Canon Elan IIe, handheld Sigma 28-105 at 28mm Fuji Provia 100F Exposure unrecorded

Composition

I'm not going to make any pretenses that this is a remarkable image. But it is one that I use to demonstrate approaching a subject with some thought as to how it works. We see trees as something usually pointing straight into the sky, like the previous image. or spreading across the frame horizontally with a huge canopy of leaves.

This one split the difference. Ths stark trunk and the rust-colored leaves from late autumn begged for attention, but a 'normal' approach would have left something out. Shooting it at an angle, I got everything into the frame, while simultaneously leading the viewer deeper into and across the frame with the line of the trunk. And since it's clearly shot from underneath, to me, it has a faint sense of dizzyness, of leaning too far back to see the soaring branches.

In B&W, the trunk becomes even more of a dominant presence, without the distractions of the deep color in the rest of the frame, and resembles a lightning bolt. But obscured by the foliage in the upper reaches, it provides depth to the image, something that can be hard to do on film (by nature two-dimensional and flat), but very useful.

And I've said it before: It could be just me. It's just a tree, after all.