Branching patterns

The first thing that I stopped to photograph on January 23, and the last that I’ll show you from that session, was the scraggly and therefore intriguing remains of some goldeneye, Viguiera dentata. I’d hoped for fog pictures that morning, and although I didn’t get any, these dried plants against a gray sky turned into a semi-silhouette in which the farther branches seem to be disappearing into what could have been but wasn’t actually fog. The resulting image has the look of an old-fashioned split-tone photograph that uses black and brown. It’s something different from what you’ve usually seen here, another case of variety being the species of life.

Like the previous six photographs, this one came from a bluff above Loop 360 near the aptly named Bluffstone Dr. in northwest Austin. The fruits of that foray fed this blog for a full week.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman