In the glade down near the river in Bloedel Reserve, there is a tree that is super gnarly looking. The center of it seems to have been broken apart and damaged over time but the tree still seems to be doing fine. It looks very different depending on the angle from which you look at it. I think this could be the sort of tree that someone would incorporate in a fairy tale!
The road on which our office was located when I first moved to the PNW has some lovely trees. As fall gets underway, these trees can turn a lovely shade of red. They attract a large number of people that come to photograph them or photograph themselves in front of them. The favored spot for doing this is in the middle of the road and it is strange how unaware some of the people are that they are standing on an active road with cars coming either side of them regularly.
Most of the drivers know the area is popular at this time of year but some do get rather frustrated by the almost suicidal approach of the wandering photographers. I am a touch more cautious as I walk along the street. There is plenty of opportunity to walk out and get a shot and then retreat rather than just loiter in the way. I don’t think the trees were at peak color when we swung by but they certainly looked nice. Will I get back for a second look? We shall see…
Before we headed to Sproat Lake to find the Mars, we did a brief recce of the area along the shore where they were due to arrive the following day. At this time, we still had a plan to return to the island on the Sunday for the final touchdown of Hawaii Mars. I would later scrap this portion of the trip. However, we hadn’t got to that point yet. There were a few possible locations to try out and Steve had noticed a small park that led down to the beach, so we went to check it out. It was a lovely little spot and there was a tree hanging out from the land over one part of the beach that looked particularly cool. We didn’t end up returning but this could have been a nice spot to watch the proceedings.
A couple of years ago, when we redid our back yard, we planted a small plum tree in one of the beds. It has grown well and, last year we had a few small plums that developed. They all fell before we had a chance to pick them, so we had no idea whether they were any good or not. This year, we had a lot more plums as the tree has grown quite substantially. I picked one of them to see how it was doing, and it wasn’t too bad. It did have a split in it, though.
The following weekend, I decided to harvest the rest. One had already fallen, and I think I saw a rabbit having a good chew on it. The rest came off easily enough. Quite a few had splits in them which, from what we hear, is the result of them getting a lot more water than they have been used to. I put them all in a bowl to get a photo. For the first one, I put them all with their best sides up. Then I turned them to show the most damage. Selective angles in photos can really change the impression you give!!
The Pacific Northwest is not short of trees (and many of those trees are not short!) but they are often pretty regular looking trees. We do have some more twisted looking specimens for sure, but the UK does seem to provide a selection of aged trees that have developed some amazing shapes to them. One such tree was in the grounds at Hinton Ampner. I have no idea how old it is and whether this is the norm for this type of tree, but I thought it looked fantastic so here it is getting its own post.
One thing that I didn’t really get good shots of during our time on safari was the baobab trees. There are many varieties of them and some of the most distinctive are in Madagascar, so they weren’t the ones we saw. However, we did see a bunch of the local varieties and they were pretty cool looking. The only one I got a good shot of was this one that someone pointed out to me behind the area where we had stopped for lunch. It was quite a beast of a tree. I did think about wandering closer to it but, unlike when at home, I was not so sure of the wisdom of wandering away from our guides. There were some rather substantial predators out there somewhere.
While walking through Washington Arboretum, we passed where a couple of trees had been taken down. It looked like it had been done very recently because the remains of the trunk where it had been sawn off still looked very fresh. The texture of the cross section caught my eye and I figured a view straight down with the light from the side picking out detail was the best angle.
The Pacific Northwest can definitely be damp and the amount of moss you see in sheltered areas is impressive. What caught my eye on this occasion was that the moss was wrapped around the tree and the sun was directly behind the tree making the moss appear more like a halo around the tree than anything else. It was quite a range of exposures, so I played around with the shots a little to get the effect I was after.
Sometimes you just don’t have the right gear with you. I had gone to Juanita Bay after work and was only carrying one camera with the 500mm on it. Looking down in to the water to one side of me, I was quite taken by a stump in the water that had a new growth of a small tree coming from the top of it. It was too far away to get a decent shot with the phone so the 500mm was the only option. I took a sequence of shots to stitch together later on. I quite like the separation that you get with using such a long lens for a shot like this. I wonder how large the tree will ultimately grow to be given the limitations of its home!
The arboretum in Seattle is unsurprisingly home to many interesting varieties of trees and plants. One tree that caught my eye was (perhaps) a type of willow that had bark that peeled to reveal an intense red coloration beneath. Sometimes these colors don’t seem to show up as well in an image but I fortunately had a polarizer with me and that took out some of the reflection and glare and allowed the color to show up well. Cropping in tighter seemed to make more sense, too.
