained almost every day we were there, but I didn’t mind a bit.  It just made all the foliage that much fresher and the greens more vibrant.

As I took a stroll down the lakeside road with my camera, I drank in the beauty of the tall trees that shaded the road and the lakeside homes.  I laughed at the squirrels that played in the branches, and whistled back at the birds that were building nests in the treetops.

I wanted to try and capture the beauty of the bark and the leaves, but I didn’t want the typical wide-angle view of a tree. When I came upon this specimen with a vine embedded in its trunk, I knew immediately how I wanted to frame it. The vine just naturally leads the eye from the bottom of the tree to the top, and so I positioned the camera near the bottom of the tree and pointed it upwards, focusing on the vine about six feet up and letting the bokeh do what it does best.

A slight repositioning of the camera to the right and left allowed the late afternoon sun to highlight different textures in the bark and the vine. Not the way I normally photograph trees, but in this case I captured exactly what I saw and loved.

A true Zen moment.

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