From gray to green, or death and rebirth

The last picture included a distant view of a forest destroyed by one of various wildfires that have swept across parts of Mesa Verde National Park in the last few decades. When I’d gotten about half-way back out of the park on September 26th I stopped above a grove of trees that had similarly died in a forest fire, but here enough time had elapsed for new growth to have dominated the understory and turned it green again.

The visual density of all the gnarled trees fascinated me and I took pictures from various angles with two of my zoom lenses as I tried to optimize the interplay of so many branches in one space.

If you’re interested in photography as a craft, you’ll find that point 15 in About My Techniques is relevant to this photograph. So is point 7, if you take as your area of focus the apparent tunnel of branches that’s two-thirds of the way over from the left edge of the photograph and two-thirds of the way down from the top edge.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman