Things As They Are

Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to photograph something just as it is.

That maple tree sits next to our driveway. It is the epitome of what a deciduous tree looks like in winter in the Pacific Northwest: beset by moss and lichen; broken by occasional rot and battered by wind.

And of course with little drops of rainwater clinging to the branches.

All of that seems obvious, but it’s surprisingly difficult to capture the full picture, as it were. I recently acquired another antique lens, a 55mm f/3.5 made for Mamiya medium-format cameras. Modern lenses are super good at certain things. They can be really sharp, but sometimes that sharpness comes without the ability to lead the eye to what’s important in a photograph. If everything is sharp, then you can’t lead the viewer’s eye to what’s important.

From an artistic point of view, you could say that everything is important in this photograph, but I’ve never had a modern lens capture the scene the way I see it with my eyes. I see the tree (duh, of course!), I see the field beyond. I see colors that rhyme, and colors that ague with each other for dominance. I see three-dimensional things that, in real life, have both texture and depth, but in a photograph, there is no stereoscopic image, just the flat canvass. Like a painting. I see feeling: stillness, strength that can be flexible when it must, and colors that reflect both the depression and the hope of So. Much. Rain.

It’s all in there for me. It’s not some big canyon, it’s not some incredible view from a mountaintop, it’s not a crushingly beautiful detail illuminated by complex lighting. It’s a tree, really being there, really saying something about where I live, and I can look at it any time I want—even in the spring, when it’s character changes completely, I can remember the gloom and doom and the spiritual strength it builds in us that gives me reason to allow in the hope of spring, the power of summer, and later on, the melancholy reality of fall.

Winter tree, I guess, would be the title here. Winter tree, teaching tree, I can almost remember that we can be on earth to learn.