Mountain Over a Clear Cut
A "clear cut" is the cutting of all trees in a an area--every last one of them, leaving stumps and twigs on raw dirt.
We still have smoke and haze, after a single clear day earlier this week. With fall rains still delayed, the air quality range from terrible to awful. Wildfires and forest fires continue to burn.
That said, the haze from the smoke is picturesque, a tiny benefit that I took full advantage of for this photo. I drove out to the last-stop town of Carbonado (rhymes with tornado) and up into the hills. I found this clear-cut—not totally recent and raw, but so far only a little recovery of vegetation among the stumps.
This is the story of the Cascade mountains in a nutshell: a naked clear cut, with nature beginning to recover it with weeds and small bushes. Since we are normally a very moist climate, some things are growing in the old stumps (very old, likely from an earlier cutting of the forest, or fallen trees), providing detail and texture in an other wise otherworldly scene. The layers here were the thing for me: the foreground trashy and barely starting to recover from the cutting; the middle ground empty, yet green with nature’s automatic effort to rebuild the forest; medium-size trees int he background, and earlier generation of trees that grew back on harvested land, and in the background, the immense Mt. Rainier volcano, towering powerfully over the mistakes and dreams of all the people who live (and have lived) around this area. We wait calmly for the possible re-ignition of the volcano, while wreaking a bit of our own torture on the environment.
Sony α1 camera with 70-200 lens at 70mm. A stack of two exposures: one for the mountain, and one for the foreground. Also called HDR, high dynamic range, imaging.