I arrived at Piney Woods Church Road just after sunrise. I watched first light skim across the tops of the bare pecan trees along the roadside. And in a small pasture ditch, nestled between a power pole and a guy wire, the scene was mirrored in the water surface.
At last a mild(er) afternoon arrived, with temperatures reaching into the lower 50s. What I first hoped would be a mostly sunny visit to Piney Woods Church Road turned quickly into a mostly cloudy one. I couldn’t get enthused about macro work — I kept looking upward for the few places where gray and white clouds thinned to deep blue. The old pecan trees’ bare branches offer such wonderful skeletal forms, inviting not one or two, but a series of images. Everywhere I looked, I discovered new possible compositions in the dynamic of trees and sky.
Another shot of arctic air arrived yesterday, and this morning it was twenty-five degrees, with a light breeze. Bare hands became partially numb after just four or five photographs. It was a day for admiring Mark Hirsch, who photographed an old burr oak tree in a pasture every day of the year, including on days that were bitterly cold by Wisconsin standards, not Georgia ones. Adapting to the cold, I have identified a few images I have been taking practically every day, and for the next few days I will focus on each one of them in turn. Today, I drove to the midway point of Piney Woods Church Road, to photograph some old pecan trees, some of which actually appear on an aerial photograph of the area back in 1938,making them probably 100 years or more in age. The most grizzled veteran stands in one of the pastures, and merits its own photograph, which I will take sometime soon. For today, though, I offer the image of bare tree branches, reaching for the sky.
