Let’s talk about seeing for a minute.
The other day I had something kind of funny happen to me. I came downstairs for lunch a little later than normal and Holly had beaten me to the lunch making process. We both generally eat salads for lunch and so she had left all the stuff out for me to assemble my own. When it came time to put on the salad dressing, I opened the fridge to see that we were out, so I walked out to the garage to get a new bottle from the fridge there. When I returned, I discovered that there was not one, not two, but FOUR bottles of salad dressing sitting directly in front of – almost touching – my bowl. I had never seen them, even though I had literally been reaching over and around them as I put together my salad. As they saying goes, had they been a snake, they’d have bit me!
So what does any of this have to do with photography? Well sometimes great pictures can be right in front of you, you just have to go looking for them… and sometimes once you see it, you’ll start seeing them everywhere. For today’s collection, the latter is the case.
The first picture above I found when Holly and I had gone out exploring earlier in the summer. I’d been wanting to see this tree for some time, so we just made a day of it. I basically crawled all over this tree until I found the composition that I really liked. I just love those roots, and they seem to sprawl out like a web from under the tree. After that session, I started paying closer attention to tree roots, and stumbled on the scene immediately below at Big South Fork on a different outing that Holly and I did. Then, on the way back from Charleston, we stopped by Congaree National Park, and that park is chock full of trees with roots going everywhere (that’s the last picture)! As I mentioned, once you see something, sometimes you’ll keep seeing it everywhere you go!
More next week!
–Dan Thompson
