Victory

I've been enjoying and photographing this tree for a while now, so I'm always looking for slightly different compositions. (I generally try to resist the voice in my head telling me that I've already made every photo there is to make.)

 

For this photo I got about as low as I could get, and even though I had taken the low approach in the past. Lying on my belly on the ground, I was struck by how heroic the tree looked from my lying-at-its-feet vantage point. Rather than the twisted Yoda figure I was used to shooting, the tree transformed into something that stood proudly in the face of incredible adversity, like a Boris Vallejo movie poster. (Think of the image of a muscle-bound Chevy Chase standing proudly over two women while clutching a tennis racket in the movie poster for "National Lampoon's Vacation.") That image is still all I see when I look at this photo.

 

This was a single exposure, taken about half an hour after sunset. Surprisingly, some of the low clouds still had some color in them. The pine tree itself really soaked up the sunset's diffused, reddish light during this long exposure. Also worth noting is the brightest "star," nearly straight above the whitebark pine, is the planet Saturn.

Done