Rings

[Richard_Handler]

Long ago a sizable limb was pruned from this manzanita tree along a trail near our Jacksonville, OR home. The bark has attempted but failed to heal the large wound. The tree lives on in good health.

Meanwhile aging of wood has pigmented the tree rings with alternating shades of gray and a variety of brightly colored micro flora have found nurture.

This is typical glistening dark red manzanita bark.

Technical Details

Composite: No
I captured the image at about 4’ distance with a Voigtlander 50mm Apo-Lanthar on a Sony a7Riii, f/8 1/25" ISO 200 handheld bracing against another tree, and processed to my liking in Topaz AI Sharpen and LrC. Light was flat, low clouds, mist, yielding even illumination across the subject (sky was a big diffuser).

[Shirley_Freeman]

Richard, this is very interesting. I guess I have neve seen this type of tree before, living all my life on the east coast and only visiting some out west, but never Oregon (on my bucket list). I am thoroughly enjoying this great find. Sometimes when things are right in our backyard, we have a tendency (or I do anyway), of getting so used to seeing it that I may not see the photo op. Thanks so much for sharing. Very interesting.

[Richard_Handler]

Shirley, I’m an Adirondack boy. To me a forest is white pines, eastern white cedar, paper birch, yellow burch, and cripplebrush spruce near timberline. But here in my 2nd retirement home we have these weird Pacific coast forests of madrone and manzanita, evergreens in that they retain their leaves all year, just sporadically dropping a few. Very dense hardwood, excellent fuel, but gnarly and unsplittable.

I’m tiring of great scene landscapes, and get more pleasure finding small interesting subjects for unique compositions, and creating the images with manual focus high resolution primes. From Sarah Marino I learned to “always watch your edges”, but where Sarah likes Lens Baby glass to create blurred vignettes, I prefer to control this in processing.

Thanks for commenting.

Richard